according to the official u.s. racial categories employed by the united states census bureau, office of management and budget and other u.s. government agencies, american citizens or resident aliens who marked ""asian indian"" as their ancestry or wrote in a term that was automatically classified as an asian indian became classified as part of the asian race at the 2000 us census. as with other modern official u.s. government racial categories, the term "asian" is in itself a broad and heterogeneous classification, encompassing all peoples with origins in the original peoples of the far east, southeast asia, and the indian subcontinent.