What does economic security have to do with deservedness?

These charts say a lot.

This year, Asian American Futures is launching groundbreaking research into a growing and urgent question with profound implications for racial justice and democracy: Why do many Asian Americans—despite broadly inclusive values—drift toward positions that align with authoritarianism or reinforce structural inequities? This tension threatens multiracial solidarity, complicates coalition-building, and exposes a narrative gap exploited by the right. Issues like affirmative action in college admissions—which 70% of Asian Americans supported, but who also became the face of dismantling it—is a classic example. We’ve also seen this happen with public safety, DEI, education, and more. Through listening sessions, interviews, and surveys, we aim to unpack this complex paradox and identify pathways toward justice-aligned engagement. We are sharing a look into our process and learnings as this project unfolds.

“I used to lobby in Sacramento with progressive groups in college. But now, I kind of just need to focus on saving money to help my parents in their retirement,” Johnny* a late-20’s East Asian American based in Southern California with a stable, well-paying job told me during an interview in 2022 as part of Asian American Futures’ initial audience persona research. To Johnny, social justice policies sounded nice, but he couldn’t count on politicians to look out for him and his family. Only his own hard work and achievement would get him the financial security he desired.

In Asian American Futures’ research into attitude drift this year, I wanted to know if people like Johnny were an anomaly or a trend. How did economic anxiety—not just income—shape people’s issue opinions? How did it make people more, or less, willing to support redistributive policies?

The distinction between income and economic anxiety is crucial when understanding Asian Americans. Although many Asians are high-income on paper (and of course, many are not), the population is concentrated in high cost of living (HCOL) coastal states, where concerns about the cost of housing, education, and childcare affect even upwardly mobile, middle and high-income people. The relationship between economic anxiety and attitude drift has been discussed repeatedly to describe the drift of White working class people, but I have not seen it applied much to Asian Americans, especially those who are upwardly mobile. In the Asian American movement, it’s much more common to attribute drift to opposition forces weaponizing trauma, spreading mis-information, or organizing around ideology.

Our survey

To understand this question, Asian American Futures surveyed Asian Americans across the U.S. in June** about their support for Medicaid work requirements, among other wedge issues. We chose Medicaid work requirements as a proxy for the resentment around offering public benefits that we noticed in our earlier social listening phase, and retirement anxiety as one way to investigate economic anxiety across class lines. Then, our research consultant, Milan de Vries, compared these responses to the same audiences’ views on federal climate change legislation, an issue with solid support amongst Asian Americans, to see how big of a wedge this issue was.

I won’t discuss our entire survey process in this post, nor all of the questions and demographics we investigated, but will share a key finding about economic anxiety. If you have more questions about our survey, we would love to hear from you.

What we found

We found a clear wedge regarding Medicaid work requirements. As shown in the chart above, the correlation is unusually direct: the less worried someone is about retiring, the more likely they are to support work requirements.

I know some will see these results and think, “Obviously!” However, there are two complicating factors. 1) Medicaid work requirements are somewhat popular amongst Asian Americans as a whole. Even a near-majority of young people support them. 2) The findings are not perfectly tied to income.

If income and anxiety were directly tied, we would expect the same number of low-income people to be supportive of work requirements (~40%) as people who very frequently worry about retirement (~30%). We would also expect the green bubbles (a reflection of the size of the group within the sample) to be the same size across the two charts. But this isn’t quite what happened. Instead, there is a slight decoupling of income and economic anxiety, where it’s possible for someone to be low income and not worry often about retirement, or vice versa.

What this means

This decoupling, although small, is part of why we are researching Asian American attitude drift in the first place. After poring over ample demographic data that doesn’t explain the passion with which Asian Americans have acted in contradiction to their issue opinions (think: affirmative action), I believe it’s crucial to understand the way emotions, mindsets and motivations affect issue opinions. This data shows how lived experience, in this case economic anxiety, affects people’s opinions. (Lived experience also affected racial resentment and support for undocumented immigrants, too.)

The chart also points to another phenomenon: meritocratic hubris. This is when someone attributes their success to their own hard work and merit, and assumes that anyone who is much less successful simply didn’t work hard or earn it. (Books and podcasts featuring Michael Sandel, including Equality: What It Means and Why It Matters, by Sandel and Thomas Picketty are a great resource to learn more about this phenomenon.) The chart suggests that people who do not worry about retirement may think that people who need Medicaid only deserve Medicaid with additional work.

Indeed, resentment about deservedness, often tied to meritocracy, was a key factor I identified in the social listening phase of our research. Whether people were upset about undocumented immigrants receiving healthcare, or believed that a policy like affirmative action prioritized people with worse test scores, there was a profound sense that people were getting benefits at the expense of Asian Americans who worked hard and contributed positively to the community.

Why this matters

If we fail to understand the roots of Asian American attitude drift, we risk losing the very majority that currently supports racial justice. That support is real, but it is not guaranteed. Attitudes are shifting in response to economic anxiety, narratives about deservedness, and broader forces that make people feel isolated or resentful. By identifying and unpacking the drivers of this drift now, the Asian American movement can better anticipate challenges, craft messages that resonate, and protect the hard-earned gains our communities have made toward justice and equity.

Narratives about meritocracy are pervasive in American culture, including amongst immigrants. Identifying the role meritocratic hubris plays in attitude drift is both clarifying, and overwhelming. Flipping an entire worldview that is foundational to being American is much harder than persuading people to support a single issue. But if we don’t try, we will always be at a disadvantage against enduring narratives that contradict the very support people need and want.

In our next phase of research, we will explore the extent to which wedge narratives about meritocracy and deservedness drive people towards isolation or further erode support for issues like medicaid. Stay tuned for more updates from our process. In the meantime, I hope these findings inspire you to think differently about the communities you are organizing–and those who you might not be reaching yet.

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*named changed to preserve anonymity

** We surveyed 1200 Asian American adults across the US in June 2025 using Pollfish. It was translated into Chinese (traditional & simplified), Japanese, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese. In addition to asking about demographics like ethnicity, age, education level and income, we asked dozens of questions, including opinions about issues, building cross-racial or Asian American political power, identity salience, and more. To learn more about our survey, please reach out directly.