In 2000 California's population was 47% white, 26% Hispanic and 11% Asian. But these numbers didn't tell the whole truth: the new Asians were much wealthier than the native Hispanics and Blacks, and often fetched higher salaries than the native Whites. In 2000, 44% of Asian Americans had a bachelor’s degree, compared with 26% of the white population. Studies showed that consistently Asian-American kids outperformed white kids in school. For example, in 1995 Asian-American 11th-graders studied six hours more per week than their white peers, and in 2007 more than two-thirds of Asian-American high school students did homework five or more days a week, while only about 40% of white kids did. In 2010 about 40% of the freshman class at UCLA and 37% of the freshman class at UC Berkeley were Asian Americans (14% of California's population). Parental expectations were a strong motivating factor for Asian-American kids, coupled with a Confucian focus on hard work and with a “moral mandate” for self-improvement (as Brown University psychologist Jin Li called it). Asian Americans were also more likely to study for occupations that yielded higher salaries, notably physicians and lawyers. By 2020, 32% of California's physicians were Asians (compared with 33% white and 8% Latinos) Ruth Chao popularized the authoritarian Chinese way of parenting in her paper "Beyond parental control and authoritarian parenting style" (1994), and then Amy Chua popularized the term "tiger mom" in her 2011 memoir "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother". Chinese parents expected their children to excel in all subjects and even outside school, even at playing classical Western instruments (prodigy pianist Lang Lang being the role model). By the turn of the century Asian Americans had become the "model minority", known for hard work and education, despite the fact that between the 1850s and the 1950s they were treated like the worst one, even denied the fundamental civil rights .

In 2000 San Francisco's population was 35% Asian, mostly Chinese. The Chinese immigration in San Francisco, however, was different from the Chinese immigration in Silicon Valley in that many new immigrants had taken advantage of the 1965 reform and were "sponsored" family members, not engineers or college students like in the south bay.

Greater Los Angeles consists of five counties: Los Angeles County in the middle, Ventura County in the west, San Bernardino County and Riverside County in the east, and Orange County in the southeast. It had become the second most populous metropolitan area in the USA after New York.

Before 1960 the county of Los Angeles had been mostly White, but in the following 40 years White families had moved to the outer suburbs while Asians and Latinos had taken over. The total population of Los Angeles County in 1960 had been 6 million, and it had increased to 9.5 million in 2000, but the White population in the county had dropped from almost 5 million to 3 million (from 80% in 1960 to 32% in 2000), while Latinos had increased to more than 4 million (from 10% in 1960 to 45% in 2000), Asians to more than 1 million (from 2% in 1960 to 13% in 2000), and Blacks to almost one million (from 8% to 10%). The "Asians" of Los Angeles were less Chinese than in the Bay Area because of the large Filipino and Korean communities, but still mostly Chinese (Taiwanese, Hong Kongers and mainlanders). The total population of the Greater Los Angeles (all five counties) had more than doubled between 1960 and 2000 from less than 8 million people to more than 16 million, but the White population had remained slightly over 6 million: Los Angeles had originally been populated from the Midwest but now it was being populated, to a large extent, from across the Pacific Ocean. The ethnic Chinese community of Monterey Park had fanned out to other towns of the San Gabriel Valley (the northeast portion of Los Angeles County), so that in 2000 it contained eight of the ten cities with the largest percentages of ethnic Chinese: Monterey Park, Alhambra, Arcadia, Diamond Bar, Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights, San Gabriel, San Marino, Walnut. Ethnic Chinese had also moved to the western part of the San Gabriel Valley, in particular to Pasadena (where CalTech was located). In that valley, the ethnic Chinese had increased 60% in ten years (1990-2000) compared with a general increase of 6%. Latinos were still the majority, followed by Whites, but the Chinese had increased from 11% of the San Gabriel Valley population in 1990 to 17% in 2000. Just like in the Bay Area, the ethnic Chinese families were generally better at finding well-paid jobs, saving money and buying homes. In 1980 home ownership was 57% among the native-born White population and 37% among Chinese immigrants. In 1990 it was 72% among Whites and 83% among Chinese. The City of Industry, incorporated in 1957 and located in the San Gabriel Valley, was an oddity: a town of 200 people with offices and factories, employing tens of thousands of workers, which made it effectively the economic powerhouse of the San Gabriel Valley. In 2000 about one quarter of its 2200 businesses were Chinese-owned, many of them import–export firms trading with Taiwan or mainland China via the port of Long Beach.

In 2002, the USA received 61,000 mainlanders, 6000 Hong Kongers and almost 10,000 Taiwanese.

In 2013, 47% of Chinese immigrants (aged 25 and over) had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 28% of the total immigrant population and 30% of the native-born population. In 2013, the median income of Chinese immigrant households was $57,000, compared to $48,000 and $53,000 for overall immigrant and native-born households.

In the 2014-2015 academic year more than 300,000 Chinese students were enrolled in US colleges and universities, an almost five-fold increase from just a decade earlier, and their preference was for the Los Angeles and Bay Area universities: University of Southern California in Los Angeles, UCLA and UC Berkeley. Just before the covid pandemic, for the 2019–2020 academic year, Chinese students accounted for almost one-third of all foreign students (372,532 in the whole of the USA).

The population of Chinese immigrants in the USA had increased almost seven-fold since 1980, reaching almost 2.5 million in 2018, or 5.5% of the overall foreign-born population; and in 2018 China replaced Mexico as the top country of origin.

The number of immigrants from China residing in the USA almost doubled from 1980 (366,000) to 1990 (677,000), and again by 2000 (1,192,000) and 1.8 million in 2010 and more than 2.5 million in 2019.

In 2020 Whites made up 37% of California's population, Asians 15% and Latinos 39%.

In 2021 the enrollment rate for Asians (share of enrolled divided by share of the general population) was about 5-6 times the same rate for Whites. In 2024 China was still the leading origin of international students in the USA, accounting for more than 27% of the total.