For the month of May, Obama administration officials plan to hold a series of events aimed at improving the lives of underserved Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.
Help can’t come soon enough, says Dr. Eugenio Matibag, director of Iowa State University’s Center for American Intercultural Studies and Asian American Studies. Matibag recently noted that “the nation and its leaders will have to account for the disparities that have challenged marginalized AAPI groups. Data collection practices have lumped together groups in the AAPI categories and in so doing overlooked some of their particular challenges.”
More than 15 million people of Asian or Pacific Islander descent live in this country, according to the 2008 American Community Survey. This includes 460,000 individuals who were either born here or immigrated during 2005-06.
Despite the pervasiveness of the model minority myth that presumes that all Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are well-educated, only 29 percent of adults are college graduates, according to the 2008 Survey. And Matibag points out that wide differences exist among various subgroups, such as only 20 percent of Vietnamese, 12 percent of Native Hawaiians and 11 percent of Cambodians holding college degrees.
Furthermore, 11.8 percent of Asians live in poverty, but the rate jumps to 23 percent for subgroups such as Hmong.
Such disparities have resulted from many factors for many years, Matibag contends. For instance, the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Act in 1996 ended federal food stamp distribution to more than 600,000 permanent legal U.S. residents, which included numerous southeast Asians. Besides the further impoverishment of those individuals, the move was “a devaluation” of people who were U.S. allies during the Vietnam War, Matibag notes.
In response to such disparities last October, President Obama signed an executive order re-establishing the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Co-chaired by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, the Initiative is charged with increasing AAPI access to and participation in federal programs.
