The stereotype of Asian-Americans as a “model minority” is a potentially harmful myth that masks the deep needs of many Asian communities in America, especially those of younger immigrant groups such as the Hmong and Cambodians, where nationally, poverty rates are high and college completion rates are relatively low.
That, in a nutshell, was the message from federal officials with the White House Initiative on Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, who are paying a rare visit to the Midwest this week to focus specifically on the concerns of Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders in the U.S.
The WHIAAPI was rolled out under the Clinton and Bush administrations in various forms and resuscitated by President Barack Obama in 2009. Kiran Ahuja, the initiative’s executive director, and Donald Yu, senior counselor to the general counsel at the U.S. Department of Education, joined U.S. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., at the Hmong National Development conference, which opened Friday at the Marriott Hotel in Minneapolis.
The annual three-day conference, held in a different state each year, is expected to draw upward of 800 Hmong-Americans from across the country, many of them young professionals.
In an interview, Ahuja said the initiative is the combined work of 23 federal agencies, which submitted a 31-page “road map” of programs targeting the Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities to the president in March. WHIAAPI is housed within the U.S. Department of Education, but the goals range from early detection of the hepatitis B virus to increasing access to emergency services during disasters such as last year’s BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast region.
“We spend a lot of time dispelling the model minority myth,” Ahuja said. “We saw this play out on the Gulf Coast. There’s actually about 40,000 Southeast Asian-Americans on the Gulf Coast, many of them fishermen … and a significant group of them Vietnamese-American.
“We kept on hearing none of this (emergency response) information was getting out to the community, for the specific reason they didn’t speak English well … (and some) weren’t literate in their own language,” she said. “We didn’t want that to happen again.”
Ahuja and Yu said many of their efforts focus on “data disaggregation.” Traditionally, surveys such as the U.S. census have lumped Asian-Americans into one or two categories, blending the status and achievements of groups with a long historical presence in the United States, such as Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, with that of newer immigrant populations with their own unique needs, such as the Hmong and Vietnamese.
That’s been of particular concern for state and federal agencies attempting to address challenges faced by Southeast Asian populations in the U.S.
“They actually have some of the highest poverty rates, highest dropout rates, lowest college completion rates,” Ahuja said. “I always say, for every spelling bee winner, there’s thousands more kids who are struggling.
“When they take our community in aggregate, they say, ‘Asians are doing a lot better than whites, so why should we be concerned?’ ” she said.
Statistics from the 2008 American Community Survey, a publication of the U.S. census, show that the national Hmong population is 222,000. The survey showed that about 23 percent of the Hmong community lived in poverty, the highest of 18 Asian-American groups highlighted by WHIAAPI and twice the national average for Asian-Americans as a whole.
While stark, that number shows major improvement, continuous over at least the past two decades. A 2003 census study by Hmong National Development Inc. and the Hmong Cultural Center in St. Paul showed that nationally, the poverty rate among Hmong people was 60 percent in 1990 and had fallen to 38 percent in 1999.
The study showed poverty in the Hmong community varied greatly by state, with Minnesota and Wisconsin occupying a kind of middle ground between California at the high end and Rhode Island and Massachusetts toward the low end.
Frederick Melo can be reached at 651-228-2172.
