There has also been recent immigration to Hawaii from more ethnic Asian groups, including Thai, Indian, Indonesian, and Vietnamese.
The high endogamy, immigration, and fertility rates of the Japanese quickly allowed them to form the plurality of Hawaii's population starting from the late 1800s.
After the breakout of World War II, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans in the mainland U.S., who mostly lived on the West Coast, were forced into internment camps.
[citation needed] Koreans mainly came to the islands to work on the pineapple and sugar plantations, but a few, including the family of Mary Paik Lee, came to the mainland (usually California) after experiencing extreme discrimination.
A notable Indian in Hawaii was Dalip Singh Saund, who on September 13, 1910, arrived in Honolulu from his home village in Punjab, India at the age of 14.
This laid the groundwork for the racial hierarchy where both Native Hawaiians and Asian immigrants were treated as disposable cheap labor.
[8] An often overlooked aspect of this increased Asian immigration to Hawaii as cheap plantation laborers is the social, economic, and political effect of the shifting demographic on Native Hawaiians.
Settler colonialism in Hawaii is a unique case compared to others historically because of the Asian ancestry (Polynesian) of the indigenous Hawaiians.
As such, there was a two-fold effect of settler colonialism on the indigenous population: on top of the white plantation owners acting as colonists, the Asian settlers also acted as colonists via their surging immigration counts pushing the indigenous Hawaiians to the fringe socially, economically, and politically.