ATLANTA (NYTIMES) – When Mr Alex Wan moved to Atlanta in 1971, he was the only student of Asian descent in his class. His grandmother grew Chinese cabbage and melons in their garden because there was nowhere close to buy them. There was no Chinese church, so services were held in people’s homes.

Over the years, Asian immigrants and their children have settled not only in the city of Atlanta, but in bustling enclaves outside. The populations of nearby Duluth and Johns Creek, both upscale suburbs, are now about a quarter Asian.

Mr Wan, whose parents came to the United States from Taiwan in the late 1960s, went on to become the first person of Asian descent elected to the Atlanta City Council.

The speed and scale of that change is a story of American success: immigrants starting businesses, building churches, sending their children to school and, eventually, gaining power through political representation. But now, along with success and visibility has come something else – fear.

Amid a rising tide of anti-Asian violence nationally, the shooting death of eight people, six of them women of Asian American descent, has shaken Asians in Atlanta like nothing in his memory.

“Whatever the justification was, the fact is, it was Asian women who were killed,” said Mr Wan, who is 53. He said one of the shooting sites was less than a mile from his house. “Everything that’s been swirling around, all this anti-Asian sentiment has come to a head with the worst possible thing – murders.”

He added: “The Asian population has become a very easy and very visible target.”

Asians represent a majority of the increase in foreign-born people in the US since 2010, and now make up about 6 per cent of the American population, up from about 2 per cent in 1980, according to Mr William Frey, chief demographer at the Brookings Institution.

People of Asian descent in the US come from dozens of countries, but according to Pew, the largest shares come from just six: China, the Philippines, India, Vietnam, Korea and Japan.

In Georgia, Asians are more than 4 per cent of the population, up from less than half a percent in 1980. In Atlanta, as nationwide, they are part of a diverse agglomeration of people with distinct languages, histories and cultures rather than a homogeneous grouping.

The four most numerous groups in Georgia are from India, Vietnam, China and Korea, according to Mr Frey.

The growth of Asian American communities around Atlanta has only recently translated to significant political power. There are now six Asian Americans in the state Legislature, including Ms Michelle Au, a Chinese American doctor who was elected to the state Senate as a Democrat last year. There were none two decades ago.

The new representation will be especially important given the anti-Asian incidents, particularly Tuesday’s shootings, said Ms Cam Ashling, a Democratic activist who helped with an aggressive get-out-the-vote effort in one of the only tightly contested House seats in the nation that Democrats flipped last year – Georgia’s 7th Congressional District.

“We just came off all this organising and we all are very connected to each other,” said Ms Ashling, 40, who came to Georgia in 1988 as a refugee from Vietnam. “We’ve been texting each other all night and this morning. I’ve got a meeting at my house tonight.”

She said activists were preparing to push their newly elected representatives to enact protections and take other action.

“We need the people whom we spent all this time and energy electing to stand up to the racism, not just put out a statement,” she said.

Asian immigrants are more educated, on average in the country, than native-born Americans, but Ms Ashling’s parents were working class. She remembers one pho restaurant when they arrived in the 1980s, but her parents, a forklift operator and a worker in a plastic foam cup factory, rarely went, because they had neither the money nor time off from working.

“My parents made like US$5 and US$7 an hour,” Ms Ashling said. “They were not the fancy Asians who are now loaded.”

Today, her mother, 69, sings in the choir at a large Vietnamese Catholic church, which has a school where children learn Vietnamese.

Still, Asian immigrants, both in recent decades and now, have generally been highly educated, often working as doctors, professors and engineers.

Mr Frey of Brookings said about 45 per cent of all immigrants aged 25 and older who came between 2010 and 2019 were college graduates, compared to about a third among the native-born population.

Mr Baoky Vu, who lives in suburban DeKalb County and is a former commissioner to George W. Bush’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, said the children of Asian immigrants, now reaching their 30s and 40s, were more politically engaged than their immigrant parents, who were often focused on keeping a small business afloat and children fed.

“The attitude has been, it’s not my problem so I don’t have to worry about it,” said Mr Vu, who came from Vietnam in the 1970s. But he said younger Asian Americans are different, volunteering in political campaigns, running for public office and starting nonprofit groups focused on public affairs.

That evolution is particularly important given the current wave of tensions and unease, he said.

“You can’t just cower in fear,” he said. “You have to stand up for justice. This is not just an Asian American problem. This is an American problem.”

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