EARLIER this year, Fil-Am Assemblyman Rob Bonta introduced a bill that would roll out new guidelines to collect disaggregated demographic data about California’s diverse Asian Pacific Islander (API) population.
The measure, AB176, aimed to address disparities in health and education.
“The API community is not a monolith. We are not the same in every single respect. Each of our diverse communities has different social, economic, and educational challenges and outcomes that need to be addressed differently,” Bonta said.
A report by Los Angeles Times published Wednesday, Oct. 21, illustrated the disparities with some statistics: approximately 70 percent of the state’s Indian American population above the age of 25 possess bachelor’s degrees; for Laotian Americans in California, that number is 10 percent.
In another comparison, a number of Hmong immigrants, many of whom came as refugees from war and genocide, are among California’s poorest ethnic groups; Taiwanese immigrants, however, are one of the wealthiest groups in the state, according to the Times.
AB 176 overwhelmingly cleared both chambers of the legislature – unanimously in the Senate, and in the Assembly with only one dissenting vote.
But on Oct. 7, in a shock for API community advocates, California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the bill.
“I am wary of the ever growing desire to stratify,” the governor wrote in a letter to the California State Assembly on Wednesday, Oct. 21. “Dividing people into ethnic or other subcategories may yield more information, but not necessarily greater wisdom about what actions should follow. To focus just on ethnic identity may not be enough.”
Under AB 176, separate categories would be required for at least Bangladeshi, Fijian, Hmong, Indonesian, Malaysian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Taiwanese, Thai and Tongan individuals, who are typically categorized collectively as “Other Asian.” It would also have mandated the University of California and California State University systems, community colleges, and the state Department of Health to use specified categories for each major API group. Furthermore, the measure would require those entities to make that data publicly available on their website.
“I was disappointed by Governor Brown’s veto of my AB 176, which would have uncovered many of the social, economic, and educational disparities in the Asian Pacific Islander (API) community,” said Bonta in a statement to NBC News. He added that he “respectfully, but very strongly, disagree[d]” with Brown’s veto.
Other API leaders and activists offered statements mirroring Bonta’s position, saying that for California’s growing 5.6 million API population, the largest of any state, stratification is necessary to reflect the diversity, according to the Times.
Bonta previously cited data from the 2010 US Census Bureau, which indicated that California’s Asian American population grew 34 percent between 2000 to 2010, while the Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander population grew by 29 percent in the same time period.
“I think he is ignoring the … reality of how diverse our nation, and in particular, California, is becoming,” said Quyen Dinh, executive director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, the Times reported.
“In vetoing AB 176, Governor Brown, unfortunately, sets forth a public policy approach that perpetuates the model minority myth and the dilemma of the AANHPI community being treated as a monolithic whole,” said Betty Hung, policy director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, according to NBC News.
Richard Chang, policy director of Empowering Pacific Islander Communities, told NBC News that AB 176 would have portrayed a more accurate picture of who Californians are, inform state and local policymakers and allow them to make better use of resources, and improve educational outcomes for some of the state’s most underserved communities.
“For now, community stakeholders and organizations like ourselves will simply have to continue engaging in a costly, time consuming struggle to extract data from each public higher education institution,” he told NBC News.
Although being lumped together in one group may hide education and income disparities among Asian populations, it collectively provides members of the groups a louder voice, Barbara O’Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at Cal State Sacramento and a former Brown appointee, told the Times.
“I think he really believes that minorities of all types are represented better when they’re not stratified,” O’Connor said. “Asians have more clout in Sacramento when they act as a caucus.”
The veto came as a surprise especially because AB 176 measure was modeled after a bill Brown signed in 2011, Bonta said, according to the Times. AB 1088 required the Department of Industrial Relations, a labor agency, and the Department of Fair Employment and Housing to gather data about the same ethnic groups.
“It shows that at one point at least, the governor thought this was important,” Bonta said, the Times reported.
When the measure was introduced earlier this year, Bonta pointed out that there had been no Filipino member of the California state legislature until he was elected in 2012.
“And I mention that to draw attn to the issue of why it’s so important that I and we here today give voice to not just the Filipino-American community, but all API subgroups who face challenges that are distinct and unique from the greater API population. And while all of us as part of the API community share common goals and struggles, our struggles and challenges are simply not all the same,” he said.
Bonta also remembered struggling to figure out what box to check on standardized test forms as a kid, the Times reported. And while he was the political chair of a Filipino student group at Yale University, he asked for information regarding retention and graduation rates for Filipino students and learned the institution did not have it.
“When you use the monolithic Asian category, you render invisible the experiences of each specific population,” Bonta said, according to the Times.
Despite Brown’s veto, Bonta said he plans to reintroduce the bill next year.
