The US government likes to differentiate between each Asian ethnic group, but lumps all the Europeans together. English and Irish, French and German, are all the same. Of course a lot of Americans have ancestry in multiple European countries--descendants of English colonists had no problem marrying descendants of French Huguenots or Dutch or German colonists.
The more recent immigrant groups (late 19th/early 20th century) went from being discriminated against and regarded as not really "white" to suddenly being part of the supposed elite who had caused all the country's problems since 1607.