Why don’t we call citizens from Russia and the Middle East ‘Asian-Americans’?

because it's disorienting

Not sure about Russians but everyone else from the continent on Asia is considered Asian on any official document in the US and many other countries.

The reason Asian mostly refers to East Asians like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. here in the US is because they made up most of the Asian immigrants that came here for a long time. In certain countries Asian refers to Indian, Pakistani, Middle Eastern, etc because most of the Asians that immigranted there were from those areas not East Asia.

Overall Asian is a pretty stupid racial classification because the continent has way too many vastly different countries

Because it is too much effort to reference Asian Americans as East-Asian Americans.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all ... The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic ... There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.

-- Former President Theodore Roosevelt, speaking to the Knights of Columbus at Carnegie Hall on Columbus Day, 1915

Bc they don't have the squinty eyes