 Thank you, Ellery. So I'm Karen Chen. I'm the executive director at the Chinese Progressive Association. So you guys weren't really fast with the organizations. I'm not familiar with them, but that's OK. I'm just here to share a little bit about the Chinese Progressive Association and how we look at building power for the community and some of the issues that we're working on. So the Chinese Progressive Association, we a small community-based organization in Boston. Our office is in Chinatown, but we serve Chinese-Americans in the Greater Boston area. So really, there's like three parts to emissions. It's to fight for full equality for Chinese-Americans, work to improve the living and working conditions of Chinese-Americans. And then the third thing is ordinary people have decision-making power that impacts our daily lives. So CPA was found in 1977. Really, college students was active in the entire one movement at the time and really inspired by the civil rights movement and felt like they need to come back to the community to give back. And then at that time, Chinatown was mostly a bachelor society, mostly men, because of immigration policy. So a lot of the students together with the community helped found CPA. And we felt like a place for the community. And at that time in Chinatown, we talk about gentrification now. But actually, for Boston's Chinatown, the struggle really began in the 70s. But really, Chinatown would deal with institutional expansion. So there is a hospital and university right in Chinatown. So as they expand, Chinatown shrinks. And then also Chinatown was bordered by imaginary borders by highways, downtown, and other neighborhoods. So for us, really, we wanted to have a place for the community to have a voice. So interestingly, with the housing issues happening within the community, but also, our main issue at the time was to support normalized relation between US and China, because China was not recognized. So a lot of people in their daily lives, like people came here, not necessarily thinking to stay, but they had to because there wasn't enough jobs. People didn't, you know, and then also then couldn't bring their families to come to the US. So having access to their home and information and communication was the key thing. So that was really the first issue that we supported. So because of that, people in the community really think CPA as communists because we supported normalized relation between US and China just so that our community members have access to information at home. So kind of like FastFort, CPA was a volunteer organization for 10 years, and then we have a first staff, and it was really volunteer run. And it was a different time in the 70s and the early 80s. And I think activism looks very different, or that really nonprofit institutions look very different then. But it took us 10 years because we didn't take popular stands in the community. We were seen as kind of like the fringe group that really wanted equality. And also part of fighting for equality is really challenging the existing power structure within the community. So there's all these traditional family associations that kind of like the gatekeepers. And for us, we need to make sure that they have democratic practices that include one simple example is that Chinatown, the combat zone, the adult entertainment district is in Chinatown because in the 70s, it was moved to Chinatown because we didn't have economic, we didn't have political power. And also the business community say, oh, that's OK. We can open later more business, but without thinking about quality of life and all the other things that the combat zone bring to the community. So that's kind of like what, you know. So and then at the same time, after we become a more established organization with one staff in 1987, we started at a worker center really looking at at the time it was the decline of the garment industry. And Chinatown had like dozens and dozens of garment industry. And actually women was the breadwinner in the community. And they're the one who when you work in a garment factory, actually you have health insurance for the family, something very simple. But then a lot of the garment shop was closing. And we needed to make sure that there's a place. We fought with the garment workers for retraining and started the first bilingual job training program. And then we started a worker center really focused on organizing the unorganized. Because one of the first thing that when we first started organizing the garment workers were really demanding the union to actually represent the workers and help address the need of the workers that they can reinter the workforce. Because we know that garment industry is dying. And then I think that we started after many years organizing around the unemployed rights. And then also at the same time, more luxury towers coming into Chinatown, starting really in the early 90s. And then we were fighting a lot of the luxury towers. But unsuccessfully, really mainly because I think that it was really depending who's the mayor, who's in the city council. And our district where Chinatown is, we had the most racist city council for years. And then we are together with a district that actually predominantly white Irish. And I think in South Boston, more than 50% of the residents in South Boston worked for City Hall. So we were together with them in a district. But then I think that at this, and then we were like, OK, we keep on losing. And then we started doing voter education work along with our issues. Because we feel like, well, you know what, the community, because I think that we're critical of the electoral system. I think because that it doesn't really represent democracy. We never have our candidates, people actually, for the issues in the community to run. But we feel like, well, in any case, we have to make sure that figure out a way for the community to actually be able to participate in a meaningful way in the elections. So actually, a lot of our electoral work actually first started with like, what do you expect in the poll? When you go in, what information you have to give to the poll worker. And then also, at the same time, work with other community colors to develop a platform that's really focused on immigrant communities and communities of color. And I think all those work together, I think, accumulated over several decades. We're becoming a force in the community. And I think, and then most recently, just this past year, Boston has the most, have a progressive majority, women majority city council for the first time. But that's actually 20 years in works. All the communities' colors working together and really pushing for the issues that really matters in our community. And really putting people on the forefront of everything that we do, we need to make sure that, how is it going to actually impact people's lives? We talk about policy all the time. And how do we make sure that when we actually make concessions? Because we know that we come up with the perfect policy. But there's always going to be compromises. And who has to be on the table when those compromises are made? And we know that people in our community, they're the experts of their lives, of our lives, so that they know what will work, what wouldn't work. And I think in that process, too, we can never rely on government to enforce policies. But then if the communities in the forefront, when we are crafting these policies, when we are compromising, once it passes, people are going to be like, well, we know that you're supposed to do this, so that we don't have to worry so much about enforcement so much because the communities already dare. And one example is like, fight for 15. It started five years ago. I remember in the beginning, people were like, oh my god, 15, that's impossible. And at that time, Massachusetts minimum wage was $9. But after a lot of community education and involvement, and people now are saying like, where's my 15? So we can turn those things around by involving the community. So I think that one of the really key things on how we do our work is that how do we make sure ordinary people is in the forefront. And in terms of our housing policies, right now, the biggest fight really around is bringing rent control. I think that that's something that nobody wants to kind of politicians never want to touch and saying that, oh, rent control, dirty word. And people start talking about how it didn't work, but we know that there's a housing crisis and as well in the life. And that, why do we say that rent control would be the top issue around housing? It's because our people, and they say, you know what, I am getting a lot of rent increase. If there's just a limit, I don't care how you craft the policy. If there's a limit how much landlord can charge in rent, you know, allies would be less crazy. Because when you don't have that, people have sometimes, you know, once ownership turnover, you're all of a sudden your rent could double. Or sometimes landlord just wanna force you out and give you like two or three rent increases each year. And we just have a huge day yesterday at the state house where I think, you know, like six to 800 people showed up for rent control that elected official was like, I don't know. You know, if you go into detail, you can talk a lot about how it didn't work. But also the people could tell you how that can make a difference in their lives. And then also along with it, because just rent control itself won't be able to solve the housing crisis. We need requirement for affordable housing, right? And money for affordable housing. Nobody likes to talk about, you know, tax, right? Taxatruces, people talk about it all the time, but it was like, well, you know, where is that gonna come from? And we're not talking about taxing everybody, but the wealthy, right? Because they have all the means to, you know, figure out how to avoid tax. And then also really taking, you know, housing out of the speculative market. I think we're so comfortable, you know, saying like, housing is an investment, you know. And it's so like used often as a profit-making tool. And we don't think about like, well, isn't it something that's like really basic that everybody needs? And then other countries are way less wealthy than the US. You know, have like housing. I mean, even China, you know, you have guaranteed housing. There's a lot of things you can say. You can criticize about China. But that's the number one thing that they make sure people have, right? So I think that, and you know, having community ownership, not necessarily like ownership as an individual, but community ownership and control, creating mechanisms so that there's a collective, you know, ownership so that people will have a stake in the future of Chinatown, of the community. Like for in Chinatown, for example, a row houses, right? That's kind of really the character of the community. We need to make sure that there's some, you know, it's impossible the community to own all of it, but we need to have some ownership so that we can have a stake so that, you know, a hundred years from now, the community can say, you know what, I would like a community be like this because we actually build the community. And also we have Chinatown because of actually discrimination, the Chinese Exclusion Act. That's why people have to form Chinatown to support each other. And then I think that, you know, in terms of around, you know, stable community, not only that, because, you know, our income is also very important, you know. There's, you know, our really, you know, the, right now in the immigrant community for years in Boston's Chinese community, we have been really just organizing, kind of defensively. So when the garment industry declined, we organized them for unemployment rights. And then I think the next kind of like decade around starting around the 2000s, it was electronic manufacturing. It was hundreds of, you know, factories of people who actually started. And now really, in terms of for new immigrants, a lot of people are becoming home care workers. And that's where actually, where a lot of immigrant workers are, and you know, back then, it was kind of like a job for most people to be like, okay, you know, I'm a factory worker, and I'm an employed, I work as a home care worker for like a few months before I find my long term. But now we're seeing more and more people, these are becoming, you know, long term employment for people. So we actually helped the first home care agency to unionize. It took tremendous amount of effort, but also it took the union compromising and actually having the community take lead in how to move the campaign. So we are actually with the home care workers, there's just one shop, you know, 300 people, but there was like tens of thousands of home care workers in Massachusetts. But I think that because we were able to unionize one home care agency, you know, we were able to maintain a labor standard for that industry. And people really looked to, you know, kind of like, okay, you know, a minimum wage is going up. So a lot of employers saying like, you know, we can't afford this, we can't afford that. But then if they want to be competitive, they need to make sure that they're like, you know, right on par with the union contract. And I think this is like the first time, you know, in CPA that we would kind of have a more proactive approach to really looking at kind of like where workers are going and how we do that. I think also, it also signified the importance of organizing the unorganized. People are not already in unions. Because we actually, if we want to build a stronger labor movement, we really have to look at where the workers are at, where we can build community power and who are the unorganized workers that we can, you know, organize and we can lift up the industry. So that, you know, and that's also one of the reasons why ending wage theft is a really key to the work because most unorganized workers are victims of wage theft. And, you know, for us, we feel like, well, you know, unless the unorganized workers can raise their standards, there's gonna be a cap at how much, you know, labor could win, how much labor unions could win. Because then, you know, we know that we're gonna be pitched against the unorganized workers and we're gonna pitch against the union and people are gonna start blaming each other. You know, we see that all the time. And so that's, you know, and then also, you know, really any workers who are ready to organize and take collective action in their workplace, we do what we can to support them. It could be through us or even, you know, working with the union. So we feel like that, all that together, you know, we can build, you know, stronger immigrant worker power. And then the last thing I wanna talk about is around, you know, voting rights and data equity. So, you know, a lot of people, like, so when we first started doing election work, right, you know, one of the first thing we realized is like in Chinatown, for decades, people were telling people who to vote for inside the poll. Like, they marked their ballots for the voters. And at that time, I was like, you know, I was like 19, I think when I did my first election and I was like, oh my God, like the things that you like learn in school all out the window. It's like what, you know, what like this country stands for, right? And you're like, you go inside, you have campaign workers inside the poll. And this was in 2001. And, you know, many of us, well, myself, I volunteered for the first Latino city council candidate. And the campaign was to bullet vote, right, him. And then you see every poll worker inside, you know, having the voters to mark like the other candidates, you know, for the voter. And there's nothing, everyone just kinda like, oh my God, you know, the voters was like just accepted it. You know, they're like, okay, nothing I can do. But as we see the voter turnout increasing, then we were like, and then we were able to get three voters to write anonymous complaints, anonymous complaints because there's a lot of fears involved. They're landlords, they're former employers, they're the kids' employers. So a lot of that stake. And then because of it, and then this is at the time where Bush, you know, was the president. And then in the kind of broader level of city-wide, and then all of the media was like, you know, this is Bush administration attacking the blue as the blue states and blah, blah, blah. But when we knew that what we were talking about, you know, the voting rights violation, it was really real. And then nobody was willing to say anything and challenge. And a lot of these people are people in the community, are leaders in the community. And, but they also work as gatekeepers, right? And finally, you know, the Department of Justice intervened, and then when the Department of Justice intervened and also more bad media. And this is like where all of the community-based organization around, you know, like, oh my God, we can't talk to CPA, we can't be, we have a handful of people were there to support us, but we feel like that was an issue. And that because we had voters who were with us, and when, you know, we started with three anonymous complaints, and we start doing more, you know, working with the community more, and we had dozens and dozens of testimonies of people actually talking about how their ballots are taken away. And today, that is still happening. That is still happening. So we fought for, you know, we fought for bilingual ballot because we thought like, people being able to independently vote, and this is at a time where we didn't meet the threshold for bilingual ballot in Chinese yet. And then, and we fought for bilingual ballots in Chinese and Vietnamese, and just for city elections. And then as soon as we were like, we did a lot of work around, you know, the importance of people being able to vote independently. And then people started stealing absentee ballots. So that, you know, when we do a camp, you know, when we go campus and have people go in and apply for absentee ballots for the voters without knowing, and then come back and take it, and then we have to, now we have to be like, okay, get this election department to say that if you go vote in person, that's your ballot, not the one that mailed in. And that just happened in 2017 within Chinatown because it was a contested race for city council. Within three days, there was 300 absentee ballots within like 10 Chinatown elderly buildings. Ballots were stolen, okay. And we were like, outraged. And then, because we also have a C4 and people were like, oh my God, you know, they're losing, that's why they're making this. So we're like, no, no, we're not. But this is an important issue that, you know, we know, that it's, you know, it's not the first time. And then, and then even we worked with the city and the city council to try to stop this, this past election 2019, there was still 150 about absentee ballots was applied on behalf of voters without them knowing. So, you know, that's the ongoing issue that sometimes when we kind of political people try to twist it, you know, to something else, but actually that's the reality of actually people and we wanna think about like, was it really happening? Even though, yeah, maybe some of it was done by like good people or good campaigns, but that's a fundamental issue, right? And then, and one of the last thing I wanna talk about is data equity. So while we're building a people of color immigrant movement, you know, for housing justice, for economic justice, for democratic participation, we've seen in the last, I think since, it's probably apparent, you know, since 2016, there's a growing right wing Chinese. There's a growing right wing Chinese, the newer immigrants, they're in a fluent neighborhoods and they would make some progressive elected feel very nervous about, you know, like they would call things like what they are opposing a firm of action and or, you know, they would call, I don't know if you guys are familiar with data disaggregation. They were saying that data disaggregation is discriminatory. It makes some of the most progressive, you know, elected feel very nervous about like, oh my God, like should we actually advocate for, you know, ethnic subgroup data for, you know, people, for Asians. So there's a growing right wing Chinese as well in life and we need to be really, they're more organized and we realize and in Boston, we have seen them, you know, they were able to mobilize 800 people to come out for a hearing that was in January 1st, 2018. And in the name of saying that, you know, data disaggregation discriminate against Chinese and you're creating a registry. And they're also starting to mobilize the people who are the Small Property Association. The new strategy is to actually organize Chinese landlords for to fight against, you know, tenant protection, to fight against rent control, you know, to limit, you know, to make sure that they can have short-term rental. And so that's actually something that's new that we are learning that we really need to, you know, really be aware of that when we say just because, you know, these are Chinese Americans, it doesn't mean that, you know, therefore the Chinese American people or the community. And then I think that, you know, how do we do all this work, right? And how do we actually see like, you know, when we see that there's power, it's done through actually a multi-racial, multi-issue platform. So we are part of the right to the city. And I have printouts of a right to the city platform, which has five planks around your right, yeah, to stable community, economic justice, quality education, healthy environment and democratic participation that I just wanna share with everybody that, you know, we share with other communities color. And then when we started realizing that this is very much issue-based and our brain, our work became kind of very compartmentalized. And we started what's called a 10-year agenda that worked with other communities colors to really think about, you know, a vision for a better world. We know if any, you know, we know that sometimes in coalitions, it's incredibly difficult to coordinate. But then if we have something, a vision, kind of like, you know, what is a better world look like and how we could conduct ourselves to help actually guide us in how to do that and how do we actually build power? Not for just one community, but for all of the communities. So I think I'm gonna leave it that. And then I think my time is up. And so that's for you to, you know, look at and, and I meant to like prepare pictures, but I was at the state house yesterday, but you guys are welcome to go into CPA's Facebook page that we have pretty, that's our main social media, having you, you know, as a small organization. So you can see some of the work that, you know, we're working on. Thank you. All right, thanks Karen. And you know, as we know, as you know, as we're, you know, doing this work, all of us are sort of like data policy geeks. I think it's helpful to always open these with looking at sort of how the issues that we work on and often looking at on a page or in sort of an abstract way, you know, translate into real people's lives and real communities and sort of how people are organizing to bring about change in their communities and really sort of shaping and defining what racial justice and economic justice looks like in different communities. So with that, we're gonna transition now to our second speaker, Professor Janelle Wong, who is a professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland and is also a professor in the Asian American Studies program. She's gonna talk to us about the data stuff. So. Thank you so much, Karen, for all of the leadership you've shown. CPA has been a really important grassroots leader in terms of both economic and racial justice, not only in Boston, but nationally as well. I also wanna thank Dr. Wilson for this, bringing us together and for this great and thoughtful programming and for leading this series. I'm very happy to be at EPI and appreciate everyone taking time out today for this program. So I'm just going to add a little bit of context for some of the issues that Karen was talking about. It's always super intimidating to present in front of economists, but okay. So many of you know the answer to this, but I just wanted to get us on the same page. You can think about it in your mind. What proportion is the US Asian American population closest to here? So is it 5%, 10%, 20% or 25%? Some of you work with these data a lot. Some of you, it's not totally in your area. So it's about, it's closer to 5%. About 6% of Asian Americans identified in the census as Asian alone and it bumps up a little bit to when we think about the multiracial population. This is about 20 million people now and about 4% of the US electorate. And I wanted to just talk about the Asian American population with a background of more general immigration trends. So many of you who study immigration or demography know that the US Latinx population has not been increasing at the same rate over time at all. In fact, in the last two years we've seen immigration to the US overall trickle to a very low flow because of current policies. But I think it's really important to know that this decline preceded the Trump administration. We've seen a decline and a leveling off of immigration really since the, I would say 2005, 2008 actually after the Great Recession. And so this has meant a real change for the role of Asian Americans in the immigrant population. So today, since about 2011, Asians have been the biggest group of immigrants entering the US every year. Those immigrants are mostly today from China but we're expecting that more will be from India in the future. So this is important from a policy perspective because so much of the rhetoric is around building a wall, for instance. But most immigrants are coming from Asia. They're not crossing a border. So this is all to say that today as has been the case for the last five decades, most Asian Americans are foreign born about 75% of all adults. And this compares to a minority of Latinx, 40% who are foreign born. So this has implications for how we think about the immigrant population. Asian Americans are already a huge part of the immigrant vote. They are actually statistically about the same proportion of immigrant voters as the Latinx population. We know that the majority of, and I'll talk about this a little bit more later in this presentation, but Asian Americans have been tremendously shaped by US visa priorities. So the majority of employment visas have gone to Asian Americans, people especially from India and China. At the same time, like all immigrants, most Asian Americans have arrived as a result of family-based migration. Of course, these two policies have a huge impact on the economic characteristics of the Asian population. So many are recruited based on high-skilled visas, and then they sponsor family members who are similarly economically or educationally, have the same education and economic characteristics. So Asian Americans are actually the group that has benefited, I think, most dramatically from what the Trump administration has called disparagingly, chain migration. This is also, the growth in the Asian American population and the especially immigrant population has meant also a change in how we think about people who are unauthorized in the US. Today, one out of seven Asian immigrants is undocumented. And this is something that is not as often a focus of the media and stereotypes about who belongs and who does not belong in the US. So actually, because of their fast way of growth and because immigration from the Americas has slowed, Asians now make up the fastest growing group of undocumented people in the US. That doesn't mean they're the largest group, but their pace of growth is faster than any other group. So Valerie asked me to talk a little bit about diversity within this population. And with this, so Asian Americans are the fastest growing group in the US, they, this growth is driven by immigration. And as a result, the Asian population has become much more diverse. So up until the 1990s, most Asian Americans were from East Asia, from places like Korea and China and Japan. That is changing rapidly. Now people from East Asia actually make up a much smaller portion of the population. The fastest growing group within Asian America are South Asian and Southeast, combined with Southeast Asians, people from Vietnam, Cambodia, they are, those two groups now make up the majority of the Asian American population. So there's a picture that people have and there's actually been some analysis of who the media covers as Asian and it tends to be an East Asian face. But in fact, the largest proportion of Asian Americans today are not from East Asia, only 25% of Asian Americans in the US are Chinese. So they're a minority. And you can see the tremendous diversity in terms of national origin in this picture. So you could see that, yes, Chinese constitute the largest group, they're 22% of the population, but there's also Indians make up a growing proportion, one out of five Asian Americans, Filipinos are also a very large proportion of the Asian American population. So while it is true, and many of us have seen these statistics that Asian Americans are, the demonstrate the highest levels of average income and average education of any racial group in the US. We also see that within the Asian American population, there is the same kind of economic polarization that you see in the US more generally. However, it's also important to know that this is not just polarization between rich and poor, it also maps on to national origin within the Asian American population. And so here you can see that there's a huge gap in median household income between Indians and Bangladeshis. Both of those groups are actually South Asian, Indians and Bangladeshis, but we tend to see differences based on the mode by which people have entered the US. And so Indians and other groups that are at the top of this level of this chart have been recruited mainly through employment visas and through other kinds of work permits. And at the bottom we see more people who have entered the US as a result of US refugee policies and other kinds of policies. And I'll talk about that more a little bit later. So here is a hint that of course, as you all know in this room, our immigration policies matter a lot for the kind of economic profile of any national origin group. And we see these gaps also. This is whether or not people have a BA. You can see Bhutanese are one of the fastest growing refugee groups in the US. 11% have a BA versus 75% of Taiwanese. In terms of health insurance, we also see similar kinds of gaps and it's not exactly on, it doesn't exactly map on to income and education. So for various reasons, Korean Americans for instance, have lack health insurance often at higher rates than other East Asian groups. So the bottom line here is that there is tremendous diversity in terms of economics within this population. It is kind of confusing to parse it out because even though we see a higher proportion of groups like Burmese, Bhutanese, Hmong, Cambodian with high rates of poverty, high rates and in more economic distress, the largest numbers of Asian Americans who are in poverty are still Chinese and Indian because those are very large groups in the US, they still make up the largest number of poor Asian Americans. So despite these high levels of average economic resources, we still see a gap in political representation among Asian Americans. This is despite Andrew Yang and Kamala Harris and Tulsi Gabbard. So here you see that Asian American turnout, this is among people who are eligible in terms of age and citizenship, still lags behind white turnout. And you'll also see, and happy to talk about this also later that sometimes, so I'm part of a group that's called AAPI data, that is Asian American Pacific Islander. We include Pacific Islander in our name because we do actually have quite a bit of data on Pacific Islanders, but it's quite controversial within the larger Asian American and Pacific Islander communities about that grouping together of two very different communities. Okay, so this gets to more of what Karen was talking about, that there is a lack of political participation in terms of voting rights, but, I mean, not voting rights, in terms of vote turnout, in terms of other kinds of civic engagement among Asian Americans, at the same time, we see this very visible political participation in U.S. politics. So how many of you have heard that Harvard was sued for alleged discrimination against Asian Americans? Okay, so this is the face of Asian American politics in the United States today, a kind of racially conservative stance on longstanding civil rights programs. So we saw that Asian Americans were working with conservative activists, Edward Blum, on that Harvard case, and the courts decided that there was not evidence of racial discrimination. However, these groups maintain a pretty active role in racial politics in the U.S., so all across the country, not just New York City, but also in Seattle, also in the suburbs around D.C., we're seeing Asian Americans take a leadership role in grassroots organizing against racial equity and measures to integrate schools. So what you see here, this is New York City, and this picture says, this person's holding a sign that says, equity equals anti-Asian. So let me unpack this a little bit more for you. This activist, this shows you the kind of, so Asian American, in New York City, Chinese are the poorest group. So yes, much of this conservatism does come from wealthy suburbs, but not only. There is a seeping into poorer Asian communities, a kind of conservative racial politics that is also seeping into poorer Asian communities. This activist was very active around human rights in Tiananmen Square, and he is an LGBT rights activist also. So there's a lot going on here. Okay, so much of the conservative positions that Asian Americans are taking on affirmative action and on, let's say, gifted and talented programs, they've been resisting integration in racial integration and gifted and talented programs. This comes from the idea that test scores are the best and only measure of merit and that they must be reflecting something unique about the Asian American community. This is very widespread in the Asian American community and has fueled this kind of false Asian penalty narrative that Asian Americans have to score higher than other groups to get into, let's say, elite colleges or even into gifted and talented programs. And there's a real resistance in the Asian American community to take a critical eye to those assumptions. So let's just, this is something that I try to present at a lot of community events and hopefully it's helpful for people here too. You know these data usually, but I think it's helpful to see what I'm sharing with the community. So a lot of people, including Asian Americans, believe that Asian Americans demonstrate higher test scores than other groups on average because of cultural values, that they care more about education or that they have a special value for education. This is highly tenacious and internalized kind of assumption within the Asian American community and many of you have heard of the stereotype it's associated with the model minority stereotype. What that stereotype doesn't capture is that most Asian Americans arrived since the 1990s, the vast majority over half the population of Asian Americans have arrived since the 1990s. That's exactly when the US started to ramp up H1B visas. And what US immigration policy has done is for some of these groups, the groups that coincidentally or not so demonstrate the highest test scores is to engage in what we call in Asian American studies hyper selectivity of certain Asian immigrant groups. That is the immigrants that are coming to the US are not only much more highly educated than people in the US in general, they are also more highly educated than people in their countries of origin. And so I'm just gonna share some of the statistics here. 27% of Asian Americans, Asian immigrants have received green cards. I can't remember what year this is from, a recent year, only 8%, only 8% of other immigrants did. And you saw the statistics before, people from Asia account for 64% of those employment visas. How does this translate into what we see in terms of Asian populations? So Chinese and Indians are the groups that are most likely to score high on standardized tests. More than 50% of Chinese immigrants in the US have a bachelor's degree. In China, the rate's about 8%. About 70% of Indian immigrants have a bachelor's degree. In India, less than 15% of Indians of college age enroll in college. And so this has vastly shaped the Asian American population here, in particular, in term, those who have highly educated parents tend to score the highest on standardized tests. And so we see this direct correlation really with this direct association with our immigration, the structure that our immigration laws create. And yet everyone says, oh, these students must care more than other students about education. And the implication is that other groups don't care as much about education, or they would be scoring in the same levels. But obviously, there's something else going on here. It's not just Indians and Chinese, you can also see it for Japanese and Koreans, the same kind of patterns. 25% of populations in those country of origin have bachelor's degrees versus 70% here. When we look at other data that look at groups that haven't been targeted by these H-1B visas, the test scores among those groups, like Cambodians or Vietnamese, much lower. They also tend to live in much closer to non-high-performing schools. And this is also, as many of you know, a big factor in standardized test performance. International students, this is changing a little bit with the Trump administration. But historically, more than 75% in the last two decades of international students have come from Asia. By definition, these students are highly educated. They're coming to get BAs and higher degrees. So just to give you a contrast, in Mexico, the average educational achievement is higher in Mexico than among Mexican immigrants recruited to the U.S. or who are in the U.S. These statistics, while they seem obvious maybe to those of us in the room, are not obvious to many who are engaged in the debate over immigration today. Or race and standardized testing. So I'll just share also this last slide on this topic, and I have many more in my back pocket, but this is another, it's not the best measure, but it is one measure of valuing education. So there's such a strong rhetoric about Asian-Americans valuing education. But if you look at this survey question, how much do you think young people today need a four-year degree in order to be successful? It is one measure of valuing education. We see that Latinx are more likely to value education according to this question than Asian-Americans, blacks more than whites. And I only present it, not because I think it's the best measure, but because I think it's important to question that cultural narrative. Finally, I've done a lot of work on, excuse me, on implicit bias among teachers, and I think it's pretty clear that teachers tend to have much higher expectations for white and Asian-American students. And this is, even if you control for the amount of homework that students do and their scores on standardized tests. So let me just talk a little bit about the new racial politics that Karen alluded to. So in Maryland, I think you should, the media could not get enough of this story. Immigrants trying to exclude immigrants. So basically, and it is true, that when Maryland tried to pass a sanctuary state law, the most vigorous opponents were Chinese immigrants. And I think something like 500 Chinese immigrants showed up at local hearings around this state legislation and they were successful. They didn't, they stopped that legislation. We've seen it in many, many other states also. This is another issue that's close to our hearts. So in terms of extending homeless services, we've seen these kind of conservative politics, not in my backyard politics happen, not just among Chinese, but in this case in Korea in Los Angeles. Korea town in Los Angeles. And Karen knows this kind of rhetoric well. So as she said, there was an effort by Asian-American civil rights organizations to introduce a bill to disaggregate data at the state level in Massachusetts. And this is what allows for the kind of breakdowns and national origin differences that I presented earlier, right? You can see that because we collect those data. But in Massachusetts, this is the kind of activism and political engagement we saw among Chinese immigrants in particular, which was the Chinese sponsor of this bill was painted as Hitler, okay? Why do Chinese-Americans resist, and I say this as a Chinese-American, but why has there been so much activism around, like why are they opposed to collecting high quality data on the Asian-American community and more detailed data? It goes back to affirmative action because the fear among these groups is that when you show there's these kind of educational disparities among different Asian groups then maybe groups that are showing lower levels of achievement might get more resources or might benefit from affirmative action. It's deep. Said, I know this is a kind of, it is a concerning politics that I have described. That said, as a whole Asian-Americans are the group that have been moving fastest towards becoming a new democratic block in the US. And so this just goes up to 2012, but it extends into 2016 that Asian-Americans, and this is also true in the midterms, have moved fastest towards democratic vote choice. So what does this mean? Many of the activists that I was describing earlier, they're Democrats. They're racially conservative Democrats. That's not new. Okay, I know we'll have a chance to talk about this. So here's the Trump vote. There's a lot of talk that these are not all Trump voters, these activists. So what you see here, this is a data set that I collected that overall only 25% of Asian-Americans voted for Trump. And even among the most conservative group, Chinese, you can see it's 35%. Why are Vietnamese also a little bit more likely to have voted for Trump? Because that is a group that has been historically Republican because they associate anti-communist policies with the Republican Party. But you can see that even that group that has historically identified as Republican, not one single Asian-American national origin group voted a majority for Trump. Despite all of the grassroots activism I just described, why is that? Look at this, taxes on the rich, okay? So when it, I don't think everyone's behind Andrew Yang, but Asian-Americans do care about economic redistribution. And what you see here is that 80%. So if you look at the orange and yellow, that's the agree. 80% of Asian-Americans think we should tax the rich to provide a middle-class tax cut. And you can go down the line of different groups and it is consistent. Whether that group tends to be more economically well-off on average or not, everybody supports at a very high level taxing the rich. Guess what, even if you ask people who are making over $200,000 a year in the Asian-American community, they still, a huge majority still agrees with this policy. It is a huge misconception that Asian-Americans are fiscally conservative. It is not true. And just to underscore, yes, a majority of immigrant small business owners are Asian-American, but that's just a small part of the Asian-American community. 5% of Asian-Americans own a small business. That's not the typical experience for Asian-Americans. I think this is an understudied characteristic of, this is what I think really distinguishes people of color in the US from white people in the US in terms of political priorities. And here what you see is while we see a lot of racial conservatism among Asian-Americans, Asian-Americans are with other people of color when it comes to preferring big government and more services to a smaller government with fewer services. Okay, so I think that a lot of people, including candidates, have the Asian-American community wrong. When they reach out to Asian-Americans, the typical campaign message is, we care about education just like you. All groups care about education. And we care about immigration just like you. Yes, most Asian-Americans are immigrants, but it pains me to say that the majority of Asian-Americans, they're progressive on immigration. They're just as progressive as Americans more generally. So most people in the US favor a path to citizenship. So do Asian-Americans, but they are not more progressive. Asian-Americans are not more progressive on immigration issues than other issues. This is where Asian-Americans look distinct from other Americans. It's not education. It's not immigration. If you want to reach Asian-Americans and you're a politician, it's good to think about these things, healthcare. Asian-Americans love the Affordable Care Act, the environment. You rarely hear about Asian-American environmentalists, but they are super environmentalists. Think about where they're coming from, countries that have really been struggling with environmental degradation, taxes. Again, this is where Asian-Americans look distinct, especially from white Americans. So these are Asian-American values. Gun control is another one, but I think it's a mistake to think that Asian-American values around family, education and immigration differently from other people in the US. Finally, I'll show this chart, which I've been tracing public opinion on affirmative action for a long time. And what we see is that overall, Asian-Americans have been consistently in support of affirmative action. There's one group where we're seeing some softening. And that is because of grassroots activism and this narrative, it's a vulnerable time because these narratives about how affirmative action could hurt Asian-Americans, even though it is not the case and there's not empirical evidence showing that to be the case, is still very powerful. So I'll close with these take home points. One, Asian-Americans have been shaped and the characteristics, especially the economic and educational characteristics of our population have been tremendously shaped by immigration policies. We are in a very fast growing group, the fastest growing group in the US, and that is fueling more diversity, including within the Asian-American population. We're seeing some very visible grassroots, racial and economic conservative activism. And it is really, even though there is an Asian-American left, there's not a grassroots movement in the same way where let's say 800 people show up at a local hearing on one of these issues. And that activism is both implicitly and in many cases explicitly anti-Black and anti-Latinx and anti-immigrant. That said, this group increasingly, increasingly is getting behind democratic candidates. It is becoming a block and that's important because we're in a polarized political environment. There's not many new people to recruit. Asian-Americans are a group that hasn't been committed to either party in a solid way until pretty much now is the moment. Finally, when you think about Asian values, I think it's important to shift the focus from education and immigration to other kinds of issues, like big government, health care, and economic redistribution. Thank you. All right, so we're a little ahead of our schedule and I think this is a good opportunity to take some questions. If any of you have questions from the presentations we've heard so far, or comments. So, do either of you have any idea of why, either why are the conservatives so effective at Asian-American conservatives and or Chinese-American conservatives so effective at mobilization and why are progressives so bad at it? I think that, you know, to me, I think it's the, I think that, you know, the model minority myth, right? I think it's very intentional is to drive a wedge between, you know, we were like lifted the model minority intentionally to drive a wedge between people of color. I think that, you know, this kind of like the right wing really trying to feed in the right wing Chinese to say, you know, to be anti-Black, you know, anti-Blackness is actually to drive that wedge. And I think also, I think that also sometimes I think that, you know, a lot of the new kind of like Chinese right wing, they draw the wrong conclusion, you know, what's justice and what's equality. And I think that, you know, that whole thing about, you know, tacky Chan, right? Or even like affirmative action. And actually we actually benefit Chinese-Americans benefit from the affirmative action and that's why we were able to get ahead, right? Cause I think just like, you know, the civil rights movement, even though, you know, there's some Asian-American leaders, but I think that actually Chinese-Americans benefit or I mean Asian-Americans benefit hugely from it, but we refuse to recognize that that actually that's where the root is. But when you actually start talking about kind of some of the kind of given more historical, you know, context, it helps. And even like, you know, the wall that we're talking about, right, crossing borders, it wasn't to stop the Mexicans, it was Chinese people from crossing the borders way back when, you know, the first wall that when it was, you know, built because I think that at that time, the U.S. haven't done so much, you know, in the global south and to affect the economy and stuff. I think that, you know, why are they so effective? It just sounds like everything now, like with social media, everything is sensationalized. It's so much easier. I mean, I think that, you know, sometimes I think the progressive, we get kind of too stuck into certain things and too technical. And I think the right-wing message is like very simple, you know, and with very little information, of course, because I think sometimes because everything's so fast-paced, people don't look into beyond like what's in the headline. That's also part of it, where it make it easy. I think that the other thing is nationalistic sentiment. I think it's huge. I think that especially for Chinese Americans, I think that, you know, if you look at, you know, for Chinese, I think like, you know, like the Japanese, you know, occupation of China. And then I think that how, you know, Chinese, you know, you know, the year of pearl kind of, you know, like all that stuff, it kind of people like, well, with Chinese, we need to stand up against, da-da-da, and all of a sudden, you know, and then I think the third thing is like individualism. I think that we all are, you know, like society is kind of pushing us and to really think if you don't, you know, take care of ourselves, who's gonna take care of ourselves? So, me first, not really, and I think that for Chinese, you know, here but also like Chinese and China, too, has moved towards, you know, more like individualistic thinking. You know, it's about me and that, you know, it's about, you know, what I will do, but really not thinking about the collective, you know, and we don't often think about, oh, shoot, if we didn't fight for us, you know, there's a limit of what is possible for me. But actually society, if you just look at, right, everything else is like, no, me first, but we don't recognize that. And I think that that is actually being, you know, that collective, you know, thinking, the collective, you know, I don't know, action and all of that has kind of like diminishing, and I don't think that's just like, just in the Chinese community, but I think that there is, you know, a kind of Chinese American, the newer, more affluent, more education, you know, the people more educated Chinese Americans who are coming to the U.S. Also the value has changed, because like, you know, I left China in 1989, and at that time, you know, we only had to start color TV in 85, you know, running electricity and running water, right? Pantyhose was still a luxury good, you know, in the 80s. And you know, now you go to China. I don't know, every major city have like, I don't know all those brand name things, like a Gucci or whatever it is that they have, you know, everyone has an iPhone, even though some of the, you know, factories, like the children's make them, you know? So, you know, so I think that also that shift too, and kind of like, what we mean by a better life has shifted, so that all had to play into kind of like the conservatism and that people took advantage of it. I actually had a clarifying question on the slide that was showing, I can't remember exactly how the question was phrased, something about like support for the importance of a four year degree among different groups. And so I was wondering if we could go back to it. I couldn't see, is this actually showing that among white Americans that they are the lowest percentage saying that a four year degree is necessary for success? Yes. I just, my observation. Yeah, so you see, it depends how you break it down. Whites, yeah, so if you look at college. I just thought that was a really striking finding and very telling that the racially dominant group who has racialized this narrative about, you know, who values education and how that determines outcomes is actually the group that themselves have the less supports. Like, of course you don't think that that's gonna be important if you're already economically dominant. I just thought those are really interesting findings. Yeah, sometimes I try to emphasize that point as well. I think it's just a different way of looking at value of education beyond our stereotypes about valuing education. It may also reflect a little bit demographic issues so that older Americans have a much less likely to already have college degrees and have done their lives kind of. I have a couple of questions. On the desegregation of data and those campaigns, could you say a bit more what's it about given that the ACS does have very detailed data? Can I just lump them all? Then one simple one, what proportion of Asian Americans are able to vote so already have citizenship? So the last one, what for you are the big research gaps in data or, you know, and a lot of us are more kind of labor market economics but where do you think would be the biggest gaps? So on the data desegregation question, what's fueling this and what does it matter if there is already, we have the ACS, we have the census, there is actually a Department of Justice complaint from this group that's happening, right, that has been submitted that is asking that they remove the detailed origin checkboxes from the census. It obviously didn't go through but this is the kind of action. So the tactics are actually pretty strategic. There's a petition online from an anti-affirmative action activist who's Chinese American but it addresses the census. It says that it has a lot of misinformation about the census saying, oh, the census trying to register a backdoor registry for Asian Americans to racially profile us but this is an anti-affirmative action activist and the petition says, don't tell the census not to collect those data and don't answer those questions. So what we're seeing is within the Chinese American community there's this movement to actually not even participate in the racial questions on the census which is sort of shooting themselves in the foot, shooting us in the foot, but it also shows you, this is a pretty sophisticated movement. How many signatures are on that over 50,000 now? Oh, okay, I don't have that number right off the top of my head but I think about 45% of all Asian Americans are eligible to vote. Well, I think understanding, I mean, this is a complicated politics. For me, it's the more research on the kind of ways in which immigration policy affects economic resources and that affects political attitudes is important because what is confusing to me often is that we cannot just say that this, even though it's tempting, that this, the conservative, the racially conservative movement within Asian America is not, there's not like another good model of that in US history. So it is not just wealthy. It is not white, it's really varied and it's people who are leaning more and more towards the Democratic Party. It's hard to unpack what's going on but it's happening and it's powerful. All right, so it's your favorite time of the afternoon, new data sets. I first want to just introduce you to a site that my colleague, Karthik Ramakrishnan, who is a professor at UC Riverside. This is a labor of love that he put together and I'm a researcher with this group but it's called AAPIdata, apidata.com. The cool part about it, there's a lot of, there's kind of archives of different reports but also if you go to the quick stats, it's like a really fast application for just making tables with this aggregated Asian American data. So that can be useful and then we also try to visualize data more intentionally and so there are a lot of infographics on this site too. And you can just right click and click them into your own reports for background. So this is what the, if you click on those community facts you get something like this. There's also this site that colleagues of mine, so now I'm moving, one of the things that's on this site is something called the National Asian American Survey. That's public opinion data that is based on surveys of Asian Americans. So those are things you can't really get from the ACS, their opinions like I showed you on tax policy but also experiences with discrimination, attitudes towards other groups. There's this really interesting, we asked Asian Americans who they think is, it sounds kind of clunky now, who is most likely to be Asian American? And we asked them about all these different groups and you can see there's, within the Asian American community, there's certain groups are seen by other groups as more likely to be Asian American, which if you're studying race and national origin or race and ethnicity is really interesting. And then we also asked whites, blacks and Latinx who they thought was most likely to be Asian American. And so you can see what the dominant kind of picture of who Asian Americans are as it's through those data. Okay, so just base, say they got to check like, which of these groups is more likely to be Asian American? And then they could check off. So Chinese are always at the top of the list for all groups. But then if you get to a group like Bangladeshis, then fewer people are likely to say that group is likely to be Asian American. If you ask about Filipinos, it's like a little bit less likely. So not only do Asian Americans, so Filipinos themselves, they say, oh Filipinos, very likely to be Asian American. As Chinese, Chinese will not say that Filipinos are very likely to be Asian American. Whites and blacks are less likely to say that group is highly likely to be Asian American. So it is a clunky way to ask it, but there's some interesting things about racial formation. No. No, that's right. Yeah, there's a lot of identity questions in those data. So this is another long-standing project by the White House Initiative for Asian Pacific Islanders. And what you see here, if you go to data.gov slash AAPI, that's all the, for you big data people, that's where you get the data on Asian Americans. Aldrinan and I are going to learn big data soon. Or did you already? Okay. Okay, I'm just gonna share two other resources. This is Down the Street, PRRI. How many of you have worked with their data before Public Religion Research Institute? So they do a lot of probability samples. So they have really great data on all kinds of attitudes. And even though they're called Public Religion Research Institute, they actually do, they have a survey of like 40,000 people talking about abortion attitudes, or they have a lot on, they have these great questions on Christian nationalism and on nostalgia, on immigration. So they're very policy-oriented, but also thinking about identity. They have a ton on Trump and they have a lot of data on religious trends. They have something called the American Value Survey. But I just work with them because they just did a survey of Asian Americans who are working and struggling with poverty in California. And the beauty of this data set is it includes Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, Hmong, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Cambodian samples. I swore after this survey, I was never gonna do a survey of Asian Americans again because it was so difficult to do this sampling, but the data are here. There's a report here. And then, so that's just at P, right now it's still on their front page at PRRI, but you'll love all the other data they have too. And then this data set was recently done by the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. And I don't think this report received enough attention, but it is on Asian American workers nationally and it uses mostly a CS data, but also I think they did a separate survey too. So I really just wanted to plug, given the work that you're doing here, this particular report, I haven't seen the raw data set yet. So those are some, I think, good resources for especially like quick background for your own reports.