12/29/08 Rafu Shrimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News: "Chu Announces Run 
for SGV Congressional Seat: Board of Equalization chair seeks seat held by labor 
sect’y nominee Hilda Solis,"
    Board of Equalization Chair Judy Chu on Tuesday an­nounced her candidacy for the
San Gabriel Valley congressional seat held by labor secretary-designate Hilda Solis.
    “In the past few days, I have received many en­couraging calls and e-mails from 
supporters and con­stituents urging me to run and have decided to heed those calls,”
Chu said.
    “I have a long history of being a coalition builder, with a track record of working well
with others to fight for change. I believe my experience is what this country needs at this
most crucial point in our nation’s history.”
    Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), has told several newspapers she is interested
in running for the seat. Sen. Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles), is also considered a possible
candidate.
    Chu, 55, served on the Garvey School District Board of Education from 1985-88, 
the Monterey Park City Council from 1988-2001 and in the Assembly from 2001-2006, 
before being elected to the Board of Equalization in 2006.
    In addition, Dr. Chu served as Chair of the California and Asian Pacific Islander 
Legislative Caucus, Assembly Select Committee on Hate Crimes, and Assembly
Subcommittee on Health and Human Services. She was also a member of the Assembly
Revenue and Taxation Committee, Labor and Employment Committee, and 
Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials Committee.
    In 2004, Dr. Chu authored a land­mark tax amnesty bill which was estimated to bring in
$300 million but actually brought in $4.8 billion in revenue for the state budget without 
raising taxes. Several states offered tax amnesty that year, and California’s was the most
successful tax amnesty program in the nation.
    Prior to the State Assembly, Chu served on the Monterey Park City Council for thirteen
years from 1988 to 2001, and served as Mayor three times. She began her career in 
public service as a Board Member of the Garvey School District from 1985 to 1988. 
Dr. Chu has been dedicated to education for decades, and was a community college 
professor of psychology for 20 years. She holds a Ph.D. in psychology and a B.A. in 
mathematics.
    If elected, she would join Rep. Mike Honda (D-San Jose), Rep. Doris Matsui 
(D-Sacramento) as Asian Americans representing districts in California. Other Asians
in Congress include, Rep. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.), 
Eni Faleomavaega (D-American Samoa), Rep. Madeleine Bordallo (D-Guam), and 
Rep. Bobby Scott (D- Va.). 

12/29/08 Asian Week: "Manju Ganeriwala Named Virginia State Treasurer."
    Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine has made the second major appointment of an 
Indian American in his administration by naming Manju Ganeriwala, currently deputy 
secretary of finance, state treasurer effective Jan. 1. The current treasurer, J. Braxton 
Powell, is retiring Dec. 31.
    India-West received further confirmation of the involvement of Indian Americans in 
the Kaine administration from a recent press release from the governor’s office, which
listed appointees Dr. Gopinath R. Jadhav, a consulting gastroenterologist from 
Richmond, Va., to the board of directors of the Small Business Financing Authority 
and Kanshana K. Thamodaran, a marketing executive in Virginia Beach, Va., to the 
board of commissioners of the Virginia Public School Authority.
    As state treasurer, she will be the chairwoman of the Treasury Board of Virginia, 
which has overseen for between $8 billion and $10 billion of investments and all 
debt management of the Commonwealth.
- Indiawest.com

12/24/08 Boston Globe: "Signs point to mayoral run by Sam Yoon; Wife pens 
ambitious fund-raising appeal."
by John C. Drake 
    In an end-of-year fund-raising appeal sent to relatives and friends, the at-large 
councilor's wife, Christina, wrote that she has been inspired by her husband to help 
him raise the cash needed to "move up in Boston's political world."
    "Certainly a commitment to seek higher office would require great sacrifice by 
our family (and especially me!), however because I feel strongly enough about what
is at stake for our children's future and that Sam may be uniquely qualified to lead 
our city forward, I felt it necessary to reach out to you at this time," she wrote in the 
missive, which appears on a personal fund-raising page she set up on her 
husband's political website.
    No one, including four-term incumbent Thomas M. Menino, has officially 
announced his or her intentions. But Yoon, Menino, and Councilor at Large 
Michael F. Flaherty have been raising money at a furious pace and staking out 
positions on politically potent issues.
    As of mid-December, Menino had more than $1.37 million in the bank, 
campaign finance records show. Flaherty, who has been on the City Council 
since 2000, had about $542,000. Yoon, who jetted to the West Coast in 
September for a series of fund-raising events with Asian-American leaders and 
has brought in thousands of dollars from out of state, still trailed significantly, 
with just under $63,300 in the bank.
    The fund-raising appeal, in which his wife set a personal goal of raising 
$10,000 by the end of the year, is an indication Yoon realizes he needs to make
a decent showing in the first campaign finance reports of 2009 if he is to appear
competitive against Menino and Flaherty, political observers said. All candidates
make end-of-year fund-raising pushes because campaign finance laws allow 
contributors to give up to $500 a year to any one candidate. The municipal 
election is in November 2009.
    "I think somebody's who's serious about the job has to raise between half a 
million and $1 million to get going," said Paul J. Scapicchio, a former city 
councilor.
    Yoon said yesterday that he has not launched a campaign for mayor, despite
his wife's optimistic fund-raising appeal.
    "I haven't made a decision, but the fact is it's still something I'm considering,"
Yoon said in a phone interview. "Raising money in this town, when a 16-year 
incumbent has fund-raising abilities that nobody else has, it is a challenge. 
So, I'm looking for every available way to raise the resources to see what's 
possible next year."
    By yesterday, Christina Yoon's fund-raising page showed she had raised 
$2,530 from 22 people.
    Lawrence S. DiCara, a former city councilor and longtime political observer,
said local political insiders increasingly believe Yoon will run, but said his 
financial picture must improve considerably by the start of the year for him to
appear to be a viable challenger to Menino.
    "Yoon has to have a six-figure number, or else he shouldn't be playing the
game, if he wants to play that game," DiCara said.
    While appealing far and wide for campaign cash, Yoon has been 
increasingly dinging the Menino administration and his fellow councilors over
government and openness issues.
    While not directly criticizing his council ally, Chuck Turner, who is facing 
federal charges of accepting a bribe from a Roxbury businessman, Yoon has
seized on concerns about corruption in City Hall to call for more transparency.
Earlier this month, the City Council approved a Yoon-sponsored proposal 
to include members' names, meeting schedules, agendas, and minutes for 
all boards and commissions on the city's website.
    Flaherty also has been staking claim to transparency issues, focusing 
particular attention on the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Yesterday, 
Flaherty fired off a letter to the agency's executive director seeking a list of
all properties owned by the BRA and the Economic Development and 
Industrial Corporation, along with rental and lease agreements.
    But despite the talk and the fact that the election is less than a year away,
Boston residents still do not know who their choices for mayor will be. 
In contrast, a growing field of candidates for the four at-large seats on the 
City Council have been campaigning publicly for weeks.
    "It's interesting that nobody has committed to the task yet," Scapicchio 
said. "I find the silence deafening."
    But political observers say there is a simple reason. With his approval
ratings exceeding 70 percent, Menino would be unbeatable, the 
conventional wisdom remains.
    Former city councilor Felix D. Arroyo, who's son Felix G. Arroyo is 
running for City Council next year, said Yoon has a future in politics, but
he doubts his chances - or anyone else's - against Menino.
    "Anybody running against the mayor on this occasion may have other
things in mind than winning the race," Arroyo said. Republican candidate running for Congress in Louisiana's Second District, which 
encompasses most of the city and a part of a neighboring parish.
    The group atop the truck, led by a man I assumed to be Mr. Cao -- though from 
that distance it's hard to be sure -- wasn't dancing but waving at passing drivers, 
a few of whom offered enthusiastic honks in return. Up the block, people filed into 
our neighborhood polling place to vote in one of the most overlooked congressional
races in local memory. The campaign, which stretched into early December due to
postponements caused by Hurricane Gustav, hadn't stirred much interest. 
New Orleans, like much of the country, was exhausted from the recently concluded 
"Obamathon." Besides, what chance did an unknown, Vietnamese-born immigration
lawyer and ex-Jesuit seminarian have of unseating William Jefferson, an entrenched,
nine-term incumbent Democrat?
    Granted, Mr. Jefferson's campaign had been somewhat hampered by the fact that
he is facing trial early next year on 16 counts of public corruption -- charges stemming
from a federal raid that found $90,000 in cash in his freezer a few years ago. But he
remained one of the state's most powerful black politicians running in a district that is
almost two-thirds African-American and hasn't sent a Republican to Washington 
since the 19th century.
    Watching the festive red truck pull away, I shook my head ruefully at the misguided
sense of mission that led men like Mr. Cao to waste their time and treasure on political
futility.
    Later that evening I went to Mr. Jefferson's election-night headquarters intending 
to interview his supporters about how he had managed to defeat a broad field of 
challengers and win re-election despite his extensive problems with the feds (two of
Jefferson's siblings and a niece are also under indictment). Mr. Jefferson's pending
return to Congress was seen by many as a further stain on Louisiana's already well-
tarnished political reputation. That he would be re-elected was viewed as a forgone 
conclusion following his victory in the Democratic primary.
    I mean, Anh Cao? C'mon!
    But as the returns came in Mr. Cao grabbed an early lead that he never relinquished.
Just after 10:30 p.m., a weary and slightly stooped Mr. Jefferson took to the podium 
and struggled to explain what had happened to stunned supporters: "I think people 
kind of ran out a little bit at the end of, I guess, the juice it takes to keep on going."
    In the two weeks since Mr. Cao's unlikely triumph, GOP leaders have been crowing
about the broader significance of the upset. "The Cao victory is a symbol of what can
be achieved when we think big," said Republican House Minority Leader John 
Boehner of Ohio.
    Well, maybe. But a closer look indicates the result was more a product of fortuitous
timing than grand GOP thinking. To start, the Republicans owe a thank-you note to the
Louisiana legislature, which adopted a closed primary system in time for this year's 
elections. That meant that while Mr. Jefferson had to fight a tough primary and runoff 
just to secure the Democratic nomination, Mr. Cao, as the lone Republican, skated 
through unopposed to the general election. It also meant that when Gustav forced a 
mass evacuation of the lower part of the state in September, the general election 
could not be held until December. So while a huge turnout of African-American 
voters for November's presidential election helped Mr. Jefferson win the Democratic
primary, that support evaporated in the general election when only 18% of eligible 
voters went to the polls.
    The decline was particularly steep in majority black precincts. On election night, 
Mr. Jefferson said he sensed trouble on the trail when supporters kept asking why 
he was campaigning since he had already won in November.
    Still, the election of Mr. Cao, and that of Gov. Bobby Jindal last year, marks a 
political sea change in this Deep South state. Just 17 years ago a majority of white
voters in Louisiana supported ex-Klansman David Duke for governor. Now Mr. Cao
(pronounced "Gow") becomes the first Vietnamese-born citizen elected to Congress,
just as Mr. Jindal was the first American of Indian heritage to be elected governor.
Their victories carry the same message that Barack Obama's did in the presidential 
race: We are finally at the point where competence can trump skin color in politics.
    Certainly, Mr. Cao's compelling personal story played a part in his win. He fled the
Communist takeover of his country in 1975, arriving from Saigon at age eight and 
speaking no English. He ended up with degrees in physics, philosophy and law. 
Key also was the support of New Orleans's vibrant Vietnamese community. 
Many of its members settled here after the war to live in a humid, heavily Catholic, 
tidal region that reminded them of home.
    And over the decades, their connection to the state has grown roots. After 
Hurricane Katrina wiped out Vietnamese neighborhoods in the eastern part of 
the city, they aggressively rebuilt, refusing to be driven from their adoptive home. 
It was the destruction of Katrina and the failed government response to it that led 
Mr. Cao to get involved in politics -- he felt compelled to take a leadership role in 
rebuilding New Orleans.
    Of course, one group's historic triumph is another's historic defeat. The Second
District was created in large measure to ensure that Louisiana's black citizens, 
which comprise almost a third of the state's population, had a voice in Washington.
With Mr. Jefferson's defeat, there are no African-Americans in the state's 
congressional delegation. Many believe that this is temporary and will be reversed
in the next election.
    But Mr. Cao's fate is now in his own hands. Republican leaders in Congress, 
eager to show that one of their members can successfully represent a "majority-
minority" district, will likely help him become an effective legislator. It's up to 
Mr. Cao to capitalize on this opportunity and set himself up to run for re-election 
in two years on a platform of accomplishments. If he does that and wins, his 
success will say a lot about the future of race relations not only in New Orleans, 
but in 21st century America as well.
    Mr. McCollam, a freelance writer living in New Orleans, is a former correspondent 
for BusinessWeek and The American Lawyer magazines.

12/19/08 http://higley1000.com: Top 25 Asian Neighborhoods 
(ranked by percentage of total households that are Asian in the 
neighborhood or suburb)
1: Mission Peak Foothills - 74.6% (Higley #627) (Fremont, San Francisco) 
2: Mission San Jose-Pine Street - 63.9% (Higley #524) 
(Fremont, San Francisco)
3: Fremont Place - 54.2% (Higley #28) (Los Angeles, Los Angeles)
4: Avalon Heights-Rancho Higuera Park - 54.2% (Higley #595) 
(Fremont, San Francisco)
5: Cupertino South-Regnart Canyon - 46.1% (Higley #835) 
(Cupertino, San Francisco)
6: The Midwest Club - 40.1% (Higley #114) (Oak Brook, Chicago)
7: Trinity Lakes - 37.4% (Higley #243) (Oak Brook, Chicago) 
8: Summitpointe Golf Club - 36.9% (Higley #842) (Milpitas, San Francisco) 
9: Kahala - 33.2% (Higley #411) (Honolulu, Honolulu) 
10: San Marino Central - 30.1% (Higley #317) (San Marino, Los Angeles) 
11: Portuguese Bend - 29.8% (Higley #399) 
(Rancho Palos Verde, Los Angeles)
12: Russian Hill - 27.1% (Higley #754) (San Francisco, San Francisco)
13: Hillsborough Park-Carolands - 24.8% (Higley #188) 
(Hillsborough, San Francisco)
14: Tustin Ranch - 24.1% (Higley #607) (Tustin, Los Angeles)
15: Saddle Brook - 23.8% (Higley #193) (Oak Brook, Chicago) 
16: Esperanza - 22.8% (Higley #341) (Yorba Linda, Los Angeles)
17: Sprain Brook-Boulder Ridge - 22.8% (Higley #616) 
(Town of Greenburgh, New York City) 
18: Edinburg Park-Cranbury Golf Club - 22.7% (Higley #804) 
(West Windsor Township, New York City) 
19: Brook Forest - 22.4% (Higley #644) (Oak Brook, Chicago) 
20: La Canada Flintridge Northwest - 21.5% (Higley #896) 
(La Canada Flintridge, Los Angeles) 
21: Crawford Corners - 21.4% (Higley #929) 
(Holmdel Township, New York City)
22: Hillsborough - 20.6% (Higley #163) (Hillsborough, San Francisco)
23: Austin Meadows-Cypress on the Greens - 20.3% (Higley #927) 
(Sugar Land, Houston)
24: Englewood Cliffs West Central - 19.9% (Higley #855)
(Englewood Cliffs, New York City)
25: Turtle Rock - 19.8% (Higley #779) (Irvine, Los Angeles)

12/15/08 80-20 PAC www.80-20.us: Why so few AsAm College 
Presidents?
    The following is from 80-20's newest Board Member, Roy Saigo,
who has just retired as the President of St. Cloud Univ., the largest
of the Minnesota state colleges. On 9/28/08, he published an article
in "The Chronicle Of Higher Education" entitled: Why There Still Aren't
Enough Asian-American College Presidents". Roy's first paragraphs 
was: "At age 5, my grandson understood fair play. If he didn't get his 
turn, he'd cry, "No fair!" As caring adults, we intercede when we see 
children ignore or gang up on another child -- we tell them, "No fair!"
    Roy gave us these facts: In 2005, the proportion of Asian Pacific 
Islander professors in the United States who held full-time positions was 
7.6 percent. In comparison, a 2006 survey by the American Council on
Education showed that only 0.9% of the president's job is held by Asian
Americans.  In the fall of 2007, 18.3 percent of California State's 
undergraduate students identified themselves as being of Asian/Filipino/
Pacific Island ethnicity. In the California State University system in the 
fall of 2006, 13.8 percent of the faculty was identified as Asians. So 
where are the provosts and academic vice presidents?
    Roy's last paragraphs was: "The issue I have raised needs more than
task forces, surveys, and recommendations -- there have been plenty of 
those over the years.  There must be actions that can be monitored for 
quantifiable results. I hope someone won't have to write this commentary
again in 10 years. Fair?"
[Dear Roy, Bigots for the Left run universities.  They discriminate 
against Asian Americans in favor of blacks and Hispanics.  It is 
known as affirmative action which 80-20 supports.  They reduce
the number of Asian Americans in order to increase the number of   
blacks and Hispanics, but they do not reduce the number of Jews 
in order to increase the number of blacks and Hispanics.  All animals
are equal but some are more equal than others.  
See Statistics on reverse discrimination.  If you don't like it, you need
to sue.  As long as Bigots for the Left think they can get away with it,
they will continue to discriminate against Asian Americans.]

12/11/08 Sacramento Bee: "Ted Lieu files to run for attorney general in 2010,"
    Democratic Assemblyman Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, filed paperwork this week to 
run for attorney general in 2010.
    Lieu is the third Democrat to make the move, following San Francisco District 
Attorney Kamala Harris, who announced she was exploring a run in mid-November,
and former Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla, who filed in July.
    Current Attorney General Jerry Brown is eligible to run for reelection in 2010, 
but the ex-governor has been making noise about trying to return to the governorship.
    Both Harris and Canciamilla have already said that should Brown run for reelection
they would bow out of the race.
    On the Republican side, Sen. Tom Harman, R-Huntington Beach, filed his 
paperwork last week.
    The 2006 GOP nominee, former Sen. Chuck Poochigian, also has an open 
account for the seat, though it has been largely inactive.


12/11/08 San Francisco Chronicle: “ Berkeley lab director likely next 
energy chief,”
by Kelly Zito
    President-elect Barack Obama is expected to nominate Nobel-laureate
physicist Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National 
Laboratory and a renowned expert on alternative fuels and climate change,
as the nation's energy secretary.
    The selection of Chu, who has led efforts to use solar energy in cars and
to work with oil companies on biofuels, would signal a bold new direction in
the United States' response to climate change, critics of the Bush 
administration said Wednesday.
    "The Chu pick is exciting because (he) will bring scientific rigor to the 
new administration's energy policy," said Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow at
the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank. "After
the anti-science Bush administration, this is like going to a Mensa meeting
after eight years of being trapped in the Flat Earth Society."
    Chu , who lives in the Bay Area with his wife and fellow physicist Jean
Chu, could not be reached for comment Wednesday. But sources close to
the incoming administration indicated that he was the likely choice.
    Obama also is expected to select Lisa Jackson, former commissioner
of New Jersey 's Department of Environmental Protection, as Environmental
Protection Agency administrator; and Carol Browner, who was EPA 
administrator under President Bill Clinton, as White House energy czar.
    Chu, 60, would beat out two other Californians whose names had been
floated for energy secretary: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dan 
Reicher, a former assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration
and leader of the Google.org foundation's energy and climate change 
efforts.
    Chu, who was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics for developing
methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light, is widely respected in
science and energy circles. He also is considered a Washington outsider
- a potential liability given that Chu would have to face off against Big Oil
and be in charge of passing a mammoth energy reform bill next year.
    Chu has not hesitated, however, to broadcast stark data showing that 
climate change could create a world ravaged by wars over arable land or
water, or to advocate for aggressive changes in America 's energy system.
    At the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas during the summer,
he said one myth of the energy crisis is that all the necessary technology
exists to solve the problem and that only political will is lacking.
    "I think political will is absolutely necessary, but we need new 
technologies to transform the landscape," he told the crowd.
    As director of the Berkeley lab since 2004, Chu has endeavored to 
make it the world leader in renewable energy research.
    In addition to collaborating on the Joint BioEnergy Institute and Energy
Biosciences Institute - centers that join universities, businesses and the
Department of Energy labs - Chu is in the midst of establishing a solar 
energy initiative called Helios. The center's goal is to develop ways to
store sunlight as auto fuel.
    Word of Chu's likely nomination came a day after Obama met with 
former Vice President Al Gore, also a Nobel Prize winner and one of 
the world's leading voices on the fight against global warming. Obama's
environmental plank calls for putting more than 1 million plug-in hybrid
cars on the road within seven years and for cutting U.S. greenhouse
gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.
    Those goals and Obama's embrace of high-profile supporters of
alternative energy sources would seem to set up obvious clashes with
the coal, oil and auto industries, which have regularly fought against
tighter regulations on emissions.
    Chu 's recent work with oil giant BP, however, may hint at a broader
approach to climate-change efforts. Last year, BP entered into a $500
million partnership with UC Berkeley, the national lab and the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to found the Energy Biosciences 
Institute, which aims to create new methods for converting plants into
fuels.
    Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council,
a group of power-generating and transportation companies, said Chu 's
background is key to ushering in a new era of energy technology.
    "An understanding of the art of the possible in energy technology will
be critical to the development of a cost-effective climate change policy,"
Segal said.
    Prior to the Berkeley lab appointment, Chu was a professor of physics
and applied physics at Stanford University .
    Chu, a St. Louis native, received his undergraduate degree in physics
and mathematics at the University of Rochester and received his 
doctorate from UC Berkeley.
    Steven Chu 
    Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, expert in climate
change and alternative fuels. Key player in partnership to create new
methods of converting plants into fuels; Nobel Prize in physics, 1997.

12/11/08 Nichi Bei Times Weekly: "C(API)tal Correspondent: APIAs In 
Politics, The Full Monte," 
by Bill Wong
Nichi Bei Times Columnist
    After the close of this election cycle, Asian Pacific Islander Americans
(APIAs) have much to be proud of. After decades of small but worthy 
advances, APIAs finished this year with broad and significant gains on 
all levels of government.
    On the federal level, APIAs again made history with the nomination of
retired General Eric Shinseki to serve as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
General Shinseki is the first API to serve as the Secretary of Veterans 
Affairs and the third API to serve in a presidential Cabinet following 
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and Labor Secretary Elaine 
Chao. General Shinseki was also the first APIA to become a four-star
general in the U.S. Army and the first to serve as Army Chief of Staff.
    More history was made most recently with the stunning election of the
first Vietnamese American to Congress. Republican Anh "Joseph" 
Quang Cao, a New Orleans lawyer, beat nine-term Congressman 
William Jefferson for Louisiana's 2nd Congressional District. Cao was
born in Saigon and fled with his mother and two siblings from South 
Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in 1975.
    On the state level, California made history with the election of ten
APIAs to the state legislature for a total APIA legislative caucus of 11
members. The 11th member, state Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco),
is in the middle of a four-year term and was not up for re-election in 2008.
Four APIA Constitutional officers — State Controller John Chiang and
Board of Equalization Members Judy Chu, Michelle Steel, and Betty 
Yee — join the 11 APIA members of the Legislature for the largest 
number of APIA state elected officials in the mainland U.S.
    In addition to an amazing growth of APIA elected officials, the staff 
ranks in government have swelled with APIA talent. On the federal level,
President-elect Obama has named three APIAs to top White House 
positions: Peter Rouse as White House senior adviser to the President,
Chris Lu as White House Cabinet Secretary, and Christina Tchen as
White House Office of Public Liaison
    In Sacramento, the top APIA staff ranks include LGBT Caucus 
Consultant Eric Aastacan; Kiyomi Burchill, legislative aide to Senate 
President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg; Randy Chinn, chief consultant to
the Senate Energy and Utilities Committee; Eric Dang, legislative 
director of Majority Whip Fiona Ma; Jody Fujii, chief of staff to 
Assemblyman Bill Monning; Dean Grafilo, chief of staff to Assemblyman
Warren Furutani; Shirley Kim, legislative aide to Assembly Majority 
Leader Alberto Torrico; Sophie Kim, legislative aide to Assemblyman
Furutani; Annie Lam, legislative director for Assemblyman Mike Eng;
Mandy Lee, legislative aide to Senator Alex Padilla; Marie Liu, 
consultant to the Senate Natural Resources Committee; API Caucus 
consultant Andrew Medina; Wendy Notsinneh, chief of staff to 
Assemblywoman Julia Brownley; Jonathan Tran, legislative aide to 
Assemblyman Eng; Collin Wong, chief of staff to State Controller 
Chiang; Sylvia Tang, director of External Affairs for State Controller 
Chiang; and Gene Wong, chief legal counsel for Senate President 
Pro Tem Steinberg.
    Also, White House veteran Mona Pasquil is rumored to soon 
become Chief of Staff to Lt. Governor John Garamendi. Lobbyists
Leilani Aguinaldo Yee, Jonathan Barnato, Lara Dunbar, Doug Kim,
Dave Low, Jai Sookprasert, Dale Shimasaki, Sarah Takahama,
David Takashima, Ron Tom, Jennifer Wada, and Angie Wei add to
the growing base of APIAs in state government affairs.
    Bill Wong is a political and strategic consultant with more than 20
years of legislative and campaign experience. He currently advises
candidates, political action committees and major corporations.


12/7/08 Associated Press: “1st Vietnamese-American elected to US 
Congress,” by Cain Burdeau
    New Orleans – The first Vietnamese-American elected to Congress took
advantage of dissatisfaction with a longtime incumbent dogged by 
corruption allegations and reflects the changing nature of New Orleans
politics since Hurricane Katrina.
    Republican immigration attorney Anh "Joseph" Cao defeated 
Democratic U.S. William Jefferson on Saturday in an election postponed 
for a month by Hurricane Gustav.
    The victory for a 41-year-old child of Vietnam War refugees was greeted
with amazement and drew parallels to last year's election of Gov. Bobby 
Jindal, an Indian-American Republican.
    It also confirms a general shift to the GOP in Louisiana , where the 
Democratic Party dominated for generations and no Republican had 
represented New Orleans since 1890.
    "This is kind of uncharted waters here," said Larry Powell, a Tulane
University historian.
    Cao was buoyed by low turnout, a lackluster campaign by Jefferson,
strong third-party candidates and the election being postponed a month
by Hurricane Gustav. State and national Republicans seized on the race
with a well-funded and effective campaign, bombarding targeted 
neighborhoods with automated telephone calls, signs and flyers.
    Jefferson faced some of the most direct attacks since 2005, when a
wide-reaching corruption probe against him was made public and FBI 
agents found $90,000 in alleged bribe payments in his freezer. He currently
faces trial on charges of money laundering, racketeering and bribery, but no
date has been set.
    In conceding the race, Jefferson blamed fatigue among his supporters.
    "I think people just ran out of gas a bit," Jefferson said Saturday night. 
"People today flat didn't come out in large numbers."
    In many ways, Cao won on a protest vote by white voters from both major
parties indignant about Jefferson 's staying power. Analysts said white 
voters turned out by a ratio of 2-to-1 over blacks.
    Nonetheless, Cao's win was viewed as improbable and important for 
the Asian communities of eastern New Orleans and the West Bank, a 
series of suburbs across the Mississippi River from the city.
    "It's a David and Goliath story," said Joel Waltzer, a lawyer who's 
worked for 20 years representing Vietnamese homeowners and fishermen
in eastern New Orleans . Before starting his own law practice, Cao worked
for Waltzer.
    Katrina made Cao's win possible, Waltzer said.
    "Before Katrina, they were an ignored constituency and now they are 
strong enough to elect their own congressman," Waltzer said. "They've 
become ambitious. They want a voice in their own rebuilding, a place at the
table when these very important decisions are made."
    The community — made up of war refugees from Southeast Asia who 
came here in the 1970s — has gained in strength since Katrina and it is 
widely viewed as a rebuilding model.
    "They jumped onto it with nobody's help," said Pete Gerica, a commercial
fisherman and industry advocate who lives near the Asian community, 
known generally as Village d'Est or Versailles .
    "It's a self-contained city," Gerica said. "They have steelworkers, 
carpenters, everything they need right there. They have shoe makers, they
got people who make clothes. They are a very tight-knit family and that's
what makes good people, when you put family first."
    Cao (pronounced "Gow") is largely unknown, but his compelling life story
attracted many voters. He was born in Vietnam and had to flee the country
after Saigon fell in 1975 at age 8. His father, a South Vietnamese army
officer, was imprisoned by Communist forces and later released. 
    He earned a degree in philosophy from Fordham University , a Jesuit 
college in New York City , and moved to Louisiana in 1992 as a seminarian.
He earned his law degree from Loyola University in New Orleans . 
    He has personally experienced the destructive powers of hurricanes in
the low-lying region. His home in an upscale suburb outside New Orleans '
levee system was flooded by Katrina and Gustav. 
    Gerica said Cao could put a new face on Louisiana 's reconstruction 
and, if he works with Democrats like Rep. Charlie Melancon, do good 
things for the state. But, he added, his lack of seniority and experience 
could be a detriment. 
    Cao has close ties with the powerful Vietnamese Catholic church, Mary
Queen of Vietnam , and vowed that his political bid was motivated by his 
religiosity. 
    "It was something that I was called to do, literally, in the religion sense,"
Cao said. 
    The congressman-elect describes himself as a political moderate with
only one firm policy belief: He is against abortion. 
    As a lawyer, he has worked for Boat People S.O.S., a national 
Vietnamese-American advocacy group for refugees. He became known in
New Orleans in 2006 as a leader in an emotional campaign to close a new
landfill for Katrina debris. In 2007, Cao ran for a state House seat as an
independent and lost. 
    He said his win Saturday proved Louisiana is open-minded. 
    "The people of Louisiana are very special, very progressive," he said,
"and I think we will serve as a beacon for the rest of the country."


12/6/08 Associated Press: “Rumsfeld nemesis Shinseki to be named 
VA secretary,”
by Hope Yen
    Washington – President-elect Barack Obama has chosen retired Gen. 
Eric K. Shinseki to be the next Veterans Affairs secretary, turning to a 
former Army chief of staff once vilified by the Bush administration for 
questioning its Iraq war strategy.
    Obama will announce the selection of Shinseki, the first Army four-star
general of Japanese-American ancestry, at a news conference Sunday in
Chicago . He will be the first Asian-American to hold the post of Veterans
Affairs secretary, adding to the growing diversity of Obama's Cabinet.
    "I think that General Shinseki is exactly the right person who is going to
be able to make sure that we honor our troops when they come home," 
Obama said in an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" to be broadcast
Sunday.
    NBC released a transcript of the interview after The Associated Press
reported that Shinseki was Obama's pick.
    Shinseki's tenure as Army chief of staff from 1999 to 2003 was marked
by constant tensions with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which 
boiled over in 2003 when Shinseki testified to Congress that it might take
several hundred thousand U.S. troops to control Iraq after the invasion.
    Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, belittled the estimate as 
"wildly off the mark" and the army general was ousted within months. But 
Shinseki's words proved prophetic after President George W. Bush in 
early 2007 announced a "surge" of additional troops to Iraq after 
miscalculating the numbers needed to stem sectarian violence.
    Obama said he selected Shinseki for the VA post because he "was 
right" in predicting that the U.S. will need more troops in Iraq than 
Rumsfeld believed at the time.
    "When I reflect on the sacrifices that have been made by our veterans
and I think about how so many veterans around the country are struggling
even more than those who have not served — higher unemployment rates,
higher homeless rates, higher substance abuse rates, medical care that is
inadequate — it breaks my heart," Obama told NBC.
    Shinseki, 66, is slated to take the helm of the government's second 
largest agency, which has been roundly criticized during the Bush 
administration for underestimating the amount of funding needed to treat 
thousands of injured veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan .
    Thousands of veterans currently endure six-month waits for disability 
benefits, despite promises by current VA Secretary James Peake and his
predecessor, Jim Nicholson, to reduce delays. The department also is 
scrambling to upgrade government technology systems before new 
legislation providing for millions of dollars in new GI benefits takes effect
next August.
    Sen. Daniel Akaka, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee,
praised Shinseki as a "great choice" who will make an excellent VA 
secretary.
    "I have great respect for General Shinseki's judgment and abilities," 
said Akaka, D-Hawaii, in a statement. "I am confident that he will use his 
wisdom and experience to ensure that our veterans receive the respect 
and care they have earned in defense of our nation. President-elect
Obama is selecting a team that reflects our nation's greatest strength, 
its diversity, and I applaud him."
    Obama's choice of Shinseki, who grew up in Hawaii , is the latest 
indication that the president-elect is making good on his pledge to have
a diverse Cabinet.
    In Obama's eight Cabinet announcements so far, white men are the 
minority with two nominations — Timothy Geithner at Treasury and Robert
Gates at Defense. Three are women — Janet Napolitano at Homeland 
Security, Susan Rice as United Nations ambassador and Hillary Rodham
Clinton at State. Eric Holder at the Justice Department is African 
American, while Bill Richardson at Commerce is Latino.
    Shinseki is a recipient of two Purple Hearts for life-threatening injuries
in Vietnam .
    Upon leaving his post in June 2003, Shinseki in his farewell speech
sternly warned against arrogance in leadership.
    "You must love those you lead before you can be an effective leader,"
he said. "You can certainly command without that sense of commitment,
but you cannot lead without it. And without leadership, command is a 
hollow experience, a vacuum often filled with mistrust and arrogance."
    Shinseki also left with the warning: "Beware a 12-division strategy for 
a 10-division army."

12/4/08 Asian Week: "A Slap in Our Face: We can’t forget what 
Richardson did to Wen Ho Lee,"
by Emil Guillermo
    Wen Ho Lee is as close as it gets in contemporary Asian Pacific 
American history to a mythic victim of racism in our nation.
    Unlike a symbol of injustice like a Rosa Parks, Lee was no activist and 
did not seek to challenge society. He was merely an ordinary Asian 
American scientist doing his life’s work. And solely because of his race 
was he wrongly suspected of being the most heinous kind of criminal 
to democracy — a spy.
    For his ordeal, Lee rarely receives the respect he deserves and now 
lives in quiet obscurity after being stripped of his livelihood as a nuclear
scientist. To add insult to injury, some still don’t think Lee is innocent.
    Meanwhile, Bill Richardson, secretary of energy in the late 1990s and
the man who fingered Lee and presided over his public flogging, remains
in the limelight and is now being honored as President-elect Obama’s 
new secretary of commerce.
    That may be the ultimate injustice to Wen Ho Lee.
    Simply for his lead role in the Lee case, Richardson should have a
karma deficit so huge that he should be happy to remain ensconced as
the popular governor of New Mexico , far from the national stage.
    But politics and ambition being what they are, Richardson has 
apparently rehabilitated himself to glory in the last eight years. His recent
unsuccessful run for president seemed to be waged on the basis that 
someone who was Latino had to do it. Yet it’s likely he never saw himself
with a real shot to win, and instead used the campaign to position 
himself to fail upwards.
    Sure enough, at this year’s Democratic National Convention, the 
also-ran spoke on that last memorable night at Invesco Field and 
achieved what his failed presidential run could not — a real shot at 
national prominence and a place in Obama’s inner circle. I mean, there’s
got to be a Latino in there somewhere, right?
    Too bad it’s someone responsible for what is arguably the most
prominent case of racism and xenophobia against Asian Americans 
since the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
    Richardson, the charming politician, would love for us all to forget
Wen Ho Lee. But we must insist that APAs and all Americans go back
to the memory vault and re-experience the pain of that episode, which
caused a ripple effect from the white towers of academia to the dim 
sum houses of Chinatown and everywhere in between where Asian 
Americans were.
    For a time in our country, every Chinese American was seen as a
suspect. Whether student or professor, Asian or Asian American, just
enough doubt was cast to impact all working relationships.
    Wen Ho Lee’s pain suddenly became all our pain. We were all 
suspects. Before Sept.11 and the terrorist fear, the profiling standard
was not a man with a turban, but a brainy Chinese or Asian American
scientist or student with access to some form of technology, top secret
or not. It really didn’t matter. All that mattered was your Asian heritage.
    Richardson ’s disgusting role
    These days, the modern memory vault seems to be YouTube 
(check out this short recap of the Lee saga at: tiny.cc/BGHDZ). It’s a 
painful reminder of Richardson ’s adamant defense of his role in the 
Lee case. The clip includes Richardson being grilled on 60 Minutes, as
well as Lee being interviewed on NBC. There’s a shot of the cell where
Lee spent nine months in solitary confinement, waiting for the trial that 
would exonerate him from espionage charges.
    The broadcast clips unfortunately do not represent the overall media
coverage, which was as close as it gets to a modern “yellow journalism.”
The media and the government were in lockstep, feeding on each other.
There were so many leaks to the media from federal sources that it 
could not have been done without some orchestration from the top of 
the Department of Energy. The New York Times was so gung-ho about
being leaked upon, it lost its sense of ethics.
    But even The Times was able to see its error. It ran a massive 
apology to Lee for its failure to present a fair human portrait of Lee and
admitted to an over reliance on a few government sources.
    The Times had no choice but to apologize. Even Judge James Parker,
the presiding judge in the Lee case, issued an apology to Lee upon his
release for how badly government prosecutors had bungled the case.
    One man should have had the moral courage to change all of that 
history: Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. But he didn’t.
    Now he hopes we’ve forgotten all about it. It would be quite the norm
to forget what happens to Asian Americans; we have constantly been 
ignored, overlooked. How many Asian Americans do you see 
mentioned in the Obama transition? So why should we expect anything
different now? Because America cannot afford to forget what 
happened to Lee.
    President-elect Obama should not give in to Richardson ’s charm or
to the large Latino vote he claims. Latino activists have propped
Richardson up as the “Latino guy.” But how many people outside a 
small circle even know Richardson is Latino? Besides, his race is 
irrelevant; ours isn’t.
    A Richardson selection is purely a matter of ambition and political 
payback, not the public good. Surely there is someone better for the 
commerce job who doesn’t have a history of trading in xenophobia?
    President-elect Obama shouldn’t dismiss concerns of Asian 
Americans who overwhelming supported his campaign. The choice 
sends a negative message to APAs everywhere. Richardson  
represents a regression. He is simply unfit to be part of any “cabinet
of change.”
    On-line petitions are being circulated at http://www.wenholee.org/ 
and petitiononline.com/GovBillR/petition.html. 

12/02/2008 San Jose Mercury News: “Chinese-American activists oppose
any Bill Richardson cabinet nomination,”
by Ken McLaughlin
    In a move bound to create political tension between Latinos and Asian-
Americans, a group of Chinese-American activists in Silicon Valley has 
launched a nationwide grass-roots movement to fight President-elect 
Barack Obama's nomination today of Bill Richardson as commerce 
secretary.
    The group is upset at the New Mexico governor for his handling of the 
nearly decade-old case of Taiwanese-American Wen Ho Lee, a former 
nuclear scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. U.S. officials once 
suspected Lee of giving nuclear secrets to China when Richardson was 
President Clinton's energy secretary.
    The Chinese-Americans say they realize that challenging the nomination
of Richardson , 61, the nation's most high-profile Hispanic politician, will 
ruffle the Latino community, many of whose leaders felt he should have 
been named secretary of state instead of Sen. Hillary Clinton. 
    But the Chinese-American group insists that Richardson 's refusal to 
acknowledge making serious errors in the case makes it a moral 
imperative to oppose his nomination to Obama's Cabinet. They say their
criticism of Richardson has nothing to do with him being Latino but 
everything to do with his lack of judgment in the case.
    "This was the major Chinese-American civil rights case in the last 30
years,'' said Albert Wang, a Fremont physician. "And there was a feeling
among many Chinese-Americans, particularly in Silicon Valley, that Bill
Richardson did a lot to promote the notion that all Chinese-Americans are
potential spies.''
    The group has already gathered more than 4,000 electronic signatures
protesting Richardson 's nomination as head of the federal department 
dealing with business and industry.
    A former congressman and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations,
Richardson ran for president against Obama in the Democratic primary
and later endorsed him over Sen. Clinton. He has acknowledged the 
government made "some mistakes'' in the Lee case, but he has denied 
that his public statements naming Lee as an espionage suspect 
represented racial scapegoating or exhibited a lack of judgment.
    But Roger Hu, a 30-year-old Silicon Valley engineer who was raised in
Los Altos and was an Obama delegate at the Democratic convention, 
has written an "open letter'' to Obama and the transition team stating that
Richardson should not be nominated or confirmed for any Cabinet-level
position.
    In the letter, which appears on his blog at http://notorich.blogspot.com,
 Hu says he became aware of the Lee case when he was entering his 
senior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
    " Richardson 's actions were simply inexcusable,'' he writes.
    Hu, Wang and well-known Chinese-American human rights activists 
such as Henry Der plan to say in a new letter to Obama today, posted at
www.wenholee.org, that Richardson 's actions violated Lee's due process
rights by firing him without the required legal notice. It will also accuse 
Richardson of promoting Lee's indictment when there was no evidence 
that he had engaged in espionage.
    Until Richardson apologizes for his actions, the group says, it will 
continue to oppose the nomination.
    Der accused Richardson of fueling suspicions about the loyalties of 
dedicated, hardworking Chinese-Americans.
    "Wen Ho Lee bore the brunt of Richardson's actions, but there were 
many Chinese-American scientists who felt great fear,'' said Der, who 
once headed Chinese for Affirmative Action in San Francisco. "Even I 
got a visit from the FBI, and I'm not a scientist.''
    Caitlin Kelleher, press spokeswoman for Gov. Richardson, referred
calls on Tuesday to Obama's transition office. A spokesman there would
not comment on anyone not yet officially nominated.
    Victor Garza, chairman of La Raza Roundtable, a San Jose-based 
civil rights group with about 800 members, said Richardson "is one of the
most high-profile Hispanics in the United States who has done an 
excellent job in many high-profile jobs.''
    Noting that his group has endorsed many Asian-Americans running for
local offices, Garza said he hopes "my brothers and sisters who happen
to be Chinese don't allow their resentment'' over Richardson 's handling
of the Lee case "to become a single issue'' that could threaten his 
nomination.
    "And I hope this single issue won't create a major problem between 
the two groups,'' Garza said.
    Lee, now 68, was indicted on Dec. 10, 1999, on 59 counts that 
accused him of mishandling nuclear weapons secrets. His arrest followed
months of press reports and speculation that he had passed secrets to
China — something with which he was never charged and always denied.
He spent the next nine months in solitary confinement at the Santa Fe 
County Jail.
    Supporters claimed Lee, who was born in Taiwan and is a naturalized 
U.S. citizen, was being targeted because of his race. The government 
denied that, although former Los Alamos counterintelligence chief Robert
Vrooman says Lee was singled out because he is ethnic Chinese.
    Initially, government attorneys said Lee had stolen the "crown jewels" 
of U.S. nuclear weaponry science and intended to turn them over to a 
foreign power. But the government was eventually forced to acknowledge
that the material was classified "restricted" rather than secret and that 
"99 percent" of the material was already available to the public.
    Lee eventually pleaded guilty to one felony count of downloading 
sensitive material and was sentenced to time served.
    Some political analysts see the dust-up as one of the opening salvos in
an evolving political mosaic created by the election of the nation's first 
black president.
    Gregory Rodriguez, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, 
said the controversy shows that all the talk about a "post-racial America ''
is overblown.
    "We believed we were going to work our way to the point where race 
did not matter,'' said Rodriguez, author of "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans,
and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America.''
    But the reality, Rodriguez said, is that "race is only going to affect our 
society in more complex ways.''

11/28/08 Asian Week: “Commerce Secretary Appointment Draws Ire 
From Asian Americans: Community looks back at Richardson ’s role in 
Wen Ho Lee Case,”
by Andrew Lee
        New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s appointment this week as 
President-elect Barack Obama’s commerce secretary is being greeted 
with anger and disappointment by some who remember the former energy
secretary’s role in the botched investigation and prosecution of scientist 
Dr. Wen Ho Lee.
    In 1999, Richardson and several other Department of Energy officials 
publicly accused the Taiwanese-born Lee of stealing classified nuclear-
related documents from the Los Alamos Laboratories.
    Lee, who had been employed at Los Alamos for 21 years, was indicted
and spent 278 days in solitary confinement. Meanwhile, the case became
a national story as suspicions formed that Lee was performing espionage
for the Chinese government.
    In the face of insufficient evidence, Lee pled guilty to a substantially 
reduced charge and received a public apology from President Bill 
Clinton for his mistreatment at the hands of the federal government.
    The future New Mexico governor came under fire for his role in the 
case, as allegations surfaced that it was Richardson who leaked 
damaging classified personal information about Lee in an apparent 
attempt to smear the 69-year-old doctor in the press. Lee eventually 
received a multimillion-dollar settlement from the federal government and
several media outlets in 2006.
    Richardson ’s new appointment has drawn fierce criticism from 
members of the Asian American community, many of whom still blame 
the New Mexico governor for perpetuating a harmful image of Chinese 
Americans.
    “ Richardson inflamed the stereotype that Americans of Chinese 
descent are easily disloyal citizens of our country,” said Henry Der who
was Executive Director of Chinese for Affirmative Action in the 1990s.
Der called upon members of the Senate Commerce Committee to 
investigate Richardson ’s conduct as secretary of energy during 
Richardson ’s confirmation hearings.
    For critics like Der, Richardson ’s refusal to acknowledge his own
misconduct during the scandal remains a bitter sticking point.
    “[He] needs to… apologize for the grave, calculated mistakes and 
harm he perpetrated against Lee and our nation’s sense of justice,” 
Der said.
    Guy Wong, a member of a group of Chinese Americans who 
supported Wen Ho Lee during his imprisonment, went further in his 
criticism of the former energy secretary.
    “Bill Richardson is simply a ruthless opportunist,” said Wong, who
circulated a petition urging President-elect Obama to deny Richardson
any cabinet position prior to Tuesday’s announcement. Wong criticized
Richardson and other government officials for being “willing to lie, not
just to Dr. Lee, but also in open court, in order to gain advantage over
an innocent and powerless man.”
    That Richardson’s appointment comes at a time of unprecedented
economic turmoil concerns Asian American business leaders like John
Jin Lee, chairman of the Asian Business League of San Francisco.
    “Mr. Richardson’s association with the well-documented mishandling
of the Wen Ho Lee case at the very least raises the question as to his
qualifications,” said Lee.
    Shien Biau “S.B.” Woo, former lieutenant governor of Delaware and
co-founder of the prominent 80-20 Initiative, an Asian American political
organization, had a different view.
    “I doubt if we want to burn our political capital opposing the 
appointment of Richardson ,” Woo said, questioning the notion that the
Wen Ho Lee case was an important issue to Asian Americans.
    In lieu of opposing the appointment and risk angering the Hispanic 
community, Woo proffered that the Asian American community should 
work to increase its influence instead of focusing on negatives.
    “The politic way of doing things has always been not to be concerned
with what others are getting,” said Woo. “We have to be politically astute.
Otherwise we’ll never succeed in enlarging our political clout.”

11/20/08 Asian Week: "Capitol Watch: The Sleeping Giant Wakes Up,"
by Maeley Tom
    Asian Pacific Islander voters deliver: This historic election demonstrated
three interesting trends. First, the voting strength of multicultural America  
can win elections; API voters can make a difference in key battleground
states and are leaning more Democratic than ever before. The reward for
API voter efforts is evidenced by the number of APIs involved with the
formation of the new administration.
    API talent spearheading Obama’s transition team: In addition to Sonal
Shah, named to Transition Advisory Board, Peter Rouse, co-chairman of
the Transition Team and Chris Lu, named transition executive director, 
several prominent APIs were appointed to the Agency Review Teams. 
These team members will be responsible for reviewing all key departments,
agencies and commissions as well as the White House, to provide the 
president-elect, vice president-elect and key advisors with information
needed to make strategic policy, budgetary and personnel decisions
prior to the inauguration.
    APIs named to the agency teams include Ginger Lew (Economics and
International Trade), Shirley Sagawa (Education and Labor), Audrey Choi
and Barbara Chow (Executive Office of the President), Linh Nguyen 
(Government Operations), Parag Mehta (Office of Public Liaison) and 
Liz Fujii (special assistant to the Working Group members). Additional
names are anticipated to join the teams.
    Opportunities with the Obama administration: During the changeover 
to a new presidential administration, upwards of 7,000 government jobs
become available nationwide and abroad. Some of the highest profile
positions generally go to top elected officials and/or corporate leaders.
However, the majority of the positions are competitive at all levels. The
Plum Book lists all the positions and can be viewed online at
gpoaccess.gov. If readers are interested in applying for one of these
jobs, be prepared to relocate to Washington, D.C., where the bulk of the
positions are based, and be aware that there is a rigorous vetting 
process for candidates seeking presidential appointments.
    National API organizations are pooling together resumes of candidates
to refer to the transition team. Here in California , the Coalition of Asian
Pacific Americans chaired by Dale Minami, a member of the Obama
API Executive Advisory Committee, and CAPA member Yvonne Lee,
a former presidential appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission,
are coordinating efforts to recommend API candidates to the transition
team.
    CAPA is also working with the UC Berkeley’s Chief Justice Earl
Warren Institute for Race, Ethnicity and Diversity project to combine
some of their recommendations with the Institute’s list of candidates.
The Institute’s goal is to develop a list of 300 highly qualified, experienced
professionals interested in public sector service and with a demonstrated
interest in and commitment to issues of social and economic justice.
Spearheading this effort is Steve Phillips and Maria Echaveste, former
deputy chief of staff to Pres. Bill Clinton.
    API names touted for key positions in the new administration: API
potential candidates for cabinet and/or ambassadorships include Hawai‘i
Sen. Daniel Inouye, California Rep. Mike Honda, former Secretary of
Transportation Norman Mineta, Tammy Duckworth, former Gov. Gary 
Locke, General Eric Shinseki and General Antonio Taguba.
    Some former Democratic presidential appointees who give the API a
deeper bench for higher executive levels include Glen S. Fukushima,
former senior trade representative with the Clinton administration, 
Hoyt Zia, Jadine Nielsen, Laura Efurd, Maria Haley, Irene Bueno, 
Charmaine Manansala, Betsy Kim, Nancy Chen, Paul Igasaki, Stuart 
Ishimaru, Robert Gee, Rajen Anand, Tessie Guillermo, Jeanette
Takemura, Angela Oh, Yvonne Lee and Michael Yaki.
    National API leaders with strong credentials include: JACL’s Floyd
Mori, president of the APA Institute for Congressional Studies William
Marumoto, Dale Minami, Karen Narasaki, Daphne Quock, OCA’s
Michael Lin and Ginny Gong, Gloria Caiole (AFSME), Courtni Pugh
(SEIU), Vida Benavides (APIA Vote), Francey Youngberg, Bel Leong
Hong (chair of the DNC API Caucus), Charlie Woo (CEO of Megatoys
and founder of CAUSE), Annie Chung (Self Help for the Elderly),
Jennie Lee Hansen (president of AARP), author Helen Zia, Irene 
Hirano Inouye, Gordon Quan (former city councilman of Houston, Texas),
Bill Kaneko (president and CEO of the Hawai’i Institute for Public Affairs)
and Michelle Rhee (chancellor of D.C. Public Schools).
    Individuals who served on Obama’s Asian American Finance 
Committee provide some excellent candidates for key appointments,
such as Silicon Valley venture capitalist and committee co-chair Vinod
Khosla, Sohaib Abbasi (CEO of Informatica Corp.), Romita Shetty,
Nasset Ahmad, Cyrus Amir-Mokri, Swadesh Chatterjee, Dr. Stan Toy,
Scott Oki and Mahinder Tak.
    Other heavy-hitting supporters in the campaign who are potential
candidates for appointments include Preeta Bansal (campaign senior
policy advisor), Eddie Wong, Eugene Kang, Curtis Chin, Krishi
Karthikeyan, Dave Kumar, Reshma Sajani, Yul Kwon and California
Assemblyman Ted Lieu, an early supporter and current chairman of the
California API legislative Caucus.

11/18/08 Atlanta Business Chronicle: “Asian American dry cleaners in 
Atlanta sue Infinite Energy; Natural gas company plans nationwide rollout,” 
    A group of Atlanta dry cleaners has filed a suit seeking class action 
and $5 million in damages against Infinite Energy Inc., claiming the energy
provider tried to fleece them by locking them into three-year contracts with
artificially inflated rates after Hurricane Katrina.
    The suit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Atlanta , seeks class action
status for more than 600 Korean-American, Asian-American and other 
dry cleaners who are part of Korean Cleaners’ Association of Atlanta 
(KCAA) and all dry cleaners in Atlanta use natural gas for their business.
    The suit claims the Gainesville, Fla.-based energy giant fraudulently 
coerced the dry cleaners into signing long-term contracts at $1.14 or 
$1.149 per therm immediately after Hurricane Katrina, which disrupted 
the drilling, refining and transportation of natural gas supplies and 
caused a short-term spike in the cost of natural gas. They contend 
Infinite Energy is still trying to hold them to those inflated rates three
years after natural gas prices re-stabilized.
    The suit argues Infinite has tried to hold all members of the KCAA to
the higher rates despite the plaintiffs’ formal attempts at negotiation to
reduce the rates and despite that many members never agreed to the
higher rate.
    The plaintiffs’ attorney is David Pardue of the Atlanta law firm 
Hartman, Simons, Spielman & Wood LLP.
    Infinite Energy has not returned a call for comment.

11/8/08 The Philippine Star: "Fil-Am elected to US Congress,"
By Edmund Silvestre
    A Filipino-American has been elected to the US Congress, representing
the seventh district of Ohio.
    Stephen Austria, a Republican from Beavercreek, is the eldest of nine 
children of the late Dr. Clement Austria of Tiaong, Quezon. The elder 
Austria served as a guerrilla under Gen. Douglas MacArthur while studying 
medicine at the University of St. Tomas.
    "This victory is for my family, for my late father Dr. Clement Austria, for the
Filipino-Americans, for the people of Ohio and the entire America," Austria,
49, said after his victory over Democrat Sharen Neuhardt by 16 percent or
46,052 votes. Austria will succeed retiring Republican congressman David
Hobson.
    Austria currently represents Ohio's tenth Senate district, and is chairman
of the Senate's Highways and Transportation committee. He was twice
unanimously elected by his colleagues as majority leader. He had also
previously served in the Ohio House of Representatives.
    "I will work very hard to help strengthen our economy by creating new jobs,
lowering taxes, cutting wasteful government spending and supporting a long-
term energy plan," said Austria, who holds a political science degree from
Marquette University. He worked as a financial planner for American 
Express for 16 years before joining politics.
    In 1984 the Austria family was chosen as "Ohio Family of the Year," and
subsequently as one of nine families named "The Great American Family."
They received the award from President Ronald and First Lady Nancy 
Reagan at the White House.
    Austria and his wife Eileen have three sons, Brian, Kevin and Eric, whom
he coached in basketball, soccer and baseball. He has been active with the
annual Dr. Clement G. Austria Senior Citizen Christmas Party, began by his
father 30 years ago. He is also a strong advocate for family violence 
prevention centers and victims' advocate groups.
    Austria is not the first Filipino-American to run for a seat in the US Capitol.
Other previous Fil-Am contenders for Congress include Gloria Ochoa of 
California (defeated) and Jon Amores of West Virginia (withdrew).
    Another US congressman who has Filipino roots is Rep. Robert Scott, 
an African-American representing Virginia's third District. The Harvard-
educated Democrat's maternal grandfather, Valentin Cortez Hamlin, is from
the Philippines.


11/7/08 The Daily Princetonian: “Obama taps Lu '88 to run transition,”
By Cornelia Hall 
    Chris Lu ’88 will serve as executive director of President-Elect Barack 
Obama’s transition team, the campaign announced Wednesday.
    A Wilson School major and former senior news editor of The Daily 
Princetonian, Lu has been working for Obama since he took office as a
U.S. Senator in 2005.
    A classmate of Obama’s at Harvard Law School, Lu worked for a law 
firm immediately upon graduation. But he soon found his way into public 
service, developing a career out of a fierce work ethic, ambition and a 
passion for politics, those who know him well said.
    “I ended up on Capitol Hill, where I’ve always wanted to be,” Lu said in an
interview Thursday. 
    He first served on the Democratic staff of the Committee on Oversight 
and Government Reform of the House of Representatives and later worked
as a special adviser to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). Lu joined Obama’s
Senate office in 2005 as legislative director and took on significant duties
from the start.
    Lu’s day-to-day responsibilities included handling “every bill that 
[Obama] introduce[d] and every vote that he [cast], every speech he 
[made], and how he [spent] every minute of every day,” he explained.
    “It’s one of the most fun jobs in the Senate,” Lu said. “It’s also an 
incredibly difficult job because you have to know something about any 
given thing going on in the Senate at the time ... It takes a couple years 
off your life.”
    When Obama announced his presidential candidacy in February 2007,
Lu did not move over to the campaign. Instead, he remained in the Senate
and “continued to run operations,” he said.
    “[Obama] knew that that was an important thing,” Lu said. “Even while he
was running for president, he had a day job.”
    While Lu would not divulge specifics of the internal workings of the 
campaign, he said he had a conversation with Obama last summer about
the transition planning effort.
    “[Right now we] have a lot of really smart people working on [the 
transition], choosing nominees, getting a handle on different government 
agencies,” he said. “My job is basically to keep the trains running on time.”
    While the media has speculated on Lu’s eventual role in the Obama 
administration, Lu said that he hasn’t thought about his next job.
    “I’m flattered by all the speculation, but I also know that that’s exactly 
what it is,” he said.
    Still, Lu noted that he “will happily serve Obama in whatever capacity 
he asks. I believe in him, and I believe in his message and the change that
he is going to bring to this country.”
    For now, Lu said that he is focusing on serving Obama as best he can.
    Obama is “as thoughtful and kind and decent and as intelligent a 
person as he is in private as he is in public,” he said. “I’m in awe of the
man and I think he’s going to be a fantastic president.”


11/6/08 AFP: “Asian-Americans eye posts in Obama administration,”
    Washington (AFP) — A majority of Asian-Americans chose Senator 
Barack Obama for president and expect him to appoint representatives
from the rapidly growing community in his new administration, officials have
said.
    Sixty-two percent of the seven million Asian voters picked Democrat 
Obama compared with 35 percent for Republican Senator John McCain
in the historic presidential election on Tuesday, media exit polls showed.
    "This is one of the best coordinated Asian-American campaign efforts
and I think the community ought to be very proud of it," said Mike Honda 
on Wednesday, the chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American
Caucus.
    Studies showed that Asian-Americans were a "deciding factor" in the
presidential race in states such as Ohio , Pennsylvania , Washington ,
Virginia , Nevada and Minnesota .
    "Asian-Americans played their part in this week's elections with record
turnouts at the polls, breaking nearly two-to-one in support of dramatic
change," said Toby Chaudhuri, spokesman for the liberal Campaign for
America 's Future.
    All six Asian-Americans in the House of Representatives successfully
defended their seat in congressional elections held simultaneously with the
presidential contest.
    Five others, however, failed to win House seats, including Indian 
American Ashwin Madia, an Iraq war veteran who ran as a Democrat in a
hotly contested election in the mid-western US state of Minnesota .
    Asian-American leaders said they expected president-elect Obama to
appoint members of the community in key posts in his administration to
reflect the rapidly growing ethnic group.
    Three Asian-Americans officials were included Wednesday in Obama's
"transition" team in preparation for the new administration taking office on
January 20, described as "good first steps" by community leaders.
    Outgoing President George W. Bush had over 300 Asian-Americans in
both part-time and full-time capacities in his administration -- the most ever
in the country's history, officials said.
    They included former transport secretary Japanese American Norman 
Mineta, the first Asian ever to serve in the cabinet, and Labor Secretary 
Elaine Chao, a Chinese American.
    "There are a little over 1,000 positions that the new administration can
appoint folks to and I hope we get our share of them, especially positions
in cabinet, sub-cabinet and other senior positions," William Marumoto,
president of the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies.
    Among Asian-Americans who could be named as cabinet members
under the Obama administration are Honda, a Japanese American 
lawmaker who could be education secretary, and former Washington state
governor Gary Locke, a Chinese American, according to Marumoto.
    "I would at least like the opportunity to express and share my vision with
Barack and I believe that when he hears it, it will resonate with him and his
vision of change for this country," said Honda, a former school principal 
with 30 years of public education experience.
    There are now 14 million Asian-Americans, making up five percent of
the total US population. Their number is expected to nearly triple in 2050
to 41 million, government figures show.
    "Asian-Americans are on the rise. With this election, they've gained 
strength, institutional capacity, political sophistication, an expanded 
coalition and exciting new leaders," said Chaudhuri, a Democratic 
strategist.


11/1/08 Austin American-Statesman: "Some Vietnamese Americans 
breaking from tradition: Vietnamese Americans are traditionally Republican,
but some say there's a move toward the left and a generational divide at 
play in this election,"
by Suzannah Gonzales
    Former South Vietnamese army Maj. William Quan says he has always 
been a Republican, ever since he became a U.S. citizen in 1996. He came 
to Austin from Vietnam in 1990, a year after he was released from prison.
    The Republican Party fights against communism and terrorism, and for 
freedom and human rights, said the 82-year-old, who was a prisoner of war,
just like Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain . Quan notes
that the senator supported legislation that helped bring political prisoners
to the United States and reunite the children of prisoners who had
immigrated.
    Along with many other veterans and older members of the local 
Vietnamese American community, Quan supports McCain.
    McCain made sacrifices "for freedom for Vietnam," Quan said.
    Because of its association with the anti-communist position, the 
Republican Party has traditionally received the loyalty of Vietnamese 
Americans, a stance that distinguishes them from other Asian Americans,
according to national researchers. But their loyalty to Republicans has 
started to dwindle this election cycle, researchers and local community
members say, especially among younger Vietnamese Americans.
    "I can definitely see it," Paul Nguyen , a 21-year-old senior at the University
of Texas, said of the generational divide. "A lot of my friends' parents have
Republican views, and a lot of my friends are Obama-crazy."
    Nguyen said last week that he's undecided, but leaning toward Obama.
He said his parents, who live in San Antonio, are strongly Republican.
    Nhi Lieu , an assistant professor of American studies at the University
of Texas, pointed to McCain's visit to Orange County, Calif., home of Little
Saigon , several years ago, when he publicly used the term "gook," to refer
to his North Vietnamese enemies. Though older Vietnamese were more
forgiving, younger Vietnamese perceived it as a racial epithet, she said.
    "There's definitely a generational divide," Lieu said.
    But Vietnamese Americans are starting to associate the Republican 
Party less with anti-communism, Lieu said. The community is diverse, but
there's a move toward the left among both young and old and also a large
contingent registered as independent, she said. Economic, social welfare
and immigration issues are among those of interest, she said.
    "I argue that the war on terror and other things brewing is distracting the
community from anti-communist causes," Lieu said.
    The trend of Asian Americans leaning toward the Democratic Party 
began in 1992 , according to Ramey Ko , founder of Asian Americans for
Obama and co-founder of Capital Area Asian American Democrats.
    Texas has the second-largest Vietnamese American population, after
California, and the Houston area has the third-largest Vietnamese 
American population, after Orange County and San Jose, Lieu said.
    Of those who had made up their minds on Tuesday's race, two-thirds
of Vietnamese Americans surveyed supported McCain, according to the
2008 National Asian American Survey , conducted from Aug. 18 to 
Sept. 26 . Vietnamese Americans identify with the GOP over the 
Democratic Party by almost a two-to-one ratio, the survey showed.
    Solidarity over the Vietnam War was not enough to make some switch
loyalties during the 2004 election, when Vietnam veteran John Kerry 
faced President Bush , said Vinh Tran of the Austin-based Vietnamese
American Heritage Foundation.
    Vietnamese Americans are different from many immigrant communities,
said Shandon Phan , founder of Asian Americans for McCain, co-chair of
Vietnamese Americans for McCain-Palin and a delegate at the 2008
Republican National Convention. Many are first-generation immigrants
with strong ties to their homeland who came to the United States because
they lost their country and freedom and because Americans opened their
arms, he said.
    Because of McCain's record on the battlefield and in Congress, Phan
said, "They identify strongly with him."

10/30/08 Voice of America: "Asian-American Vote Crucial in Some 
Key States,"
by Mike O'Sullivan
    Asian Americans make up just five percent of the U.S. population, but 
they may play an important role in Tuesday's presidential election in such 
key states such as Virginia and Nevada. Mike O'Sullivan reports from Los
Angeles, both major political parties and community activists are working
to get out the Asian American vote.
    UCLA Asian-American Studies Center Director Don Nakanishi says 
Asian-American voters are important to both presidential campaigns.
    "Asian Americans now number nearly 15 million across the country, and 
they are concentrated in electorally rich states - California, New York, Texas,
as well as in Hawaii, New Jersey, and places like Virginia," Nakanishi said.
    Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders total five percent of the population
of Virginia and six percent in Nevada. Both are hotly contested states in 
this election, and under the U.S. presidential election system individual 
state votes decide the winner. 
    In California, Asian Americans are 12 percent of the population, with 
heavy concentrations in places like Westminster. This city of 90,000 is home
to an immigrant neighborhood called Little Saigon. 
    A recent festival and parade offered both parties a chance to get out their
message. Volunteers handed out balloons with campaign fliers, and local
politicians took part in the parade.
    Vietnamese immigrant Tri Ta is a Westminster city councilman and 
supporter of Republican presidential candidate John McCain. He says for
him and others in his community, issues in their homeland are important.
    "We are really concerned with issues of human rights and democracy,"
he said. "That is one of the top concerns that the Vietnamese-American
community has."
    He says McCain, who was a prisoner during the Vietnam War, 
understands Vietnam's communist government and knows how to deal 
with it.
    A survey of Asian-American voters released in early October showed
that two-thirds of Vietnamese Americans support McCain, but other Asian
Americans preferred Barack Obama by varying margins. Chinese, 
Japanese and Indian Americans backed Obama by more than a three to
one ratio. Filipino and Korean Americans also supported Obama over
McCain, but by a narrower margin.
    The study found that among Asian-Americans, Democrats outnumber
Republicans by more than a two to one. But half of Asian-American voters
are non-partisan or independent.
    Both parties are reaching out to Asian-Pacific voters. Their efforts are
limited by the problem of dealing with multiple languages. Asian-American
volunteers are helping. Vietnamese-American Lily Nguyen supports 
Democrat Barack Obama for president and backs local Democratic 
candidates in the city of Garden Grove, California. She says ethnic voters
must make their voices heard.
    "You know, we have a small ethnic community group here and we have 
another small community, ethnic group there," she said. "How can we 
make sure that they are all involved?"
    Nguyen came to a local park to canvass for her Democratic member of
Congress, Loretta Sanchez, a Latina whose political support cuts across
ethnic lines.
    Independent Asian-American organizations are also helping with the 
effort to get out the vote. Lisa Thong of the Center for Asian Americans 
United for Self Empowerment oversees a telephone information line, 
where volunteers answer voter questions.
    "About what to do if you want to vote by mail, if you have not received
your voting information what you should do," she said. "We are answering
all types of questions in English and Mandarin and Cantonese."
    Housewife Christine Lai is responding to the phone calls. An immigrant 
from Taiwan, she says Asian-American voters are interested in the election.
    "Especially since right now, people know how important voting is to 
make power in the Asian community and make change," she said.
    Don Nakanishi of UCLA says many Asian Americans are recent 
immigrants and are new to the U.S. political process. But he says that year
by year, more are getting active in politics.
    "Whether that is in terms of getting people to register to vote and to 
actually vote, whether it means contributing to candidates in terms of 
monetary contributions, or more importantly, I think for Asian Americans, 
for Asian Americans to actually be encouraged and to feel confident 
enough to run for political office," he said.
    Nakanishi's center compiles an annual list of Asian Americans who 
hold major elected or appointed office. He says the number has grown to
more than 2,000 office holders in 38 states.
    Many Asian-American voters have been slow to make a decision on 
the presidential election. The recent survey showed that in the past month
of the campaign, one third were undecided. The study showed that 80
percent of Asian Americans who are likely voters list the economy as a
pressing problem, followed by the war in Iraq. 
     

10/28/08 crainsnewyork.com: “Poverty claims nearly 20% of city's Asian
residents; More than 18% of Asian-Americans in New York City live 
below poverty level, and about 41% are considered low-income, 
according to a new report,”
By Kira Bindrim
    Nearly one in five Asian-Americans in New York City live below the 
poverty level, according to a report released Tuesday by the Asian 
American Federation. At 18.5%, that proportion dwarfs the 10.8% of the
city’s non-Hispanic white population living in poverty. 
    About 41% of the city’s Asian residents were low-income in 2006, 
according to the report Working but Poor: Asian American Poverty in 
New York City, which used per-capita income data from the U.S. Census
Bureau’s 2000 Census and 2006 American Community Survey. The
percentage of low-income Asians, defined as those making less than 
twice the poverty level, topped the rate of low-income non-Hispanic 
whites (24%) and the overall rate of low-income residents (39%). 
    “These findings counter the widely held perception of Asian Americans
doing well financially,” said AAF executive director Cao O. “Many Asians
are vulnerable and unprotected, trapped on the low rungs of the economic
ladder.” 
    Asian-Americans accounted for nearly 12% of the city’s population in
2006, compared with 9.8% in 2000. 
    “Most reports in the past focused on household income, and Asian-
Americans were depicted as above Latino and black Americans, and just
below Caucasians,” said Larry Lee, executive director of nonprofit New
York Asian Women’s Center. “What those reports fail to take into account
is that Asian-American households usually have two and sometimes three
breadwinners and many family members are working long hours, often six
or even seven days a week.” 
    According to the AAF report, the city’s working age (18 to 64 years old)
Asian-American population is more engaged in the labor force than the 
city’s average working-age adult. Nearly one half of poverty-level Asians
had a job or were actively seeking one in 2006, compared with 42% of 
poverty-level residents citywide. Moreover, the unemployment rate for 
working-age poor and low-income Asians was 16% in 2006, compared
with 27% citywide. 
    The report also highlighted poverty among Asian senior citizens and 
children. According to the study, nearly one-third of Asians 65 and older
lived in poverty, making them more likely to be poor than Hispanics 
(29.8%), blacks (19.8%), non-Hispanic whites (13.6%) or New Yorkers
overall (19.4%). 
    The rate of poverty among the city’s Asian-American children was
25.6% in 2006, greater than 14.5% for non-Hispanic whites and only
slightly below a citywide rate of 28.3%.

10/26/08 Associated Press: “Growing Asian-American vote sheds
passive past,”
by Jesse Washington
    Lorton , VA — For a long time, says Loc Pfeiffer, his fellow Asian-
Americans were passive participants in American politics. But things 
are changing.
    "Asians don't like confrontation or being adversarial, but that's politics,"
says Pfeiffer, a 41-year-old lawyer who was 6 when his parents brought 
him to America from Vietnam .
    "The more we're raised and bred here, the less likely we are to be 
passive. So much of our culture, it's a very, very obedient culture. ... You
don't argue with the government. You don't argue with Big Brother. There's
the assumption that you give up all your individual rights for the whole. 
Which is astounding to me, because I'm American now."
    An assertive Asian America matters, especially in places like Virginia
and Nevada , swing states where Asians have been growing in numbers
and influence.
    With a booming population of highly educated, increasingly Americanized
voters, this former "silent minority" is entering the most engaged and visible
era of its political history.
    The number of Asians in the United States has grown 25 percent in the 
last seven years, to 15 million, said Jane Junn, an associate professor of
political science at Rutgers University . Educated people are more likely to
vote, and 50 percent of the Asian population has a college degree, 
compared with 25 percent of the U.S. population, Junn said.
    "There comes a point where there's a critical mass," said Junn, whose
parents were born in Korea . "When you're only one person out of 100, 
you're very self-conscious about (becoming politically active). But there is
power in numbers."
    Asian attitudes toward the two presidential candidates are as varied as
the nations stretching from India to Malaysia to Japan , lumped into one 
racial category by the U.S. Census.
    Yet some say Barack Obama's rise from humble origins resonates with
many Asians who value education and hard work as the keys to success
and have been forced to fit their heritage into an American framework.
    In a recent column for the San Francisco Chronicle, writer Jeff Yang was
even inspired to riff on President Clinton's honorary black membership and
ask if Obama's background — parental academic pressure, struggle for
identity, guilt-wielding mother, Harvard education — would make him the
first Asian-American president.
    "So much of what we deal with is the notion of being outsiders, foreigners,
of being outside the social dialogue of the United States ," Yang said in an
interview. "You look at Obama and those are some of the same aspersions
and slanders being cast at him. He's kind of the closest thing we can have
legally to an immigrant in the White House. He's somebody who understands
this journey that Asian-Americans and other immigrants have made."
    Obama also spent much of his youth in Hawaii , with its Asian-American
majority, and in Indonesia . Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, is the
daughter of his white mother and an Indonesian businessman, and has 
helped reach out to the Asian-American community.
    Yang added that his Taiwan-born parents, who had never voted for a
Democratic presidential candidate, were seriously considering Obama.
    News of Yang's Obama proclamation inspired hearty laughter at the 
gathering of a half-dozen lawyers at the home of 65-year-old Paul Nguyen
in Lorton. Although many had voted Republican in the past, all but one 
planned to vote for Obama.
    When Nguyen said Asians had to learn the American political system
and form a bloc to demand something in return for their votes, the
conversation bubbled over:
    "We never ask for anything. We always work for what we get."
    "We're too diverse. You can't bring the Filipinos, the Koreans, the 
Japanese, everybody all together."
    "We're still in the infancy of our presence here."
    "Now we're more active, more aware. Over the last 10 or 20 years it's
happened very slowly."
    In the past, Asians were largely overlooked during past presidential 
campaigns because of their widely varied nationalities and concentration
in the reliably Democratic states of California and New York .
    Now, both campaigns have national Asian outreach efforts. In Virginia ,
Obama's campaign is focusing on sending language-specific volunteers
to register voters from particular countries. The McCain campaign's priority
is securing the support of community leaders from the Korean, Vietnamese,
Chinese, Indian and Filipino communities.
    Although no Democratic presidential candidate has won Virginia since
Lyndon Johnson in 1964, polls show Obama edging ahead. Meanwhile,
the state's Asian population has grown from 3.7 percent in 2000 to 4.8
percent in 2006, above the national average of 4.4 percent.
    Virginia 's Asians are concentrated in the D.C. suburbs, where the Asian
population reaches as high as 16 percent in Fairfax County , as well as the
Norfolk area, where the naval operations have attracted Filipinos.

10/18/08 Los Angeles Japanese Daily News (www.rafu.com): “APIs Weigh
In at USC Post-Debate Event,”
by Ellen Endo
    While presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain faced 
off at New York’s Hofstra University for the third and final Presidential 
debate on Wednesday, Asian Americans in Los Angeles reacted to 
statements by the candidates, then added a few of their own. 
    Organized by the USC Asian Pacific Alumni Associa­tion (APAA), the
debate-viewing was watched by a bipartisan crowd of about 80 students 
and alumni and included post-debate commentary from Assemblymembers
Ted Lieu (D-53rd) and George Plescia (R-75th), surrogates representing 
Obama and McCain, respectively.
    Following the broadcast focused on health care, the economy, negative
campaigning, vice presidential choices, and energy, those attending the
USC event wanted to know where Asian Americans will factor into the 
election. 
    Lieu noted that the Obama campaign includes support from Asian 
American officials, including Congressional representatives Mike Honda
and Doris Matsui as well as former U.S. Secretary of Transportation
Norman Y. Mineta, who early on supported Obama over Hillary Clinton. 
Mineta, one-time Congressman from San Jose , was first appointed by 
President Bill Clinton.
    “A blueprint for Americans has been rolled out by Obama, and there is
an Asian Americans for Obama web site,” Lieu stated. Obama’s sister,
Maya Soetoro-Ng, is half-Indonesian and Obama’s brother-in-law is
Chinese American.  
    “This was John McCain’s best debate of the three,” stated Plescia, who
began actively supporting McCain in January 2007. Plescia, who represents
the San Diego area, wants to see Republicans do a better job of reaching
out to APIs. The Asian & Pacific Americans for John McCain Coalition,
coordinated by Peter Su, is based out of of Arlington , Va.  
    One attendee asked if the “Bradley effect” would impact the election
results, referring to the 1982 Cali­fornia gubernatorial race in which Los
Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African American, narrowly lost to
Republican George Deukmejian despite pre-election polls in Bradley’s
favor. Some theorized that white voters were giving inaccurate polling 
responses to conceal the appearance of racial prejudice.
    Both Lieu and Plescia believed that the Bradley effect would not be a
factor this time.
    One participant criticized the media for “dumbing down” election 
coverage, noting that there is very little extensive reporting of the issues.
“Even newspaper articles are shorter,” the attendee observed. 
    Emmy-winning television producer Frank Kwan, who moderated the 
discussion, pointed out that the news media tends to reduce coverage to
sound bites. 
    “The discussion turned out well,” said USC APAA president Jon Kaji,
“I feel it was balanced.” The USC gathering was chaired by Jennifer Lum
and coordinated by Grace Shiba, senior director, USC Alumni Relations,
and USC APAA associate director Alex Chang.
    Co-sponsors included the USC Asian Pacific Law School Assembly,
USC Asian Pacific American Student Services, USC Graduate and 
Professional Students, and the USC Asian Pacific American Student 
Assembly.

 
10/16/08 blogs.wsj.com: “API Voters Could Hold White House Key: Asian 
Americans & Pacific Islander Voters Poised To Impact Battleground States;  
34% remain undecided about presidential pick,"
http://blogs.wsj.com/politicalperceptions/2008/10/16/asian-american-voters-could-hold-the-white-house-key/?mod=googlenews_wsj
    WASHINGTON, DC-Thirty-four percent (34%) of all likely Asian Americans 
voters remain undecided between the two presidential candidates, a National
Asian American Survey revealed. The survey highlights the potential impact 
of Asian Americans-numbering 7.2 million eligible voters in 2006-in highly 
contested and leaning states such as Nevada , Virginia , Pennsylvania , 
Michigan , and Ohio . California alone, 
NAKASEC registered 10,000 first-time voters, many of them at citizenship
naturalization ceremonies," said Lee. Pennsylvania
    In 2004, approximately 43,000 Asian Americans voted in Pennsylvania . 
While this was only 32% of the state's 135,000 eligible Asian American voters,
it was almost 1% of all PA voters, showing that AAPIs can make an impact 
where only a few points separate the candidates.  APIAVote Partners: 
APIAVote-PA/APALA, Cambodian Assn. of Greater Philadelphia
    Ohio
    While AAPI eligible voters make up only .6% of Ohio 's voting population,
Ohio is still a toss-up, with recent polls' spread ranging from a neck-and-
neck race to a ten-point difference. In 2004, approximately 25,000 Asian 
Americans voted in Ohio-- 48% of the state's 52,000 eligible AAPI voters.
APIAVote Partners: OCA-Columbus
    Washington
    In 2004, approximately 169,000 AAPIs voted in Washington , making up
about 5.9% of the state's 2.85 million votes. Washington 's 300,000 eligible
AAPI voters make up 7% of the state's 4.2 million CVAP (2004). AAPIs
could impact the outcome in Washington , with only a few points separating
the candidates.  APIAVote Partner: APIAVote-WA
    Virginia
    In 2004, approximately 45,000 Asian Americans voted, making up about
1.4% of Virginia 's 3.1 million voters.  Eligible AA voters may make up only
3% of the state's voters, but are still critical to such a tight race. Jim Webb's
won his 2006 race by 7,231 votes, an indication that AAPI eligible voters
can impact the outcome in Virginia .  APIAVote Partner: APIAVote/
APALA-VA
    Nevada
    In 2004, 32,000 Asian Americans voted in Nevada , making up about 3.7%
of the state's 871,000 votes.  Nevada has a rapidly growing AAPI population,
with a CVAP of 68,000 that could impact the state's 5 electoral votes. 
APIAVote Partner:  APALA/ One APIA Nevada Coalition
    Minnesota
    In a state where candidates are separated by about 3 points, AAPIs can
affect this state's results. 59,000 Asian American voters made up 2% of 
Minnesota voters in 2004, and also made up more than half of the Asian
American CVAP, a proportion larger than the national AA average.  
APIAVote Partner: Lao Assistance Center
    *CVAP= Citizen Voting Age Population
    Statistics derived from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey
2004 and from the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA).

10/16/08 Washington Post: “Asian-American Voters Could Hold the White
House Key,”
by Rhodes Cook
    If the country is to elect its first minority president next month, it will be
with the ballots of the nation’s minority voters.
    For Democrats, this is nothing new. John Kerry, the party’s nominee in 
2004, lost the white vote by a margin of more than 15 million. But he 
carried the three leading minority groups – African Americans, Hispanics
and Asian Americans – by a combined margin of about 12.5 million votes,
even though the three groups together cast only one in every five presidential
ballots.
    This time, however, Barack Obama appears to be doing better on both
counts, cutting Democratic losses among white voters while increasing the
party’s advantage among minorities. 
    Sen. Kerry dropped the white vote to President George W. Bush by
roughly 15 percentage points. A recent aggregated Gallup Poll for the week
of Oct. 6-12 found Sen. Obama down among whites by just four points.
    So too among fellow African Americans, Sen. Obama is running better 
than Mr. Kerry. While the Massachusetts senator routed Mr. Bush by 88%
to 11% among African Americans, the recent Gallup Poll found Sen. Obama
with a nearly unanimous 91% to 3% advantage over Republican hopeful
John McCain. 
    Regaining Ground Among Hispanics
    Sen. Obama is also regaining ground among Hispanics that Democrats
had lost in 2004. Then, Mr. Bush was able to capitalize on his long,
assiduous courtship of Hispanics, dating back to his early political career
in Texas . He ended up capturing roughly 40% of the Hispanic vote, a record
for a GOP presidential candidate.
    But since then, the Republican Party’s stormy involvement with stricter
immigration laws, primarily aimed at curbing illegal migration from Latin
America , has cost the party and Sen. McCain dearly. GOP support from
Hispanics dropped to 30% in the 2006 midterm elections, a level that the
Arizona senator is struggling to maintain this time. And that in spite of his
public support for immigration legislation less draconian than policies 
favored by many in his party. 
    However, it appears the Republicans could make inroads with one 
minority group: Asian Americans. To be sure, it’s a fairly small group. 
While African Americans cast 12% of the presidential ballots in 2004 and
Hispanics, 6%, Asian Americans accounted for just 2%. But in 2008, it 
could be an important 2%.
    According to Paul Ong, a professor of Asian American Studies at 
UCLA, “Asian Americans are today’s sleeping giant.” They are steadily 
growing in numbers and have been in both camps in recent years, breaking
narrowly for the Republican presidential ticket in the 1990s, before trending
toward the Democrats this decade. 
    Taking Time to Decide
    But Asian Americans are clearly not as firmly in the Democratic column
as are African Americans and even Hispanics. An academic study of the
Asian-American vote released recently found Sen. Obama leading Sen. 
McCain by about 15 points among this group, but with fully one-third still 
undecided. 
    Their fluidity is understandable. Most Asian Americans are immigrants,
encompassing many different cultures, religions and languages. In 2004,
barely one-third of them were registered to vote, a level comparable to
Hispanics. And the diversity of Asian Americans makes them difficult, if
not impossible, to reach as a voting bloc. 
    Each party, though, has its beachhead in the Asian-American community.
For Republicans, it is the Vietnamese. For the Democrats, Japanese and
Asian Indians are particularly sympathetic. But there are significant 
numbers of Asian Americans of all ethnicities that are open to partisan 
persuasion. And while many of them reside in California and Hawaii, their
numbers are growing in the major population centers of contested states
such as Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, Virginia and Washington.
    The largest jurisdiction in Virginia , Fairfax County , is 13% Asian 
American (according to the 2000 census). In the most populous counties
in New Jersey (suburban Bergen ) and Washington (Seattle-based King),
11% of the population is Asian American. Meanwhile, Ramsey County ,
Minn. , which includes the state capital of St. Paul , is 9% Asian American,
while in Nevada ’s fast-growing Clark County ( Las Vegas ), the figure is 5%.
    In short, the Asian American vote next month could be critical in tipping
one or more of the battleground states to the Democrats or the Republicans.
“If either campaign is looking for a place to get an extra one or two 
percentage points,” says Taeku Lee, an associate professor of political 
science at theUniversity of California-Berkeley, “Asian Americans are not 
a bad place to get it.” 
    (Note: 2004 racial data is based on general election exit polls published
in the New York Times, Nov. 7, 2004.)
    Rhodes Cook is a veteran Washington political analyst who tracks 
national elections and voting trends and publishes a bimonthly political 
newsletter.

 
10/14/08 indiawest.com: “Obama Targets Asian American Voters in 
Battleground States,”
by Richard Springer  
    Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is making an “unprecedented”
push to target Asian American voters in Virginia and other battleground 
states, Betsy Kim, deputy director of Obama’s Asian American and 
Pacific Islander voter outreach effort, told reporters in a conference call 
from Virginia Sept. 30.
    Kim and Democratic National Committee co-chair Congressman Mike
Honda, D-Calif., listed Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, North 
Carolina, Minnesota, Nevada, Colorado and Florida as key battleground
states where the Obama campaign has Asian American staff heading 
voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives in Asian and Pacific Islander
communities.
    Kim pointed out that in a state like Virginia , where the approximately 
370,000 Asian Americans make up five percent of the state’s population,
there are areas like Fairfax County , where Asian Americans constitute 
about 15 percent of the population.
    A similar situation exists in Nevada , where Asian Americans are about
six percent of the state population, but 8.4 percent in Clark County .
    Kim said the Obama for America team has appointed AAPI field directors
and organizers leading multilingual volunteers who greet voters with 
brochures in Asian languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Vietnamese and
Tagalog.
    Honda emphasized that Asians Americans have been increasingly 
voting with the Democratic Party since the 1992 election. He said Asian 
Americans who register to vote, tend to go to the polls on Election Day, 
but there is still a lot of work to be done getting Asian Americans registered.
    Honda stated that Obama “understands the plight of immigrants.”
    Chris Lu, chief of staff of Obama’s Senate office in Washington and 
senior advisor of Obama for America , said that the first bill the Illinois  
senator sponsored in the Senate mandated an increase in Pell college 
grants. He pointed out that affording a college education is a hot-button
issue for Asian Americans and Obama has a comprehensive plan to
increase education funding.
    Asked to identify key Democratic races in Congress, Honda quickly
cited Ashwin Madia’s campaign for Congress in Minnesota ’s 3rd District
in suburban Minneapolis .
    Honda also mentioned the “macaca” comment by former Republican 
Senator George Allen in Virginia that enraged Indian Americans and 
helped cause Allen’s defeat by Senator Jim Webb in 2006.

10/6/08 San Jose Mercury News: "Obama leads McCain among 
Asian-Americans, but one-third are undecided,"
By Frank Davies
    Asian-American voters support Barack Obama over John McCain
by a substantial margin, but as many as a third are still undecided 
and could have an impact on the race in swing states, says the largest
survey of Asian ethnic groups conducted this year.
    The study, conducted by four universities and released Monday, found 
that 41 percent of Asian-Americans support Obama and 24 percent 
McCain, with 34 percent undecided. In breakdowns by country of origin, 
all groups favored Obama except Vietnamese, a traditionally Republican
community that backs McCain over Obama 51 percent to 24 percent.
    Asian-Americans "are the quintessential swing vote, and a large chunk
of them have not made up their minds," said Karthick Ramakrishnan, who
studies immigration at the University of California-Riverside.
    Because two-thirds of Asian-American voters plan to vote next month,
and so many are undecided, they could play an important role in close
battleground states such as Virginia, Florida and Nevada, the researchers
said. Most national surveys show less than 10 percent of all voters are
undecided.
    Rep. Mike Honda, a San Jose Democrat who is Japanese-American, 
said the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign are trying to reach
more Asian-American voters.
    "We're working with community groups, getting materials out in seven
languages, and we hope to get some radio and TV" in battleground states,
said Honda, a Democratic National Committee vice chairman who is 
planning trips to Florida and Virginia.
    After a recent influx in Santa Clara County, Asian-Americans make up
30 percent of the county's population. They have long had an impact in the
Bay Area and the state, but their clout is smaller in many other states.
    Asian-Americans tend not to be as politically involved as other ethnic
groups, the survey showed. Party identification is low: 32 percent identify
with the Democratic Party, 14 percent with the Republican Party, 19 percent
were independent and 35 percent described themselves as non-partisan.
    Obama is doing well among most Asian ethnic groups. Japanese and 
Indian-Americans strongly favor Obama, and he has a lead among 
Chinese, Filipino and Korean voters.
    But many Asians are still undecided, including 43 percent of Chinese-
Americans.
    Obama owes his support to several factors, researchers said: The 
economy is by far the dominant issue, which has helped Democrats; many
Asian-Americans supported Bill Clinton; and most who backed Hillary 
Clinton in the primaries have shifted to Obama.
    "Many Asians started voting in the 1990s and tend to lean Democratic
because of President Clinton," said Janelle Wong of the University of
Southern California.
    Wong said the undecided number is high because many recent
immigrants "are not experienced in the political system, and are just getting
to know it."
    While Latinos can be reached in English and Spanish, Asian-Americans
are a more diverse and multi-lingual group, and "they aren't targeted as
much as other voters," said Taeku Lee of the University of California-
Berkeley.
    James Lai, a University of Santa Clara professor who studies 
demographics, said "neither party has done a particularly good job at 
outreach, and Asian-American groups feel kind of slighted."
    Four foundations and think tanks funded the survey, conducted by 
researchers for UC-Riverside, University of Southern California, UC-
Berkeley and Rutgers in New Jersey.
    A breakdown of data from the survey for several states including 
California will be released next week. According to a Field Poll last month,
45 percent of Asian-Americans in California backed Obama, 35 percent
supported McCain and 17 percent were undecided.
    After Latinos, Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing group in the
United States, constituting about 5 percent of the population. The 
researchers said Asian-Americans make up about 5 percent of the vote
in two battleground states, Virginia and Nevada.

10/1/08 slate.com: “Chinese Democracy: Why don't we ever hear about the 
Asian-American vote?”
by Christopher Beam
    Presidential campaigns can feel like an informal census. As the 
candidates traverse the country, they pander to Latino voters, African-
American voters, working-class white voters, older voters, younger voters,
elite-college-graduate voters … everyone gets to feel important.
    Except Asian-American voters. Somehow, amid all the demographic 
navel-gazing, the country's third-largest, fastest-growing minority—now 
15.2 million people, or 5 percent of the population—gets overlooked.
    Not this week. Or, more accurately, not for several hours on Tuesday. 
That's when a nonprofit group called Leadership Education for Asian 
Pacifics held a news conference excitingly titled "Political Role of Asian 
Americans Examined" while the Obama campaign scheduled interviews
about its outreach efforts to Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters.
The message from both events: Asian voters can make a difference. 
Attention must be paid.
    More about that later. But first, a question: Why, with all our obsessing
over demographics, do we hear so little about the Asian-American vote?
    The most obvious reason is size. Asian-Americans make up only 5 
percent of the U.S. population. (Note: "Asian-American" here, and at the
press conference Tuesday, is defined in the broadest possible sense, 
to include Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Thai, 
Filipino, Indian, Pakistani, and Indonesian, among others.) Fifteen million
people is a lot, but not compared with other ethnic groups. African-
Americans now number 38.4 million, according to the 2006 census; 
Latinos boast 44.4 million. Plus, Asian-Americans have the lowest 
proportion of eligible voters compared with the populations (about 52 
percent) of any racial group. And of those, very few (about 50 percent in
2006) actually register to vote. So we're talking about 7 million eligible 
voters and about 3 million actual voters.
    But wait—it gets worse! The five states with the largest Asian populations
are, in order, California , New York , Texas , Hawaii , and New Jersey . Not 
exactly the swingiest places around. There are two big exceptions: 
Nevada and Virginia . Both states have rapidly growing Asian-American 
populations—they constitute 6 percent of eligible voters in Virginia , 
possibly enough to swing a competitive presidential race.
    Another difficulty is the Asian-American community's heterogeneity. 
Koreans and Chinese and Vietnamese aren't necessarily more or less 
fractured than Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and Cubans. But, unlike 
Latinos, they speak different languages. Campaigns can easily cut 
Spanish-language ads to run nationwide; it's tougher to run ads in 
Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, etc. (Only about 60 percent of Asian-
Americans speak English.) Then you'd need to target ethnic media, 
which is costly and, on the national level, of marginal benefit.
    Then there is the difficulty of targeting Asian-American issues. This is
a problem in ethnic politics generally—opinions on immigration, for 
example, are more diverse among blacks than among the interest 
groups that lobby on their behalf—but it is especially acute among 
Asian-Americans. Yes, there are general bread-and-butter issues 
like health care and education for which platitudes about access and
opportunity are useful. There are also hyperspecific concerns that are
not ideal campaign talking points: Chinese care a lot about U.S.-China
relations. Taiwanese care about China-Taiwan. Vietnamese favor anti-
Communist policies. And Filipinos often vote based on whoever 
supports benefits for Filipino veterans of World War II. Plus, segments
of the Asian-American community often disagree—as Taiwanese-
Americans and Chinese-Americans do on Taiwan , for example, or 
Pakistanis and Indians on Kashmir .
    Finally, as if demographics and geography and message weren't 
challenging enough, there is partisanship. Or, more precisely, lack thereof.
African-American voters break heavily toward Democrats; Latino voters 
(with the exception of Cubans) are also largely Democratic. Asian-
Americans, meanwhile, can't make up their minds. About a third of them
are Republican, a third Democratic, and a third unaffiliated. This last group
consists largely of immigrants—more than half of Asian-American were 
born overseas—who often won't develop party loyalty for another generation.
    An argument can be made—and is—that excessive partisanship is 
exactly the problem with a lot of ethnic politics. It goes something like this:
Democrats take black voters for granted, Republicans don't even try to win
them over, and the result is that they have less influence than they would if
they had less party loyalty.
    But an argument can also be made that partisanship enhances influence.
On the national level, the most powerful groups—unions, African-Americans,
evangelicals—are often the most partisan. A pandering politician wants to 
maximize the efficiency of his pandering. So if the strategy is to mobilize the
base, it makes more sense to court a loyal group. (Plus, it gets you more
media coverage. The one time the national media noticed Asian-Americans
this election cycle was when Hillary Clinton won 75 percent of their votes 
in California .)
    So what are Asian-Americans planning to do about their underwhelming
influence? One idea is something called the 80-20 Initiative, a political action
committee dedicated to persuading 80 percent of Asian-Americans to vote
for one side. Since 2000, the group has endorsed a candidate and asked 
Asians to support him or her. (They endorsed Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 
2004. In the 2008 primaries, it was Hillary; in the general, it's Obama.) The
goal of the group, the brainchild of former Delaware Lt. Gov. S.B. Woo, is 
eventually to turn the Asian-American vote into a bloc vote that can swing 
both ways, Republican or Democrat.
    It's a quixotic enterprise. On the one hand, it's an artificial way to replicate
the normally organic process of party identification—and so far, it hasn't quite
worked. "You can't get to 80-20 by making a targeted approach in a single 
election cycle," says Taeku Lee, a professor at the University of California , 
Berkeley . "You build a constituency over time." At the same time, the Asian-
merican vote already is increasingly Democratic. By the time 80-20 could 
persuade four-fifths of the group to vote one way, they might already be there.
80-20 does take credit for Hillary Clinton's winning the California Asian-
American vote by 3-1. But swinging party primaries isn't the goal here.
    Another solution is strengthening the ground game. In Virginia , the Obama
camp has hired Asian-American field directors and recruited Asian-
American volunteers. It's also distributing foreign-language campaign 
literature to local communities in Fairfax County —in Vietnamese, for 
example, in Falls Church and in Korean in Centreville. "We definitely have 
the potential to be the swing vote," says Betsy Kim of the Obama campaign.
There's evidence, too: In 2006, Jim Webb won 76 percent of the state's 
Asian-American voters and eked out a victory over George Allen. Many 
believe those voters—with an assist by Allen's "macaca" moment—made
the difference. McCain also has done some outreach, but the enthusiasm
seems to lie with the Democrats. One columnist even called Obama "the
first Asian-American president."
    One area where politicians do make concessions is representation. 
Asian-Americans make up 5 percent of the population, but only about 
1 percent of elected officials. So they want candidates to include more 
Asian-Americans in their administrations. President Bush earned points 
by appointing Elaine Chao secretary of labor. On a questionnaire, Hillary 
Clinton promised to select Asian-American judges; Obama balked at 
quotas but committed to appointing qualified Asian-Americans.
    Experts offer up all sorts of other solutions to the relative invisibility of
Asian-Americans in politics. Terry Ao, director of the Asian American 
Justice Center , argues that congressional districts must be redrawn to 
consolidate the Asian-American vote. She also says the U.S. census 
understates their population—since Asian-Americans value their privacy 
and immigrants are often afraid to provide information—and needs 
tweaking. Voter registration is another solution. Once Asian-Americans 
register, says Lee, they vote in high numbers. Some activists also 
encourage pollsters to include "Asian-American" as a demographic, 
instead of lumping it in with "Other." And of course, electing more Asian-
American leaders would raise their profile considerably. The best-known 
Asian-American politicians now are probably Hawaii Sens. Daniel 
Inouye and Daniel Akaka, both Democrats, and Chao and Louisiana 
Gov. Bobby Jindal, both Republicans.
    Since 1980, the Asian-American population has tripled. By 2030, it's 
expected to nearly double again. Meanwhile, Asian-Americans are 
flooding battleground states like Nevada , Minnesota , and Virginia  
faster than other immigrant groups. So maybe 80-20 shouldn't be 
telling Asian-Americans how to vote. Maybe it should be telling them 
where to move. 

10/1/08 Washington Post: “Hughes Institute Chooses President; 
Berkeley Professor Is Esteemed Scientist,”
by Philip Rucker
    The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of the world's richest 
philanthropies and a leading funder of U.S. biomedical research, 
announced yesterday that it has tapped a distinguished 
biochemistry and molecular biology professor as its new president. 
    Robert Tjian, of the University of California , Berkeley , will take the 
helm of the Chevy Chase-based nonprofit institute in April. Tjian 
succeeds Thomas R. Cech, who has served as president since 
2000 and will return to full-time research and teaching at the
University of Colorado at Boulder . 
    With an endowment of $17.5 billion, the institute founded by 
Howard R. Hughes, the late aviator, engineer and film producer, 
funds the research of more than 350 scientists at about 67 
institutions through its flagship investigators program. The Hughes
Institute is among the largest benefactors of scientific research in 
the United States and is influential in scientific policy debates. 
    Tjian, 59, whose work has been supported by the Hughes 
investigators program since 1987, has conducted pioneering 
research toward decoding the human genome. 
    "Research is ultimately my biggest passion," Tjian said in a 
telephone interview yesterday. "The leadership of an institution like
the Hughes, whose primary mission is to make sure that really 
great research continues to be supported, means that the person
at the top has to have a really good, deep understanding of what
research is." 
    Tjian is credited with having discovered proteins that bind to 
specific sections of DNA and play a role in controlling how genetic
information is transcribed into the thousands of biomolecules that 
keep cells, tissues and organisms alive. 
    Hanna H. Gray, chairman of the Hughes Institute Board of Trustees
and head of the presidential search committee, said Tjian was a top
candidate because of his scientific achievement and commitment to
mentoring young scientists. 
    "He is known as a person of impeccable taste in science who 
commands a great breadth of understanding across the life sciences,"
Gray said in a statement. 
    Tjian (pronounced TEE-jen), the youngest of nine children, was born
in Hong Kong as his family fled China because of the Communist 
Revolution. The family went to Argentina and Brazil before settling in
New Jersey , where Tjian attended high school. 
    He received a bachelor's degree from Berkeley in 1971 and a 
doctorate from Harvard University in 1976. In nearly three decades on
the Berkeley faculty, Tjian has held several leadership roles, most 
recently as director of the Stem Cell Center. 
    In 1994, Tjian was named California Scientist of the Year, and he
has been awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Prize from the General Motors
Cancer Research Foundation and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize 
from Columbia University . 

9/22/08 www.kvbc.com (Las Vegas): "Asian Americans hope to influence 
election,"
    With the election now just six weeks away, the minority vote is proving
to be more crucial than ever.
    Americans have heard both candidates vying for the Hispanic vote, but
there's another minority group hoping to flex its voting power. News 3's 
Hetty Chang explains that Asians are hoping to make a difference.
    While the Hispanic population is larger in numbers, community leaders
says Asians have a much higher percentage of swing votes - and that will
be key in this election.
    If there's one thing Obama and McCain can agree on, it's the minority
vote. They've reached out to Latinos, but have largely kept quiet on the
nation's other fastest growing minority group.
    "We have been sleeping," says Rozita Lee, community advocate. 
"We are a giant group because we have over 150,000 Asians here."
    The number of Asians has nearly tripled in Clark County, but the 
number of registered voters has been slow to catch up.
    "The number one challenge is people don't want to be bothered," 
says Asian American advocate Angelo Aureada. "They don't have time
to do it even though it only takes two minutes."
    It's a battle registered voters like Elizabeth Montes has been fighting 
for years. But her husband has a different story.
    "He doesn't really care for the two candidates," says Elizabeth. 
"He's says he's lazy and a lot of people have said that to me at work, 
which is a shame."
    It's a mindset that community leaders hope to change - a community
hoping to break its reputation of being the "silent minority."
    While 60 percent of Hispanics in Nevada are registered Democrats,
Asians do not yet have a clear affiliation.
    Asians represent nearly eight percent of Clark County's population. 
More than half of first-generation Asian Americans are eligible to vote.

9/18/08 Chronicle of Higher Education: "Colleges Told They May Not 
Consider Race Unless It's 'Essential' to Their Mission,"
by Peter Schmidt
    Washington - The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights has 
aroused the ire of at least one leading civil-rights group by telling 
colleges receiving federal aid that they may not consider race in 
admissions unless it is "essential" to their "mission and stated 
goals."
    The advice to colleges came in a letter 
<http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/raceadmissionpse.html>
of guidance sent to them by Stephanie J. Monroe, the department's 
assistant secretary for civil rights, late last month. The letter represents 
the first attempt by the federal civil-rights office to tell colleges how it 
will interpret the U.S. Supreme Court's last major rulings on the use of 
affirmative action in college admissions, its 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger 
and Gratz v. Bollinger decisions involving the University of Michigan 
at Ann Arbor.
    The new letter also tells colleges that the diversity they seek "must 
be broader than mere racial diversity," that "quotas are impermissible," 
and that "providing individualized consideration is paramount and there 
must be no undue burden on other-race applicants."  In addition, it says, 
colleges must give "serious good-faith consideration" to race-neutral 
alternatives before using race in admissions, and the use of race 
"must have a logical end point."
    The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund has responded 
to the letter by accusing the federal office of overstating the legal limits
on race-conscious admissions policies to get colleges "to abandon
programs that consciously seek to foster diversity and address the 
pervasive racial gaps in access and opportunity in schools." Its 
statement disputes the Office for Civil Rights' assertion that the 
Supreme Court's 2003 decisions held "the use of race must be 
essential to an institution's mission and goals."
    "There is no reason for such clarification at this time," the group's 
statement says. "Rather, it seems that more than five years after 
those decisions, OCR is issuing this letter to further its efforts to 
subvert and give unnecessary pause to higher-education institutions 
that are pursuing a racially diverse student population in a constitutional 
manner."

9/11/08 New York Times: "In Assembly Seat’s Past, a Hint of Musical 
Chairs,"
By Jonathan P. Hicks
    Grace Meng, a lawyer who was the winner of the Democratic primary 
on Tuesday for an Assembly seat, said she was thrilled about her victory. 
As one of the youngest members of the freshman class of Assembly 
members, she said she would bring a new energy to Albany on behalf of 
her district, which is anchored in Flushing, Queens .
    Ms. Meng, who faces only token opposition in the general election in 
the heavily Democratic district, is in a district known for its unusually rapid 
turnover of Assembly members. She would be the fifth person to represent
Flushing in the Assembly since 2000.
    Many in Flushing, a center of Asian-American political life in New York 
City , are now asking whether the residents there are hurt by the revolving-
door representation in the Assembly.
    But many civic leaders say the turnover in the 22nd Assembly District is
a reflection of the maturing of the Asian-American political community. As
more Asian-American residents became politically active, they are apt to
follow a pattern of politics that has often emerged in New York City ’s 
history: Factions vie for a foothold, then compete for that turf. And elected
officials often seek to pass their political legacies to their children.
    And many in this community say Flushing is no different.
    “I think it reflects the fact that our community is emerging, growing and 
becoming, politically, truly part of New York ,” said Christopher Kui, a 
Flushing resident who is also executive director of Asian Americans for 
Equality, a social service nonprofit organization with offices in Flushing 
and Chinatown .
    He acknowledged that many in the neighborhood believed that Flushing
could be hurt by the lack of seniority in the legislative body. But Mr. Kui 
said he viewed it in part as a positive statement about the community.
    “We have urgent issues here with regard to affordable housing and 
health care,” he said. “And this gives the community a sense of 
empowerment. It makes voters here feel that they really can make a 
change in who represents them, if they want.”
    The turnover history dates to the 2000 Census, which recorded 
substantial population growth in Queens . The following year, the 
Legislature created two new Assembly districts in Queens, one anchored
in Jackson Heights and the other in Flushing .
    At the time, Flushing was represented by Brian M. McLaughlin. But 
when the lines were redrawn, Mr. McLaughlin’s home was in the 
adjacent district, and he ran there.
    While the 22nd Assembly District was created with the aim of making
it easier for an Asian-American candidate to win (in 2000, it was 53
percent Asian, 20 percent white, about 20 percent Hispanic and about
5 percent black), the winner of the 2002 election was Barry Grodenchik,
the chief administrative officer for the former Queens borough president,
Claire Shulman.
    Even before that race, there had been Asian-American candidates in
a number of races (Ethel Chen and Pauline Chu ran for City Council in 
the 1990s). John C. Liu’s victory in 2001 as the first Asian-American 
member of the City Council helped spur more political activity among 
Flushing ’s Asian-American residents.
    When Mr. Grodenchik sought re-election in 2004, he was challenged
by Jimmy Meng, a businessman who was born in the Shandong Province
in China and grew up in Taiwan . Mr. Meng won and became the first 
Asian-American member of the Assembly. But nearing the end of his 
first term, Mr. Meng said he would not run for re-election (his campaign
was being investigated).
    In the 2006 race, Mr. Meng’s daughter, Grace, was one of the 
candidates, as was Ellen Young, an immigrant from Taiwan who worked
as an aide to Councilman Liu. Ms. Young, who won, challenged Ms. 
Meng’s residency, and Ms. Meng withdrew before the Board of Elections
took any action.
    That set the stage for this year’s hard-fought primary contest, the first
between two Asian-American women. It was a campaign that received
virtually nonstop coverage in the city’s Chinese-language newspapers.
(Ms. Young is on the November ballot on the lines of the Working 
Families Party and the Independence Party, but she said that she would
not be actively campaigning.)
    Some lament the battle between two Asian-American candidates, just
when the community is coming of age. Some in the district say that it will
be hard for Flushing to benefit from a continuous stream of newcomers.
    “They’re just getting used to the job in two years,” sad Siu Kwan Chan,
a social worker who lives in Flushing . “Things get done by collaboration
and relationships with other elected officials and government agencies.
They can’t even get the big, important stuff done in two years.”
    Ms. Meng, 32, said that the turnover was “something I think of as 
growing pains for a growing community.”
    Flushing , she said, “went from electing the first Asian councilman to 
having two Asian-American women running against each other. And, 
now we have an Asian-American Assembly member born here. I think 
it’s a good thing, a sign of maturity and deeper political activity.”
    As for the rapid turnover, she added, “I hope to end that pattern.”

9/7/08 Los Angeles Times: "Opinion: How UC is rigging the admissions 
process; Officials are perverting the law in a desperate attempt to 
increase black enrollment,"
by Heather Mac Donald
    Ever since California voters banned the use of racial preferences in 
government and education in 1996, the University of California has 
tried to engineer admissions systems that would replicate the effect of 
explicit racial quotas while appearing color-blind. 
    To some observers, the legality of those efforts has long been suspect,
but proof of wrongdoing has been hard to come by. Now a professor 
who sat on UCLA's committee on undergraduate admissions is 
charging that the school is deliberately taking race into account when 
deciding which students to admit. The university has refused to give him
access to the data to test his claim, prompting the professor -- political
science faculty member Tim Groseclose -- to resign from the school's
admissions oversight committee in protest.
    UCLA's stonewalling is misguided and futile. Though the University of
California has always jealously guarded information on its students' 
qualifications and its admissions procedures, enough details have 
come out over the last 10 years to suggest that race remains a factor in
many parts of the system. More important, hard evidence is accumulating
that enrolling students in a college for which they are academically 
unprepared does them a disservice. 
    The story begins with the passage of Proposition 209, the 1996 
anti-quota ballot initiative, which reduced the number of African 
Americans admitted to campuses across the state and sent UC officials
into crisis mode. They began implementing a series of admissions 
changes intended to bring underqualified blacks and Latinos back to the
system's most demanding campuses. 
    They tried a preference scheme for low-income students, but it 
backfired when it boosted the number of Eastern European and 
Vietnamese admissions -- not the sort of "diversity" the university had
in mind. Administrators cut the low-income preferences in half and went
back to the drawing board. 
    The subsequent admissions gambits, which continue to be rolled out
to this day, are intended to increase "diversity" without running afoul of
the law. Whether they have succeeded in substituting other factors for
race in a permissible manner, or whether they are illegally seeking to
pervert the requirements of the law, will probably be decided, in the end,
in court. 
    Berkeley's Boalt law school, for example, reduced the role of academic
qualifications in ranking students; the resulting disparities between 
minorities and whites at the school were enormous. In 2002, Boalt 
admitted only 5% of white students in a low academic rank, but it 
admitted 75% of black applicants in the same range. 
    At UCLA, from 1998 to 2001, black applicants were 3.6 times as
likely to be admitted to its undergraduate college as whites, and 
Latinos 1.8 times as likely, even after controlling for economic status
and school ranking, according to an unpublished study by statistician
Richard Berk. 
    The most powerful tool that the University of California has come 
up with to engineer such outcomes is something it calls "comprehensive
review," which, as the president's office delicately put it in 2003, 
"broadens the conception of merit." Under comprehensive review, 
a student's academic qualifications are boosted or demoted according
to various factors, including his or her life situation -- whether he or she
lives in a high-crime neighborhood, has been a shooting victim, is a
single parent or comes from a single-parent home, for example. 
    Even with such a relativist take on academic credentials, UCLA still
faced a dearth of qualified black students. In 2005, under enormous 
political pressure to increase the low black enrollment at UCLA, acting
Chancellor Norman Abrams all but demanded that the faculty adopt a
more radical version of comprehensive review -- "holistic" review -- 
which deconstructs the idea of objective academic merit even further. 
    UCLA's associate vice provost for student diversity also directed the
admissions committee to increase the number of blacks who read and
rate student applications, resulting in a 25% black representation 
among readers, more than three times the ratio in California 's population.
    Abrams had assured the black community that UCLA would increase
its black admissions rate, and sure enough, holistic review did just that.
For 2006-07, the last year under the old system, UCLA admitted 250
black students; the next year, it admitted 407. 
    The average combined SAT score for black admits dropped 45 
points to a level about 300 points lower than the average among white
and Asian admissions, according to a report by Groseclose. Blacks'
chances of admission rose from 11.5% to 16.5%, while that of 
Vietnamese students, who tend to come from poorer households, 
dropped from 28.6% to 21.4%. 
    Groseclose wanted to evaluate whether a student's mention of his
race on his application essay affected his chance of admission under
holistic review. The university refused to turn over the necessary data,
citing privacy concerns. But its reasoning is specious. The essence 
of the university is transparency. Groseclose has promised to abide 
by all applicable privacy restrictions. He has even offered not to 
publish his findings anywhere but to use them only to advise UCLA 
on its compliance with the law. 
    Even if UCLA continues to keep Groseclose away from its data, 
the flimsy justifications for racial double standards are crumbling just
as fast as the myth that they no longer exist at the University of California . 
    Students admitted with drastically lower qualifications than their 
school's norm frequently end up in the bottom of their class and take 
much longer to graduate, if they graduate at all. UCLA law professor
Richard Sander has shown that black law students, almost all of whom
receive large racial preferences in law school admissions, are six 
times as likely as whites to fail the bar after multiple efforts. The reason,
Sander has argued persuasively, is that students learn less in an 
academic environment pitched over their heads than they would in a
school that matches their capabilities. Thus, racial double standards
can end up hurting black and Latino students rather than helping them.
    Yet UC administrators continue to devise new schemes to admit 
poorly qualified minority students to their most competitive campuses
on the ground that objective tests of academic merit are not related 
to subsequent performance. The fact is, nothing else comes close to
the predictive power of aptitude and other objective tests -- including
the "spark" and "leadership" qualities that UC administrators purport
to be seeking these days. 
    The academic elitism behind the effort to shoehorn underqualified
black and Latino students into UC's flagship schools is an insult to the
rest of California 's college and university system. The proportion of
underrepresented minorities in the UC system as a whole has returned
to its pre-209 levels. "Irrelevant!" say preference supporters. Berkeley
Chancellor Robert Birgeneau has complained that there are not 
enough black and Latino students at Berkeley to provide minority 
communities with the "leadership" they need -- in other words, don't 
expect UC Riverside or Cal State Long Beach to graduate "community
leaders." But if attending Cal State Northridge or Santa Monica  
Community College would so impair the life chances of black and 
Latino students, why should any student be subjected to such a fate?
Why not close down all second- and third-tier schools so that everyone
can get an elite degree? 
    The energies that have been expended since 1996 to re-create a 
full-blown preference regime have been wasted. While UC race 
advocates have fiddled with their admissions criteria, the test score 
gap in California has widened. Blacks' average math SATs in 2007 
were 429, compared to 564 for Asians and 549 for whites, according
to the California Department of Education. On reading, blacks scored
438, compared to 510 for Asians and 541 for whites. The dropout 
rate in 2007 was 41.6% for blacks, 15.2% for whites and 10.2% for
Asians. 
    These figures reveal the true educational crisis in California: It is
in the state's elementary and high schools and in its homes, not in 
the universities. If, over the last decade, pro-preference faculty 
members and administrators had devoted their considerable talents
to tutoring minority students and convincing them and their families
that learning is important, Groseclose's whistle-blowing might not
have been needed. 
    Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal.

9/6/08 Washington Times: "LPGA scraps its English policy; Advocacy 
groups, lawmakers trigger retraction,"
by Tim Lemke
    Facing growing criticism, the LPGA Tour has rescinded plans to 
suspend golfers who could not demonstrate proficiency in English.
    The tour revealed last week it would require English as a way of 
boosting players' abilities to interact with fans and sponsors but said 
Friday it would soften its stance after several groups voiced concerns 
that the policy was discriminatory.
    "The LPGA has received valuable feedback from a variety of 
constituents regarding the recently announced penalties attached to 
our effective communications policy," LPGA commissioner Carolyn 
Bivens said. "We have decided to rescind those penalty provisions."
    Getty Images Commissioner Carolyn Bivens announced the LPGA
would not require English proficiency from its players.
    The announcement came just hours before a planned news 
conference by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, which was 
expected to demand the LPGA overturn the policy. The center was 
one of several Asian-American advocacy groups and lawmakers that 
argued the policy unfairly targeted South Korean and other Asian golfers
on tour. There are 121 international players on tour, 45 of which are from
South Korea. Two golfers from South Korea, one from Taiwan and 
another from Mexico won this year's majors on the LPGA Tour.
    "While it is quite unfortunate that in the 21st century any organization
would think such a policy is acceptable, I am pleased that the LPGA
heard the millions of American voices who opposed this unfair,
unreasonable and discriminatory mandate," said California state 
Sen. Leland Yee, San Francisco Democrat. "While these types of
incidents unfortunately still seep into our society, it is refreshing to 
see the overwhelming number of people who will fight for equality, 
fairness and justice."
    Yee, a native of China, had explored whether the policy would violate
any state laws. He led a protest that included more than 50 civil rights
organizations.
    The LPGA was motivated to craft the English policy after some 
sponsors complained they could not converse with players during 
pro-ams and other events during tournaments. But State Farm, which
sponsors a tournament in Springfield, Ill., said this week it wasn't 
consulted in the plan and didn't agree with it.
    "It's something we are dumfounded by," a State Farm spokesman
told Advertising Age. "We don't understand this and don't know why 
they have done it, and we have strongly encouraged them to take 
another look at this."
    The tour didn't, however, back off its desire to see its players speak
English. Bivens said the tour would continue offering English support
through a special program that includes tutors, translators and 
software programs.
    "After hearing the concerns, we believe there are other ways to
achieve our shared objective of supporting and enhancing the
business opportunities for every tour player," Bivens said. "In that
spirit, we will continue communicating with our diverse tour players
to develop a better alternative. The LPGA will announce a revised
approach, absent playing penalties, by the end of 2008." 

9/4/08 National Review: "Ducking Colorblindness: A UCLA professor 
blows the whistle on the persistence of racial preferences,"
by Robert VerBruggen
    University of Los Angeles political science professor Tim Groseclose 
publishes studies that get <http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/Media-Bias-Is-Real-Finds-UCLA-666.aspx?RelNum=6664>
California 's Proposition 209, "The state shall not discriminate 
against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group 
on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the 
operation of . . . public education." Prop 209 was passed in 1996, 
but it's no secret that campuses in the left-leaning state - Berkeley 
and UCLA in particular - have been defying the will of California 's
electorate. Berkeley , by contrast,
had taken a more holistic approach, with a single reader judging an entire
application, and Berkeley was attracting more black students than U.C.L.A.

9/3/08 San Diego Union Tribune: "At UCLA, who must pay price for white 
racism? Vietnamese-Americans,"
    In 1996, California voters decisively approved Proposition 209, ending 
the use of racial preferences in college admissions and other state 
programs. This year, we've seen Democratic presidential candidate 
Barack Obama express concerns about the continuing use of racial 
preferences even in states where they are still legal. Obama suggests 
that giving preferences based on socioeconomic status -- helping poor 
kids attending substandard schools -- makes more sense than basing 
preferences on race.
    So the most admired and popular African-American politician of all 
thinks it's time to fix affirmative action. But at UCLA, racial spoils politics 
are back in business, thanks to administrators and professors who think 
they have figured out how to evade the plain meaning of 209 to help 
one group -- blacks -- at the expense of another group: Asian-
Americans.
    Specifically, Vietnamese-Americans.
    This disturbing fact is part of why political science professor Tim 
Groseclose resigned last week from UCLA's committee on 
undergraduate admissions. For four months, Groseclose has been 
stonewalled in his efforts to find out what if any standards were being 
used to determine which of the students with relatively weak grades 
and test scores were being admitted under UCLA's new "holistic" 
admissions approach.
    Here's what Groseclose already had confirmed: Black applicants'
admission rates soared by nearly half when UCLA went "holistic," 
while Latino and Native American admission rates went down slightly.
    When he further parsed what data he could get, the evidence that 
"holistic" was code for race favoritism became overwhelming.
    A "holistic" approach is supposed to be one that factored in the 
obstacles individual students faced -- in particular, family poverty 
and parents' education levels. At UCLA, the parents of Vietnamese-
American applicants are on average poorer and less educated than 
the parents of African-American applicants. But instead of seeing 
their admission rates go up under the holistic system, Vietnamese 
kids' rates plunged, from 28.6 percent to 21.4 percent.
    Remember, of course, that the original rationale for race 
preferences is to atone for white racism. At UCLA, who's being 
forced to pay the heaviest price for white racism? Vietnamese-
American applicants.
    This isn't enlightened social engineering. This is raw, ugly racial 
politics. And, oh yeah, it's against state law, too. Shame on UCLA.
    Read Groseclose's report at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/groseclose/CUARS.Resignation.Report.pdf 

9/03/2008 Los Angeles Daily News: "LPGA's new rule bad in any language,"
    Here's a quick current-events quiz for American golf fans:
    Question: When people turn out for the LPGA tour, they are most interested in:
    A) Viewing the athletic prowess of the best women golfers in the world.
    B) Hearing them speak good English.
    If you're confused by the question - and the choice of answers - then you've 
passed the test. That's exactly how intelligent people ought to respond to the 
LPGA's requirement that international players not just speak some English, 
but be English-proficient by 2009 or be suspended. It's befuddling that the 
Ladies Professional Golf Association would choose to alienate some of the 
world's best players for the sake of proper English discourse.
    This kind of requirement might have been acceptable in the days of 
American sports of yore, when there were mostly homegrown players on 
the field and the few female players were subjected to much more personal 
scrutiny than the men.
    These days, sports organizations, from baseball to soccer, are more 
concerned with how athletes excel in their particular sports than with their 
looks, their culture or their language skills.
    As they must be. To put together winning teams, U.S. sports 
organizations are now regularly recruiting players from all over the world. 
Indeed, there are 121 international players on the LPGA tour. When you're 
a multinational organization of that scope, you've got to expect some 
language diversity.
    So what gives? LPGA officials' reasoning for why they are treading 
where no other sports league has, including the PGA, is thin, not to 
mention patronizing.
    "In order for them and the LPGA to be most successful, players must 
be able to effectively communicate with fans, sponsors and media, the 
vast majority of whom speak English," LPGA Commissioner Carolyn F. 
Bivens said in defense of the new rule, which caused an instant uproar. 
Funny, the sports world hasn't seemed at all concerned about players' 
use of translators or language barriers before.
    But the LPGA sees itself apart from other sports. "Unlike athletes in
other sports, LPGA players must entertain and engage sponsors and 
their customers on a weekly basis." Is she talking abut professional 
athletes or strippers here? It's hard to tell. (In any case, the controversy 
surrounding the new rule has at least one sponsor, State Farm, 
reconsidering its sponsorship.)
    As for charges that this is an English-only rule, Bivens explained that 
English would be required in three instances: during pro-ams, winner 
acceptance speeches and media interviews. Players could speak to 
their caddies, for example, in whatever tongue they like.
    Not surprisingly, the LPGA's patronizing tone with this language 
requirement has caused some uproar from groups representing 
Asian-Americans and women, such as the Asian American Justice  
Center and the California National Organization for Women.
    The rule seems to have been targeting some of the 45 players 
from South Korea who have varying English skills and are camera-
shy to boot.
    But it also targets women athletes, and that is what has so many 
people upset. No other professional sports league has any similar
requirement, though many do have international players with varying
degrees of English proficiency.
    California state Sen. Leland Yee condemned the action.

8/30/08 Los Angeles Times: "UCLA accused of illegal admissions 
practices. A professor resigns as an admissions committee member, 
saying the university is factoring race into acceptance decisions, a violation 
of state law."
By Seema Mehta
    Arguing that UCLA admissions policies are being manipulated to 
circumvent the state's ban on consideration of applicants' race, a professor 
there has resigned from a faculty committee that he says refused to allow 
him to study the matter.
    Political science professor Tim Groseclose resigned Thursday from the 
Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools, 
saying high-ranking university administrators and fellow committee members 
are engaged in a "coverup" to block illegal activity from being discovered.
    "A growing body of evidence strongly suggests that UCLA is cheating on admissions," he wrote in an 89-page report posted on a UCLA website.
    University officials called the report unsubstantiated and argued that 
Groseclose took a rise in the university's enrollment of black students as 
evidence that admissions officials were tampering with the process, without considering other factors such as increased outreach activities.
    "He's taking an outcome and from that deducing a cause," said Tom 
Lifka, associate vice chancellor for student academic services.
    Proposition 209, a 1996 voter initiative, bars California's public 
universities from considering race and other factors such as religion in the 
admissions process. In ensuing years, the number of black students at 
UCLA and many other UC campuses dwindled. By 2006, only 103 
entering freshmen and 108 transfer students at UCLA were black, the 
lowest level in more than three decades. 
    Prompted by campus and community concerns about the lack of student 
diversity, UCLA decided in 2006 to move to a "holistic" application process,
in which applicants' grades, test scores, extracurricular activities and other 
factors were no longer reviewed separately. Rather, achievements could 
be considered in the context of their personal experiences, Lifka said.
    UCLA officials have said the new process is fairer to all applicants, and 
they have emphasized that admissions officials continue to abide by the 
restrictions imposed by Proposition 209.
    Yet, since the admissions change was implemented, starting with the 
class that entered UCLA in fall 2007, the number of black students on 
campus has edged up. This fall, for example, 230 of 4,889 freshmen are 
African American, along with 100 transfer students. University officials 
attribute this increase to the holistic approach, as well as community 
outreach.
    But Ward Connerly, a former UC regent who helped lead the drive for 
Proposition 209, said Groseclose's report buttressed his suspicions that 
university officials may be violating the law in their efforts to boost the 
number of black students on campus. His organization, American Civil 
Rights Institute, will probably file suit against the university in coming 
months, he said.
    "They caved under the pressure from the NAACP and others in Los 
Angeles who want to see an increase in the number of black students," 
Connerly said. "There are so many ways you can rig the system."
    Attempts to reach Groseclose on Friday were unsuccessful, but he 
wrote in his report that admissions officials often learned of students' 
race in personal application essays, and factored it into admissions 
decisions.
    "It is obvious that the admissions staff was under intense pressure 
to admit more African Americans," he wrote.
    He noted that black applicants' chances of admission increased 
with the holistic approach, while acceptance rates of other low-income
students declined, particularly among Vietnamese, a point Lifka did 
not dispute.
    Groseclose said in the report that he requested access to student 
applications to study the matter but was denied because of what he 
was told were privacy concerns. The university turned to another 
UCLA professor to conduct the research. 
    "Because I cannot properly conduct the duties with which I am 
charged as a member of CUARS, I am therefore resigning, in protest,
from the committee," Groseclose wrote. "To do otherwise would 
condone and make me complicit in what appears to be illegal activity."
    Lifka responded that the university uses 165 application readers 
and that they are told not to consider race. Each application is 
randomly distributed to two readers, so their ability to collude would 
be difficult, he said. 
    Lifka said it was vital for the university to pick a researcher who did 
not have a stated position on the admissions debate. "This is a highly 
charged political issue," he said.
    The subject of whether Groseclose ought to have access to the 
data divided the committee. Attempts to reach several committee 
members were unsuccessful, and one said she had been told to refer 
media calls to the university.
    Duncan Lindsey, a public affairs professor and a committee 
member, said he disagreed with Groseclose's beliefs that race was 
factored into admissions decisions, but strongly supported allowing 
him access to data. "We're a public university," Lindsey said. 
    In his report, Groseclose wrote that diversity could be increased 
without violating the law, perhaps by admitting students who finish in 
the top 1% of their high school class.
    Connerly said students ought to be told that any mention of race 
in applications would be grounds for denial.
    University officials called that idea untenable and noted that 
Proposition 209 also bars admissions based on other factors, such 
as gender. 
    "Where do we draw the line?" UCLA spokeswoman Claudia 
Luther asked.


8/28/2008 San Jose Mercury News: "English-only golf rule upsets 
Korean-American audience,"
By Matt O'Brien
    Danville — When it comes to the Blackhawk Country Club each fall,
the Ladies Professional Golf Association attracts Korean-American 
fans thrilled to see the league's South Korean women golf stars in action.
    "They play really well and we're really proud of them," said Sarah 
Kim-Lee, spokeswoman for the Korean American Association of 
San Francisco and the Greater Bay Area.
    But that relationship was chilled by an LPGA policy imposed this 
week that has many fans upset. By the end of next year, says the 
58-year-old women's golf organization, those international golf stars
must speak English well or face suspension.
    Brian Flajole, director of the LPGA Longs Drugs Challenge in Danville ,
said the new English-only rule is a response to "some rumblings" from 
tournament sponsors nationwide over the lack of English ability of 
some of LPGA's roughly 120 international players from 26 countries. 
Players, especially tournament champions, are supposed to hobnob 
with sponsors and address media events.
    "This event is heavily, heavily sponsor driven," Flajole said. "It's title 
sponsor driven as opposed to TV-driven, like the NBA."
    But that explanation offers little consolation to fans who say the rule 
is discriminatory, especially against a growing number of successful 
Asian golfers, including a contingent of 45 from South Korea .
    "I thought it was all about sportsmanship," Kim-Lee said. "It's kind of 
hard to believe that they would go to that extreme way of limiting some
of the international players to come and compete."
    Some plan to fight the new policy as the LPGA prepares for its 
upcoming tournaments in Danville and Half Moon Bay in October.
    State Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi, D-Hayward, said she is 
looking at arming the state athletic commission, which mostly regulates
boxing, with the power to examine discrimination in sports. The athletic
commission falls under the Assembly Business and Professions 
Committee that Hayashi will head later this year.
    Flajole, whose company, Raycom Sports, has hosted LPGA 
tournaments across the country and the Danville event since its 2006
debut, said the language tensions have been a growing problem for 
years.
    Flajole said he does not believe most golfers have a problem with 
the new policy, which requires golfers to meet a certain level of English
language skills by the end of their second year on tour.
    "The reaction I've heard, at least from the player side of it, is that the
players are all OK with it, both the non-English speaking ones and the English-speaking ones," Flajole said.
    LPGA says all current golfers will be tested for English language 
skills at the end of 2009.
    Hayashi, the first Korean-American in California 's Legislature, said
she began looking at different legislative options this week after 
hearing from concerned Korean-Americans in the Bay Area.
    "The Korean community knows Mary," said Kim-Lee. "We called 
and asked her, 'What do you think of this? She said 'Yeah, it's 
outrageous.'"

8/28/08 Assemblyman Eng Responds to LPGA'S Discriminatory Policy
    Sacramento, CA – Assemblymember Mike Eng (D-El Monte) wrote 
a letter today to Carolyn F. Bivens, Commissioner of the Ladies 
Professional Golf Association, expressing his disappointment over the 
organization's decision to propose a policy that would require all 
participating golf players with at least two years seniority to be 
proficient in English starting in 2009.
    "I am deeply offended by the LPGA's decision to contemplate such 
a discriminatory policy," stated Assemblymember Eng in the letter. 
"Not only is this punishment severe and unfair to the world's most 
renowned LPGA professionals, this policy goes contrary to the 
democratic values I and many Californians hold dear with respect to 
diversity and equality."


8/28/08: Asian American Justice Center organizes boycott of LPGA 
for "English proficiency" rule
    Washington, D.C. – The Asian American Justice Center (AAJC) 
urges the LPGA sponsors to withdraw support of the Tour until the 
English proficiency policy is retracted. The LPGA will require all players
to be proficient in English starting in 2009 and those who cannot pass 
an oral evaluation of English skills face suspension from the Tour. 
There are currently 121 international players from 26 countries on 
the LPGA Tour.
    "This policy is tantamount to national origin discrimination, which 
is prohibited under Civil Rights Act," said Vincent A. Eng, deputy 
director of AAJC. “The policy is an affront to our American principles
of diversity and equality. It is even more unconscionable that the 
LPGA is devolving to past divisive and exclusionary practices of their
sport following the successful closing of the unifying Olympic Games."
    "There is already a strong endorsement incentive for the players 
to learn English to increase their global marketability," said Tuyet G. 
Duong, senior staff attorney at AAJC. "The new LPGA policy along 
with their actions to have a special meeting with the South Korean 
players, smacks of clear discriminatory targeting of those players."
    “The game of golf has a long history of exclusion of minorities and
women and they have fought for years to be included in sport,” 
added Duong. “That is why it is shocking that the LPGA would issue 
this policy, which is completely contrary to the spirit of inclusion that 
drives LPGA pioneer women to continue breaking new ground in 
their sport. This will ultimately result in depriving the audience and 
fans of seeing the best golfers in the world."


8/28/08 AsianWeek.com: "Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders 
Take Part in Historic Democratic National Convention" 
by Rep. Mike Honda, DNC Vice Chair
    It’s been an amazing week here in Denver for me personally, as a 
speaker at the Convention Tuesday afternoon, as well as for the Asian 
American and Pacific Islander community.  Our presence here in the 
Democratic National Convention has been historic, and exemplifies the 
diversity that is the strength of the Democratic Party. We turned out in 
record numbers with many Asian American and Pacific Islander delegates representing our communities throughout the country, and many events 
showcasing our political involvement were held.
    Official DNC events included two widely attended meetings of the 
Asian Pacific Islander American Caucus, chaired by our very own Bel 
Leong Hong. We are seeing participation from all sides of our 
community, from our grassroots organizations like Asian Pacific 
Americans for Progress to the advocacy community including our 
National Council of Asian Pacific Americans, from the nonprofits like 
APIAVote to our political organizations like the Asian American 
Action Fund. I also want to give a big hats off to the incredible work 
of Charmaine Manansala and Betsy Kim in leading the Obama for 
America’s Asian American and Pacific Islander vote team. The 
presence of our community here, and on the campaign, supporting 
the first African American nominee makes this Convention truly historic.
    This year, four Asian Americans spoke at the Convention, including 
the sister of our presidential nominee, Maya Soetoro-Ng. I, Mike 
Honda, addressed the delegations on Tuesday and emphasized the 
importance of a quality education for all young people in our country. 
As a former educator for over 30 years, I know that education is the 
great equalizer in our country, and Barack Obama is living proof. 
California State Controller John Chiang also addressed the delegates 
on Tuesday, and Tammy Duckworth, Director of Illinois’s Veterans 
Affairs eloquently spoke about taking care of all of our veterans on 
prime time last night. We are so proud of our rising stars, and I am 
thrilled to see what the future holds for John and Tammy.
    Our community is on the rise. There is no doubt about that. As I 
reflect on this Convention, before Senator Obama makes his historic 
acceptance speech tonight, I am heartened by the sea of hard fought 
success stories amongst us. This week, we celebrate the modern 
day pioneers in the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, 
leaders who have been on the front lines fighting for equal treatment, 
recognition and opportunity. Barack Obama has helped us on this 
journey; he has fought on our behalf. Now let’s fight on his, and put 
him in the White House so he can restore the promise of the 
American dream, and restore dignity to people throughout this 
country and around the world.
     


7/29/08 Medill Reports, Northwestern Univ.: “Another group to watch for in ’08: Asian-Americans,”
by Hallie D. Martin 
    Washington -- Asian-Americans have not always been the most politically active constituency, but that may change this November. 
    “Historically, they are less focused on politics, but they are an emerging bloc, suddenly in the last few years in both state and national elections,” said Gautam Dutta, the executive director of the Asian-American Action Fund.
    Of U.S.-born adults eligible to vote, Asians were 18 percentage points behind non-Asians in voter turnout in the 2006 midterm election. The naturalized Asian community was four percentage points behind non-Asians in voting rates that same year, according to a UCLA report released earlier this month. 
    But the turnout for the California primary on Feb. 5 suggested a boom in voter participation could be in the making. More than half a million Asian Americans went to the polls, according to Presidentpolls2008.com. 
    There, Asian-Americans made a difference voting for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama by a 3-1 margin. CNN, using exit poll data, credited Clinton ’s victory in California to “an Asian American and Latino voting bloc.” 
    “In 2008, we’ll probably see more Asian-Americans at the ballot box because of large numbers,” said Paul Ong, a professor in the Public Relations and Asian-American Studies departments at UCLA. “I’ve noticed my students are much more interested this year.” 
    That vote could also be crucial in local, state and congressional elections. The entire House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate must stand for reelection this year. 
    “In local and state elections, (Asian-Americans) are very critical of who wins and loses,” Ong said. “(If they are) concentrated in large numbers that makes a difference, and around D.C. and Virginia they are starting to emerge as a potentially important vote.” 
    In 2006, Virginia ’s Senate race was an indication that the Asian-American vote may be gaining in influence. 
    That year Democrat Jim Webb narrowly beat Republican incumbent George Allen; 78 percent of voting Asian-Americans voted for Webb. 
    “He wouldn’t have won,” Dutta said, adding he expects Asian-Americans will flock to the ballot box in 2008. 
    Ong predicted the Asian-American vote will be stronger in 2008 due to increases in population and in the number of individuals who become citizens. 
    “In a number of areas, they’ve reached a critical level where they begin believing they can have an influence,” he said. “It gives them more reason to register and to turn out to vote.” 
    The Asian American political awakening could trace back to 2006, when fierce debates over immigration raged and talks about anti-immigrant legislation got many of them thinking about politics, Ong said. 
    “We’ve been ignored for the longest time, and this time noticed a little more,” said Kathleen To, president of 80-20 Political Action Committee. “We only make up about 5 percent of the U.S. population, nobody thought we'd be that important.” 
    The candidates have reached out a little, but there has been more buzz surrounding the Latino voters because they are concentrated in swing states. 
    “Asian-Americans are essentially about a decade behind where Latinos are now,” Ong said. “Hopefully both parties and others will pay attention to that development.”

 

7/18/08 Inside Higher Education: “The Myth of the Model Minority”
by Scott Jaschik
    A new book — The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism (Paradigm Publishers) — challenges the idea that most Asian Americans are relatively untouched by racism or focused on issues related to equity. Based on field interviews nationwide, the book describes the Asian American experience in schools, colleges, the workplace and public discourse. In the section on college, examples include students who have been the victim of ethnic profiling (as Muslims) and the barrage of allegedly harmless jokes (such as UCLA as the acronym for “ University of Caucasians Lost among Asians") that students experience. The authors of the book are Rosalind S. Chou, a doctoral student in sociology at Texas A&M University , and Joe R. Feagin, a professor of sociology at Texas A&M. Chou recently responded to e-mail questions about the book’s findings about college students.
    Q: Why do you think some college students, many of them self-professed liberals who might not tolerate racist jokes about some groups, not only tolerate but engage in jokes about Asian Americans?
    A: There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, as we note in the book, there is a pervasive stereotype that Asian Americans are docile. The history of Asian American resistance to racism is largely left out of the history books and the news media. There is activism, especially concentrated on the West Coast and Northeast, but it’s forgotten or ignored. Secondly, many of our respondents talked how they received either explicit or implicit messages to “let things go” or to “not rock the boat,” further reinforcing that Asian Americans will tolerate racist teasing, whereas other minority groups have been unfairly stereotyped as violent or dangerous. The more visible activism of these other racial minority groups may deter a person from poking fun so publicly. Thirdly, Asian Americans appear to have “made it.” This illusion of being “model minorities” can make it seem “less offensive” to poke fun at a group that is seemingly free of racial oppression.
    Q: The book’s section on college opens with examples related to California universities with large Asian populations. Does the treatment of Asian students differ significantly at institutions where they make up smaller shares of the student body?
    A: Our respondents shared that they faced racial discrimination regardless of their geographic location. However, those students who attended schools with large Asian/ Asian American populations found that they had access to support. The Asian American students groups were very active on campus; this did not save them from mistreatment but they had a community to surround them. The students attending schools with a smaller population of Asian American students did not have those resources so readily available. They still dealt with “model minority” stereotyping and, at times, very violent hate crimes, but the experiences were very similar.
    Q: What do you see as key similarities and differences in the treatment of Asian American students with black and Latino students?
    A: The similarities start with the shared history of racial oppression and labor exploitation. Early Asian immigrants were brought to this country for their cheap labor, just as African slaves and Mexican Braceros were. They were also lynched just as the African American and Latino American. Today, these students still live in a society that is racially stratified. Unfortunately, many students do not know about this shared history and then do not apply this knowledge to our current racial hierarchy.
    The major differences in the treatment of these students are how they are stereotyped. Asian Americans are associated with academic excellence and overachievement. Whereas black and Latino students are negatively stereotyped in academia. Either way, these stereotypes are externally imposed and can have a great affect on individual students internally, but also may impact other students, their teachers, professors, and administrators. Stereotyping, whether positive or negative, can be damaging.
    Q: Your book features interviews with students from East Asian and South Asian backgrounds — do you think those students have similar college experiences?
    A: I think where we are in worrisome political moment after September 11th, South Asian Americans are dealing with additional stereotyping that challenges their patriotism and religious affiliation. Our South Asian respondents have had to deal with very violent attacks rooted to the misconception that they might be “terrorists.” They still deal with “model minority” stereotyping but they have an extra burden right now. Those South Asian respondents that are very dark skinned are confused for African Americans at times and are then stripped of the “model minority” status and are hit with a different set of prejudices.
    Q: Many Asian American high school students feel that competitive colleges hold them to a higher standard than they do white students, and some view this as an impact of affirmative action. What are your thoughts?
    A: I, Rosalind, have a personal story that relates to this question. When I was applying to colleges when I was a junior in high school, I bought one of those college guides you get at the bookstore. They had a quiz in the first few pages of the book that would give you a score at the end determining how competitive you would be for colleges. The higher the score, the more lucrative you were as an applicant. You would get two extra points for being in the top 5 percent of your class, two points for playing sports, two points for volunteering, 2 points for being Black or Latino etc. If you were white you neither had to add or subtract points, BUT you were to deduct 3 points if you were Asian American. This was a reputable college guide that I had purchased brand new, it was 1993, and it was so blatant and obvious to me that there was a different standard for Asian Americans compared to any other group.
    Nowadays, I think it is something that is cloaked, but the issue is so complex. The educational playing field is not even and the circumstances for each racial group are greatly varied. I do not buy into the cultural argument that some racial groups value education more than others. Asian Americans are used as a marker by whites to accuse blacks and Latinos of being educationally deficient. This issue is much more complex than these sweeping generalizations of racial groups. We cite a documentary in our book that shows that Japanese Americans living on the West Coast that were interned actually pushed their children to perform well academically as a response to the horrific racist experience of internment camps in hopes that it would be a protective measure from future discrimination. When that generation of Japanese Americans started to perform well in school, the media blew up the story and the ideology of Asian Americans as great students emerged. I do believe we should still affirmatively act to level the playing field.  


7/17/08 Newsday: “New judge appointed for Eastern District on NY,”
     New York - The federal court system has a new judge in New York . 
    The Senate unanimously confirmed the appointment of Kiyo Matsumoto as federal judge in the Eastern District of New York. 
    Matsumoto is second Asian American woman to become a federal court judge. Sen. Charles Schumer says her appointment to the bench will help close a gender gap in the federal judiciary. 
    Matsumoto is currently a federal magistrate judge in the Eastern District, and has previously worked in the U.S. Attorney's office there. 
    The Eastern District court sits in Brooklyn and Central Islip . 


7/17/08 The Daily Californian Online: “Regents Debate Proposal to Water Down UC Freshman Admissions Policy In Order To Reduce the Number of Asian Americans”
by Kelly Fitzpatrick
    Discussion of a proposal to change the university's freshman admissions policy yielded to confusion and debate at a UC Board of Regents committee meeting yesterday on whether the proposal's adoption would be positive for the UC system.
    "The purpose (of the proposal) is to provide a broader swath of students the opportunity to make the case that they're qualified for the UC," said UC Davis professor Mark Rashid, chair of the university faculty's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, which drafted the proposal.
    In particular, the proposal to lower the required GPA for UC eligibility from a weighted 3.0 to an unweighted 2.8 drew some negative reactions from the regents.
    Regent Judith Hopkinson expressed concern about lowering the minimum GPA, which she said could make a huge impact on the state's K-12 system. 
    Another point of contention surrounds changing measures of statewide eligibility and local eligibility. Current local eligibility policy provides that the top 4 percent of students in their respective California high schools are automatically UC eligible. Statewide eligibility provides that the top 12.5 percent of all California students are also UC eligible, as outlined by the California Master Plan for Higher Education.
    If the regents pass the proposal, which would take effect for freshmen entering the university in fall 2012, the top 9 percent of students in their high schools and the top 9 percent of students in the state would be guaranteed eligibility.
    Regent George Marcus noted that the changes, while widening the pool of eligible students, might also have unintended consequences, such as a negative public perception of the university.
    "Basically, we're going to take a seat away from someone who followed the rules for someone who didn't follow the rules; we're lowering our standards," Marcus said, in what he called a "gross generalization" of how the public could perceive the changes.
    Though many of the regents expressed their admiration for the work of Rashid and his board members, others said they were concerned about the proposal's impact and troubled by the lack of time to review the proposal.
    "We need to get on with this, but I want to do it in a way where everyone around the table has had all their questions answered and all the information to make an informed decision," said Regent Eddie Island , chair of the Educational Policy Committee, in which the proposal was considered.
    The committee is slated to resume discussion about the proposal today, and a vote on whether to implement the changes is expected this afternoon.

7/17/08 U.S. News: “To Reduce Number of Asian Americans, UC Discusses Radical Change to Admissions,”
    Admissions to the University of California could see a major overhaul for the freshman class of 2012, a change meant to open up the university to low-income, minority, rural, and inner-city students, the Daily Californian reports.
    The proposal, discussed in length at the UC regents meeting yesterday, would lower grade-point average minimums, emphasize class rankings, drop the requirement for SAT subject tests, and guarantee admissions for the top 9 percent of senior classes, as opposed to the 4 percent currently in use.
    "This represents the biggest change in [UC's] eligibility policy since there has been an eligibility policy," said Mark Rashid, the UC-Davis engineering professor who chaired the faculty committee that developed the proposal.
    The plan would also relax college-prep course and test score standards and reduce UC's guaranteed admissions target, giving flexibility to find students who have not met the junior-year eligibility requirements but can show they are on the right track. "The purpose [of the proposal] is to provide a broader swath of students the opportunity to make the case that they're qualified for the UC," Rashid said.
    The plan would most likely not affect the system's elite campuses, such as Berkeley and Los Angeles , but less selective colleges could "see a substantial shift in the makeup of their freshman classes," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
    Several regents remain skeptical, and new UC President Mark Yudof, attending his first regents meeting yesterday, has asked for more time to review the changes. Said a UC regent: "This is too important to rush through and too important to delay."

7/16/08 Los Angeles Times: "Why do Asian students generally get higher marks than Latinos?"
By Hector Becerra
    The eight students walked into a room at Lincoln High School prepared to discuss an issue many people, including some of their teachers, considered taboo.
    They were blunt. Carlos Garcia, 17, an A student with a knack for math, said, "My friends, most of them say, 'You're more Asian than Hispanic.' "
    "I think Carlos is Asian at heart," said Julie Loc, 17, causing Carlos to laugh good-naturedly. Asian students who get middling grades often get another response, she said.
    "They say, 'Are you really Asian?' " Julie said.
    "It's sad but true," said Eliseo Garcia, a 17-year-old with long rocker hair, an easy manner and good grades. "I had an Asian friend, but he didn't necessarily get that great a grades. We used to say, 'He's Mexican at heart.' "
    What accounts for such self-deprecating humor? Or the uneven academic performance that prompts it?
    The state's top education official, Supt. Jack O'Connell, called for that kind of discussion last fall when he decried the "racial achievement gap" separating Asian and non-Latino white students from Latinos and blacks.
    At The Times' request, the Eastside students gathered to talk about this touchy subject.
    Lincoln Heights is mostly a working-class Mexican American area, but it's also a first stop for Asian immigrants, many of them ethnic Chinese who fled Vietnam .
    With about 2,500 students, Lincoln High draws from parts of Boyle Heights , El Sereno and Chinatown .
    Both the neighborhood and student body are about 15% Asian. And yet Asians make up 50% of students taking Advanced Placement classes. Staffers can't remember the last time a Latino was valedictorian.
    "A lot of my friends say the achievement gap is directly attributable to the socioeconomic status of students, and that is not completely accurate," O'Connell said. "It is more than that."
    But what is it? O'Connell called a summit in Sacramento that drew 4,000 educators, policymakers and experts to tackle the issue. Some teachers stomped out in frustration and anger.
    No Lincoln students stomped out of their discussion. Neither did any teachers in a similar Lincoln meeting. But the observations were frank, and they clearly made some uncomfortable.
    To begin with, the eight students agreed on a few generalities: Latino and Asian students came mostly from poor and working-class families.
    According to a study of census data, 84% of the Asian and Latino families in the neighborhoods around Lincoln High have median annual household incomes below $50,000. And yet the Science Bowl team is 90% Asian, as is the Academic Decathlon team.
    "Look at the statistics. It's true," said George De La Paz, 17, whose single mother works as a house cleaner.
    Asian parents are more likely to pressure their children to excel academically, the students agreed.
    "They only start paying attention if I don't do well," said Karen Chu, 15, whose parents emigrated from Vietnam . "They don't reward me for getting straight A's. I don't get anything for that. But if I get a B, they're like, 'What's this?' "
    If her grades slipped, she said, her parents laid on the guilt extra thick. "My parents are always like, 'If you don't do well in school, then it's all going to be worth nothing,' " Karen said, laughing nervously.
    Julie Loc, the daughter of a seamstress and a produce-truck driver, said that if she gets a B, her parents ask whether she needs tutoring. She said her father used to compare her to other people's children, noting their hard course loads or saying, "They have a 4.3 [grade-point average]. Why do you only have a 4.0?' "
    Julie said her mother, Kin Ho, finally told her father to stop making comparisons. Ho, in an interview, said with a slightly embarrassed smile, "My daughter has embraced American culture, where she expects my reassurance and approval. Our children, if they did something well, they would ask us if we were proud of them, if they did good. They ask if we love them."
    George said his mother, a Mexican immigrant, has high expectations for him too, but she is not so white-knuckled when it comes to school. She wants him to do well -- he's now thinking of college -- but the field of endeavor is up to him.
    "She said, 'I came here to do better for you,' " he said. "But that's about it. Being happy and getting by, that's what she wants."
    For Carlos Garcia, the one with the knack for math, the message from his parents was to focus on school. Neither got to finish grade school in their native countries.
    His mother, Maribel, from El Salvador , is a homemaker; his father, Santos , a Mexican immigrant, is a drywall finisher who once took Carlos and his older brother to work with him -- to scare them away from manual labor. Two of their children have college degrees, one is still in college and Carlos, the only Latino on Lincoln 's Academic Decathlon team, wants to attend Caltech.
    Ericka Saracho, 16, an A student, said her Latino family did not push her to do well in school. When she got a rare B, "they're like, 'Oh, wow, Ericka finally got a B! How do you feel about that?' " she said. She is one of the few Latina students on Lincoln 's Science Bowl team.
    The students talked not just about parental expectations, but also about those of peers. Karen drew laughter when she said of other students, "They expect me to be smart. Even if, like, I do everything wrong on purpose, they still copy off of me -- as if I'm right just because I'm Asian."
    She said expectations came into play in an even odder way in Lincoln High's hallways.
    "In our school we have tardy sweeps, and normally the staff members let the Asians go," Karen said. "They don't really care if we're late."
    The group, nodding, erupted into laughter. "They don't even ask them for a pass sometimes," George added.
    "Generally speaking -- like it's stereotypical that Asians all do better -- I also think there's a stereotypical view that Asians are usually late," Julie said. "They'll come to school late, but they'll get to class and do their work."
    This drew more laughter.
    Many factors influence academic performance: class size, poverty, and school and neighborhood resources. But as the discussions at Lincoln show, expectations loom large.
    Fidel Nava, a coordinator for English learners at Lincoln , said some Latino students say that Asians get higher grades simply because, well, they're Asian.
    "In a sense, they have come to believe that it's OK for Asians to be smart and not for Hispanics," said Nava, who immigrated from Mexico at 14.
    Nava, the only one of six siblings to go to college, said he was once like many of his students. His parents wanted the children to finish high school, but there also was an expectation that they get jobs and help the family.
    "A lot of my relatives don't see my job as a stressful job at all," Nava said. "If I tell them I'm tired, they say, 'Why? You're not doing any labor. You're not doing anything.' "
    Rocio Chavez, 18, said that even though her older sister graduated from high school, their mother didn't really expect her to go to college.
    "I guess she didn't expect that from me, either," Rocio said. "And now that I'm going to move on to college, she's kind of scared. She gets kind of sad I'm leaving. She's like, 'You're supposed to graduate from high school, go to work and help me out.' "
    Frank D. Bean, a professor of sociology at UC Irvine's Center for Research on Immigration, Population and Public Policy, has studied the Mexican work ethic and found that work and education occupy the same pedestal, and in some cases, work is even more valued.
    Bean said his research shows that children of Latino immigrants, if they drop out of school, are more likely to be working than most other students who leave school.
    "In Latino families, being able to work to provide defines your manhood, your worthiness," said Min Zhou, a UCLA sociology professor who has studied working-class Korean and Chinese communities.
    Latino and Asian families in Lincoln Heights were essentially in the same socioeconomic boat, she said, but Asian immigrants were more likely to have been more affluent and had better education opportunities in their native countries.
    Of course, there are exceptions to stereotypes at Lincoln . "My mom just wants me to pass," said Thin Lam, 17.
    But Thin said counselors assumed he wanted to take a slew of AP classes, and a counselor urged him to take AP calculus.
    "I said, 'Yeah, sure, I want to take it,' " he said. "In the end, I dropped it."
    A few hours after the eight students concluded their discussion, some teachers gathered in Principal James Molina's office.
    "I feel a little bit uncomfortable talking about racial and ethnic generalizations," said Cynthia High, a 20-year teaching veteran now in charge of teachers' aides and other programs.
    "In some situations, it sparks a good conversation. In others, it's more taboo-ish to talk about it," said William Olmedo, who teaches AP physics.
    Barbara Paulson, who coordinates Lincoln's magnet program and teaches AP biology, said it had been understood for a long time that teachers needed to try harder to recruit Latino students for AP classes because "the Asian kids come on in droves."
    Gilbert Martinez, who teaches AP government, said he didn't think the school did as good a job as it could to raise expectations among Latino students and to get them into AP classes.
    "But I do," Paulson said.
    "I'm not saying you, Barbara. I'm saying all over."
    Olmedo said many capable Latino students refused to take AP classes or join other academically rigorous activities.
    Teachers said they were saddened by self-defeating attitudes.
    "I think the thing I always hear from the Latino kids is, 'Oh, well, Miss, he's Asian, she's Asian. Of course they do well,' " said Alli Lauer, who teaches English. "It's frustrating to hear them do it to each other."
    But as one student said in a separate interview, many Latino students are responding to cues. Johana Najera, 17, said the Academic Decathlon offers a not-so-subtle cue about who belongs.
    "We already know that it's Asian, and they kind of market it more for Asians," Najera said. She noted that the shirts for the Academic Decathlon team have a logo done in the style of anime, Japanese animation. "It appeals more to Asian students," she said.
    Martinez turned the conversation toward parents' attitudes, summarizing a discussion from one of his Chicano studies classes.

7/16/08: You are cordially invited to a slide talk by Judy Yung and Eddie Fung about their new book, The Adventures of Eddie Fung: Chinatown Kid, Texas Cowboy, Prisoner of War, hosted by the Dallas Fort Worth Chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans.  Refreshments will be served and the event is free and open to the public.
Date/Time: Thursday, August 14, 2008, 7:00-8:30 p.m.
Location: DFW Activity Center , 999 Arapaho Road, #300 , Richardson , Texas 75081
Description: Judy Yung, Professor Emeritus of UC-Santa Cruz, will introduce her new book The Adventures of Eddie Fung--a memoir of her husband's experience as a second-generation Chinese American, a cowhand in West Texas , and a POW survivor of the Japanese during World War II.
The book will be on sale with discount and both Professor Yung and Mr. Fung will be on hand to autograph the books.
Selected Reviews:
"A vibrant, compelling portrait of a unique individual that deepens our understanding of what it means to be a Chinese American, a survivor."
--Ruthanne Lum McCunn, author of Wooden Fish Songs 
"A remarkable chronicle of a boy from Chinatown who in his journey through life acquires a wealth of insight and wisdom."
-- Franklin Ng, California State University , Fresno
"An unusual and riveting contribution to Asian American history."
--Valerie J. Matsumoto, University of California , Los Angeles
Asian Week: http://www.asianweek.com/2008/01/25/'the-adventures-of-eddie-fung-chin

7/13/08 New Jersey Star-Ledger: Princeton is accused of anti-Asian biases
by Ana M. Alaya
    For decades, critics of affirmative action have contended elite colleges, in their zeal to form racially diverse student bodies, have discriminated against top white applicants.
    In a twist on that long-running feud, federal authorities are investigating an allegation that Princeton University discriminates against Asian-American applicants by accepting black and Hispanic stu dents with lower entrance scores.
    At the heart of both arguments lies the question of whether and how colleges should consider race when choosing a class. The Supreme Court has ruled race can be a factor in the process, though racial quotas have long been declared unconstitutional.
    Critics say admission quotas remain a dirty little secret in academia.
    "There is almost no other area that colleges consistently lie about," said Russell Nieli, a professor in Princeton 's department of politics, who recently published an essay titled "Is there an Asian Ceiling?"
    Princeton , for its part, denies using quotas. The university declined, however, to release admissions data broken down by race and test scores, spokeswoman Cass Cliatt said, "because we don't want anyone to make the mistake that we make admissions decisions by category."
    The federal review at Princeton -- which adamantly denies it discriminates against Asians -- was sparked by a complaint filed in 2006 by Livingston High School graduate and Asian immigrant Jian Li. He claims he was rejected by Princeton and other elite universities despite graduating in the top 1 percent of his high school class, earning various honors outside the classroom and nailing perfect SAT scores.
    Nieli said Li's complaint, be cause it was made by an Asian- American, may carry more weight with proponents of racial preferences.
    "The people making these decisions are post-'60s guilty white limousine liberals," Nieli said. "They don't take a protest by a white person as seriously as one by a Chinese or Japanese or Korean student."
    Others argue Asian students are wrongfully being used as racial mascots in the battle against affirmative action. Advocates claim affirmative action policies can help Asian students, because diverse classes help dispel lingering biases against minority groups.
    "I have a hard time buying the argument that this particular student suffered serious harm," said Vincent Pan, a Millburn native who now heads Chinese for Affirmative Action in San Francisco . "There is a need to balance the private interest and the public interest, and in this case I think affirmative action does that well."
    Li, who could not be reached for comment, went to Yale and transferred to Harvard, according to other published reports.
    In January, the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights expanded its review be yond Li's case to include all admissions policies for Asian-American students for the Class of 2010 at Princeton .
    In his complaint, Li accused the Ivy League institutions of a "historical and ongoing" use of racial preferences for admissions, including bias against Jews at Princeton in the early 1900s.
    He also cited a 2005 study by two Princeton researchers who found eliminating racial considerations at three unnamed elite universities would increase the admission rate for Asian Americans, while that of African-Americans and Hispanics would plum met.
    At Princeton , race is one factor, including socioeconomic background, extracurricular talents and academic record, considered during the admissions process, Cliatt said. Building a diverse class is like forming an "orchestra," that may need different talents from year to year, she added. About half the applicants with perfect SAT scores were ad mitted to the class Li applied to; 14 percent of that class is Asian. Almost half of Princeton 's incoming class this year are students of color.
    A commitment to "acting affirmatively to ensure diversity," Cliatt said, is not the same as discriminating.
    Li's complaint has been closely watched by the Ivy League schools, in part, because he asked for a suspension of federal funding to the university until it eliminates not only racial preferences, but also athletic preferences and legacy preferences, which universities historically give to children of alumni.
    Ward Connerly, a former member of the University of California Board of Regents, and the architect of anti-affirmative action initiatives in California , Washington and Michigan , said the federal investigation is going to force "a very exacting examination of what Princeton is doing." He said it will get the attention of universities nationwide, contending discrimination against Asian-Americans is widespread.
    Still, proving discrimination at Princeton or any college may be difficult, because colleges don't use a specific formula for admissions, according to David Hawkins, director of public policy and research at the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
    Roughly 30 to 40 percent of colleges consider race in admissions, according to the association, and some 70 percent of institutions have a stated commitment to diversity.


7/13/08 www.discriminations.us: “Princeton Receives Weekly Chutzpah Award,” 
by John Rosenberg  
    "What weekly chutzpah award?" you may well ask.  You're right. At the moment DISCRIMINATIONS doesn't bestow a weekly chutzpah award, but if it did this week's would go to Princeton .
    Regular readers will be aware of Jian Li's complaint that Princeton discriminates against Asian applicants by holding them to a higher standard than others, a case I discussed here http://www.discriminations.us/2006/11/preferences_as_a_zerosum_game.html. Li's complaint is being investigated by the Department of Education, and in fact has been broadened, causing nervous jitters across all Ivy Leaguedom.
    Today's Trenton Star Ledger has an article <http://www.nj.com/starledger/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-11/12159237 422985 60.xml&coll=1>  about Li's case today that avoids most common pitfalls of mainstream media news coverage of racial preferences ... except this one: author Ana M. Alaya writes:
    "For decades, critics of affirmative action have contended elite colleges, in their zeal to form racially diverse student bodies, have discriminated against top white applicants.
    In a twist on that long-running feud, federal authorities are investigating an allegation that Princeton University discriminates against Asian-American applicants by accepting black and Hispanic students with lower entrance scores. But there is no new "twist" here; there is only one argument, not two: awarding benefits or burdens based on race is wrong, no matter who receives either burden or benefit. Ms. Alaya's contrary assertion is rather like arguing that opposition to the state awarding preferential treatment to Jews and Catholics is really two arguments, rather than one argument based on the principle of separation of church and state. Princeton , for its part, denies using quotas. The university declined, however, to release admissions data broken down by race and test scores, spokeswoman Cass Cliatt said, "because we don't want anyone to make the mistake that we make admissions decisions by category.""
    Translated from diversity-speak, what Ms. Cass Cliatt is saying on behalf of Princeton is that the release of admissions data revealing that Asian applicants had to jump over a much higher hurdle might cause the gullible public to make the "mistake" of concluding that ... Asian applicants had to jump over a much higher hurdle. The problem here, as most people not entwined in the "diversity" industry and rationale can see, is that at places like Princeton "acting affirmatively to ensure diversity" requires acting negatively when evaluating the applications of a whole host of people like Jian Li. Princeton .
    "At Princeton , race is one factor, including socioeconomic background, extracurricular talents and academic record, considered during the admissions process, Cliatt said. Building a diverse class is like forming an "orchestra," that may need different talents from year to year, she added...."
    Excuse me, but don't most orchestras have, well, quotas for their string, wind, percussion, etc., sections (or are these only "goals"?)?
    In short, if words have meaning Princeton believes that choosing some applicants and rejecting others on the basis of their race or ethnicity is no different from filling a violin vacancy with a violinist.
    Despite decades of tutelage to the contrary from Princeton et. al., liberals, Democrats, etc., most Americans continue to march to the tune of a different drummer, believing that everyone should be treated without regard to their race or ethnicity. Being black, white, Asian, Hispanic, or whatever, is simply not the same as playing an oboe or plucking a guitar.
    And that's not just whistlin Dixie .

7/7/08 USA Today: “Opposing view: Race is deciding factor; University admissions unfairly pit Asian Americans against one another,”
by Owen Leong
    On a summer night in June 2000, four friends and I waited eagerly outside a local high school for 8 a.m. to arrive. It was 1 a.m., yet we were not alone. At least 200 other students had already formed a line behind us. While waiting, I glanced back and noticed the demographics; they were mostly Asian Americans. Not surprisingly, considering that the majority of students attending this high school, located 24 miles east of Los Angeles , are Asian Americans, which also included me and my friends. 
    What was the purpose? Well, we were all competing for one of the few spots to take chemistry and other accelerated courses during the summer. But most important, we wanted to stand out against other college applicants, especially Asian American students, who had similarly high grade point averages and near-perfect SAT scores. If taking chemistry one semester earlier was going to give us an edge for admission to an elite college, then it was worth the seven-hour wait.
    Every year, colleges consider far more applicants than they can accept. Yet in many cases, a disproportionate number of qualified applicants are Asian American, thus making it difficult for colleges to keep an ethnically diverse campus while still trying to admit all qualified students. Hence, many Asian American students, including me, believe that we are unfairly pitted against one another in admissions, not just judged blindly against all. 
    The competition was not limited to just applying for summer school spots. In my honors and Advance Placement classes, 75% of my classmates were Asian American. With the school continually limiting the number of students in honors and AP courses each year, we had to compete for these coveted spots, often with other Asian American students.
    We all believed that taking regular classes would be grounds to deny us admission because another applicant was taking the honors equivalent. So while colleges continue to deny that race is used as a deciding factor, as Asian American students, we know that our ethnic background makes our chances of getting in even harder.
    Owen Leong graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in art.  


7/7/08 USA Today: "Our view on equal education: Admission to college isn't just about grades, test scores,  
But it may look that way to high-scoring Jews who don’t get in. "
    Isaac Cohen was the ideal high school student. He had perfect scores on the SAT reading, writing and math tests. He graduated in the top 1% of his class. He participated in lots of extracurriculars, including leadership roles. And yet in 2006, Princeton University turned him down. Why?
    At elite universities, the answer is pure guesswork. So many students with sterling records apply that admissions officers could fill an entire class with their second choices and see no drop-off. They seek a diverse mix of interests and talents. Playing the oboe or showing a sense of humor can make the difference.
    What any university desires is a mosaic in which students learn as much from one another as they do in class. But to those who don't get in, the result can feel like discrimination. Cohen concluded that discrimination against Jews was part of Princeton 's formula. Jews were held to a higher standard, he said.
    Although Cohen was admitted to Yale University , he filed a complaint against Princeton with the federal Department of Education, which earlier this month confirmed it was using Cohen's complaint to take a broad look at Princeton 's admissions policies to determine whether discrimination against Jews was involved. On the surface, Cohen appears to have a good case. According to a study done by two Princeton scholars, if students were admitted on grades and test scores alone, the acceptance rate for African American and Latino students would plummet while the rate for Jews would rise sharply.
    That says high-scoring Jewish students face higher admissions hurdles, but it does not necessarily prove discrimination. Tests scores and grades have never been the sole basis for admission to college; nor should they be. The guidelines for choosing a freshman mosaic are a compromise between what colleges want and court decisions that constrict their options.
    In the 1978 University of California Regents v. Bakke decision, the Supreme Court ruled out race-based quotas and separate admissions tracks for students of different ethnicities. The court did, however, allow colleges to consider applicants' race and ethnicity as "one of many factors." Twenty-five years later, the court clarified Bakke by ruling out point-based admissions (giving minority students extra points) but allowing subtler evaluations of applicants.
    Translated, that means universities routinely hand out what looks like preferences to get the freshman class they want. Football players, oboe players, dancers, minorities, children of alumni and men (yes, many colleges favor men to keep their campuses from becoming too female) at times find the scales tipped in their favor.
    That is discrimination only if you imagine that university admissions policies are designed solely to sweep up the highest-scoring students.
    The admissions system used by Princeton and other colleges falls well short of perfection. The process is too secretive and often produces only the illusion of diversity, such as ethnic students in name only or minority students from wealthy families who attended elite high schools.
    But the goal of that process — to produce a diverse freshman class where students are exposed in college to the mix of races, ethnicities and viewpoints that await them in the world beyond — is a good one and worthy of preserving.
    [The original editorial referred to Jian Li and Asians/Asian Americans.  You could also substitute Jose Gonzalez and Hispanics or Jamal Washington and African Americans.  Bigots for the Left would never write the above editorial about Jews, blacks or Hispanics because the discrimination and condescension would be too obvious.  But according to Bigots for the Left, it is okay to discriminate against Asian Americans.  Bigots for the Left: Craig Moon, publisher of USA TODAY; Ken Paulson, editor; John Hillkirk, executive editor; Brian Gallagher, editorial page editor]


7/4/08 Asian American Action Fund: "ENGLISH, S’il Vous Plait!"
by Gautam Dutta
    Last May, Vietnamese American cousins Cindy and Hue Vo — who were co-valedictorians of their high school in southern Louisiana — unwittingly triggered an ugly backlash.
    In her valedictory speech, LSU-bound Cindy Vo thanked her parents by reciting a Vietnamese phrase, and then translated it into English:
    “Co len minh khong bang ai, co suon khong ai bang minh,” she said into the microphone.
    The 18-year-old graduate told classmates that the line, roughly translated, was a command to always be your own person.
    Her speech did not raise any hackles at the time. In fact, Vietnamese Americans had been valedictorians before in the town of Houma, located in bayous southwest of New Orleans. (Vo’s parents catch shrimp for a living.)
    But one month later, a local school board member came up with a startling proposal: to ban “foreign” languages from commencement speeches (hat tip to Your Right Hand Thief and reporter Matthew Pleasant).
    Here’s what that school board member, Rickie Pitre, had to say: “I don’t like them addressing in a foreign language. They should be in English.”
    Pitre’s faulty grammar aside, several ironies abound. First, consider Pitre’s “non-English” pedigree:
    Rickie Pitre is among six people with French surnames on the nine-member school board in Terrebonne Parish, where the county’s name is French for “Good Earth” and elders of the local Native American tribe speak French as their first language.
    In fact, the town of Houma is part of Acadiana, a diverse region that was first settled by the “Cajuns”: French-speaking Catholics who were deported from Nova Scotia in 1755. From Associated Press: “As late as the 1950s, children who spoke French in school were routinely punished.” Intriguingly, Spanish is now spoken more often than French in Acadiana.
    At best, Messr. Pitre’s Vietnamese vendetta smacks of gross ignorance. But here’s the ultimate irony: many Vietnamese Americans actually speak French! (After all, France colonized Vietnam long before the US got involved there.)
    According to the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, the Louisiana Constitution recognizes “the right of the people to preserve, foster and promote their respective historic, linguistic, and cultural origins“.
    On this Fourth of July, please tell the Terrebonne School Board (www.tpsd.org/main/boardmembers)  (985-876-7400) what you think of Rickie Pitre’s ill-advised, unnecessary, and un-American proposal.
    E pluribus unum.

6/30/08 MindingtheCampus.com: "Is There An Asian Ceiling?"
By Russell Nieli
    Several years ago a Korean-American student in one of my politics classes at Princeton described the reaction of his Asian classmates in the California private school he attended when the college acceptance and rejection letters arrived in the mail the spring of their senior year. A female Black student, he explained, had applied to more than half a dozen of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the nation and got accepted to all of them, deciding eventually to enroll at Stanford. Many of his Asian friends, he said, along with many Whites, reacted bitterly to the Black student's success, some in open disbelief that this student could be so phenomenally successful in her college search. Why was there such bitterness among his classmates, I wanted to know. "Were there better qualified Asian and White students with higher SAT scores than the Black student?" I asked. "Better qualified?!" he said, "there were loads of Asian and White students who were much better qualified, with much higher SAT scores, much higher grade point averages, and who were much more active in student government and a host of other extra-curricular activities than this Black student." To add further fuel to his classmates' anger, he went on, this particular Black student had a cold, off-putting, self-centered personality which hardly endeared her to her classmates. "She didn't make it on charm" was the gist of his further remarks here. 
    This Korean student's story was in the back of my mind as I read the newspaper accounts about the racial discrimination complaint lodged not long ago with the Department of Education against Princeton University by Jian Li, the Chinese-American student at Yale who had a perfect 2400 (i.e. three 800s) on the newer version of the SAT. Li was a stellar student in high school, who in addition to his perfect SAT score achieved near-perfect scores on several of the College Board achievement tests (SAT IIs), took nine Advanced Placement courses, and had a near-perfect grade-point-average that placed him in the 99th percentile of his graduating class in a competitive suburban high school. In addition to his top-of-the line academic performance, Li was active in a number of extracurricular activities, and was a delegate to the prestigious Boys State. All of this would be an impressive achievement for anyone, but Li was the son of Chinese immigrants, his first language was Chinese, and English was not spoken in his home. Li's academic achievement was a truly remarkable and inspiring story of talent, persistence, and the immigrant work ethic in pursuit of the American Dream.
    Li was happy at Yale and lodged his complaint not because of any animus against Princeton -- Princeton was only one of five elite universities that rejected his application (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Penn were the others) -- but because of a general sense that Asian applicants to elite colleges were being unjustly disfavored in comparison to the members of other minority groups, especially Blacks and Hispanics, and were not being evaluated fairly under the same set of academic standards as others. For anyone familiar with the admissions policies at the more selective colleges and universities over the past thirty years, Li's complaint not only rang true but has been well-documented again and again wherever the situation has been adequately studied. The simple fact is that a Black or Hispanic student with Li's credentials would almost certainly have gained admission to every elite institution he or she applied to. Indeed, an "underrepresented minority student" would have stood a decent chance of gaining admission to some of the schools Li was rejected at with test scores a hundred to two-hundred points below each of his scores on the three-part SAT exam. 
    While policies differ somewhat from college to college, generally speaking elite institutions strive to have a minimal representation of 5-7% Blacks and a similar percentage of Hispanics in their student body (i.e. roughly half the Black and Hispanic proportion of the general population), though they will almost always deny publicly that they have such numerical target goals in mind. What motivates them is a combination of "social justice" for previously disadvantaged groups, a fear of being charged with "institutional racism" by Black and Hispanic activists, a perceived social need for more Blacks and Hispanics in leadership positions in the U.S., and a peculiar form of post-60s white-guilt-expiation (the latter brilliantly analyzed by essayist Shelby Steele). All of these reasons and motivations, however, are concealed and fraudulently packaged under the beguiling rhetoric of "diversity" in order to make college admissions policies more palatable to the general public and more in tune with the requirements of the two major Supreme Court decisions in this area regarding the constitutionality and legality of racial preferences. (There is no other area of academic life, with the possible exception of the relaxation of standards for athletic recruits, where college administrators, admissions deans, and college presidents are more likely to lie -- and to engage routinely in deception and double-talk -- than on the question of racial preferences in their respective institutions.) 
    A rough rule-of-thumb is that in checking off "Black" as one's racial category on an application to a highly selective college or university one gains the equivalent of about 75-150 points (out of a possible 800) as a "plus-factor" on each of the parts of the SAT exam and a boost of approximately .4-.5 (on a 4.0 scale) in one's high school grade-point-average. Hispanics enjoy a racial enhancement roughly two-thirds to three-quarters as great as that given to Blacks. 
    A 2004 study of the admissions policies at three of the most selective private research universities in the country by sociologist Thomas Espenshade and his colleagues has documented some of these racial advantages. At these three elite institutions, "being African American instead of white" was found "[to be] worth an average of 230 additional SAT points on a 1600-point scale [math + verbal]," while "Hispanic applicants gain[ed] the equivalent of 185 points." But "coming from an Asian background is comparable to the loss of 50 SAT points." 
    The Espenshade team, however, goes on to explain that as sizeable as these preferences are "their magnitudes are biased down[ward] by relying on SAT scores as the sole indicator of academic merit. When such additional measures as high school GPA and class rank are included … the African-American and Hispanic advantage [in admissions] increases, as does the disadvantage if one has an Asian background." Again, one can well understand the consternation of people like Jian Li.
    Although private colleges and universities will usually not disclose data regarding the past or present academic performance of their students categorized by race (they are aware that such disclosure would document the huge racial preferences they grant and the resulting racial stratification of subsequent college grades), we can get a fairly good indication of what is going on by a look at some of the more prestigious public institutions which have been forced to disclose such data either by court order or action upon Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) petitions. The University of Michigan is perhaps the best case to look at since it has operated recently under the watchful eye of the federal courts since the 2003 Grutter decision rejected as too mechanical and not sufficiently individualized its previous policies of racial preferences. Michigan now apparently scrutinizes each applicant's file more carefully but it is still up to its old tricks of counting "being Black" or "being Hispanic" as very huge "plus-factors" in making up its entering class. Indeed, the SAT gaps between recent Black and Hispanic admits, on the one hand, and Asian and Whites, on the other, has actually increased since Grutter. For those admitted to Michigan as undergraduates in 2004 the median SAT scores for the four major ethno-racial groups were as follows: Blacks 1160, Hispanics 1260, Whites 1350, Asians 1400. 
    These entering scores would closely parallel the cumulative GPAs earned by members of the four ethno-racial groups their first and second year in college (i.e. there was no tendency for the lower scoring groups to out-perform their entering SAT scores and do better in terms of classroom grades than their SAT numbers would predict). Broken down by race, the cumulative grade point averages (as of 2006) for the class entering in 2004 were as follows: Blacks 2.82, Hispanics 2.99, Whites 3.33, Asians 3.26. For those not familiar with the pattern of grade-inflation and grade-compaction at most elite colleges in America these differences may not seem large, but they are actually very large indeed, since many humanities and "soft" social science courses have effectively eliminated grades in the "C" range except for clearly substandard work that in pre-grade inflation days would have received a "D" or an "F". Blacks and Hispanics at Michigan were clearly not catching up to the better qualified White and Asian students, were receiving substantial numbers of mediocre-to-poor grades, and were no doubt viewed by many of their White and Asian classmates as intellectually inferior. 
    A similar pattern can be seen at the University of Virginia, which published, under FOIA prodding, odds-ratios of being accepted for admissions in various academic years. UVA's statistics show that in 2003 a Black student with an SAT score in the 950-1050 range had a substantially better chance of getting admitted to UVA than an Asian student with SAT scores in the 1250-1350 range. If a Black applicant had an SAT in the 1150-1250 range his chances of admission were about the same as an Asian student with a 1450-1550 SAT. The Black/White disparity in the odds-ratios of admission was even greater than the Black/Asian difference. 
    These are, by anyone's reckoning, very large differences and explain much of the ill-will that racial preference policies often create, especially in view of the fact that the typical Black or Hispanic student at an elite college or university comes most often from a middle class home and has almost always had the advantage of a decent, usually mixed-race public or private high school education. (Students from impoverished families attending a typical inner-city school system dominated by poor Blacks and Hispanics almost never achieve at the level considered the minimum for acceptance at the more highly competitive colleges). 
    In an ongoing longitudinal study of students at 28 highly competitive colleges and universities, sociologist Douglas Massey and his colleagues found that White and Asian students expressed a great deal of "social distance" between themselves and the "beneficiaries of affirmative action" and that this had clearly negative consequences for the quality of race relations on campus. "Whites and Asians tended to perceive a great deal of distance between themselves and blacks who benefited from affirmative action," the Massey team writes. Students in general tended to rank each group in terms of their academic promise, "with Asians on top, followed by whites, Latinos, and blacks." The Blacks and Latinos, they found, were clearly perceived by their Asian and White classmates as "underqualified," the Asians as the most qualified. 
    The Massey group, which surely started out with no bias against current racial preference policies (its study was funded by the pro-affirmative action Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), warned against the harmful effects on college campuses of this general disdain for current affirmative action policies and their beneficiaries. "Such perceptions of distance from 'affirmative action beneficiaries,'" they write, "carry important implications for the general tone of race relations on campus because one stereotype that emerges... is that without affirmative action most black and Latino students would not be admitted. To the extent that such beliefs are widespread among white students at elite institutions, they will not only increase tensions between whites and minorities on campus; they will also increase the risk of stereotype threat by raising anxiety among minority students about confirming these negative suspicions." And we might add here, such beliefs may sour not only Black/White and Black/Latino relations, but relations between Asians and the lower-achieving minority groups as well. 
    Underlying the huge admissions preferences that Black and Hispanic students receive at the most competitive colleges is the simple fact that college bound students in these groups do not exist in sufficient numbers to satisfy the 5-7% representation goal that most elite institutions strive for. Were college administrators to enroll students primarily on the basis of academic performance without regard to race or ethnicity, projections show that Asian students would increase substantially at the most competitive colleges, while Black enrollment would sink to the 1-3% level, and Hispanic enrollment would similarly plunge, though somewhat less steeply. Instituting class-based preferences rather than race-based preferences, as many have suggested, would not significantly raise the proportion of currently underrepresented minorities for the simple reason that there are a lot of poor Asians and poor Whites with much superior academic credentials to poor Blacks and poor Hispanics.
    The reason for these hugely disparate admissions outcomes is very simple: ethnic groups do not perform in the educational arena at anything like parity and over the last 15 years at least, their differential performance has remained remarkably constant. In 2004, for instance, when the average combined math and verbal score on the SAT test was 1026, the scores for the four major ethno-racial groupings distinguished by the College Board were as follows: Asians 1084, Whites 1059, Hispanics 916, Blacks 857. Two years earlier the College Board published data on SAT scores by religious groupings and revealed that Jews, the academically most successful group in the latter half of the 20th century, had an average SAT score of 1161, substantially higher than any other ethno-racial group. 
    There are very few Hispanic students, and even fewer Blacks scoring at the very high levels on the SAT from which the most selective colleges typically draw their students. In 2004, for instance, while constituting almost 10 percent of all SAT test takers, Blacks comprised only 1.4 percent of those who scored 700 or above on the verbal part of the SAT, and only 1.0 percent of those scoring 700 or above on the math. Since the nation's most selective colleges and universities choose most of their incoming student body from those who have scored at these levels, college administrators are faced with the choice of either forming an entering class that is well outside the 5-7% Black representation range they desire, or according to Blacks a huge racial preference. 
Virtually all elite institutions choose the latter option (Cal Tech may be the one exception).
    At the 750 SAT level, where schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford recruit many of their incoming students, the situation looks even more ethnically skewed. In 2004, for instance, 25,403 students nationwide scored 750 or higher on the verbal SAT, and 31,316 scored at this level on the SAT math. But more than ninety-five percent of these very high scoring students were either White or Asian. In the entire country that year only 303 Blacks scored 750 or higher on the verbal SAT (1.2 percent of the total), while only 203 Blacks scored that high on the SAT math (a mere 0.6 percent of the total). The situation with Hispanics was only moderately better. The message here is clear: if elite colleges seek to enroll the most academically talented and accomplished, they will be drawing from a pool that is overwhelmingly White and Asian (and among the Whites disproportionately Jewish). If they are unwilling to have an entering class that is only 1-3% Black or Hispanic, they will have to resort to huge racial preferences, even if they try to conceal this fact from the public -- or lie about it, as they almost invariably do. 
    Our current affirmative action regime is criticized for many things -- its tendency to foster a sense of racial grievance on the part of the disfavored groups, to reinforce negative stigmas and stereotypes about those racially favored, to generate a climate of lies and deceptions among academic administrators, to create a chilling effect on interracial relations on college campuses. But perhaps worst of all is its tendency to distort the incentive structure for members of the lower-achieving minority groups to improve their academic performance. "I can attest that in secondary school I quite deliberately refrained from working to my highest potential," writes the linguist and Manhattan Institute scholar John McWhorter, "because I knew that I would be accepted to even top universities without doing so." From an early age, McWhorter goes on to explain, "almost any black child knows … that there is something called affirmative action which means that black students are admitted to schools under lower standards than white; I was aware of this from at least the age of ten. And so I was quite satisfied to make B+'s and A-'s rather than the A's and A+'s I could have made with a little extra time and effort." 
    And it isn't only the students among the lower-achieving minority groups who know about "this something called affirmative action" but their parents and teachers as well, who have less to be concerned about in terms of college admissions when Blacks and Hispanics perform at very mediocre levels in school. Everyone knows that Black and Hispanic students can get into the same colleges and universities as their similarly talented -- or greater talented -- White and Asian classmates doing much less work in school, taking easier courses, and getting much lower grades. As McWhorter concludes, "in general one could think of few better ways to depress a race's propensity for pushing itself to do its best in school than a policy ensuring that less-than-best efforts will have a disproportionately high yield." 
    If the past is any guide, nothing of any consequence will come from Jian Li's complaint to the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights. Princeton and other top universities will continue their mantra, "We don't discriminate against Asians or any other racial or ethnic group!," while continuing to plus-factor in "underrepresented minorities" at the expense of those like Li unlucky enough to be categorized among the "overrepresented." This, they will say (when forced to confront policies they would prefer to keep secret) is legitimate "diversity enhancement," not discrimination. Which is really a shame, since in the long run the benefits of abandoning "race sensitive admissions" and returning to the older color-blind ideal that inspired the original Civil Rights Movement would be enormous, and would redound to all parties concerned. It would not only improve race relations on college campuses and eliminate the sense of racial grievance among Asians and Whites, but would help to refocus the energies of the Black and Hispanic communities into avenues where they might really do some good -- like improving the educational outcomes of Black and Hispanic youngsters in the nation's k-12 school system. 
    Russell Nieli is a lecturer in the Department of Politics at Princeton University


6/28/08 Wall Street Journal: " America 's Universities Are Living a Diversity Lie,"
By Peter Schmidt
    Thirty years ago this past week, Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. condemned our nation's selective colleges and universities to live a lie. Writing the deciding opinion in the case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, he prompted these institutions to justify their use of racial preferences in admissions with a rationale most had never considered and still do not believe – a desire to offer a better education to all students.
    To this day, few colleges have even tried to establish that their race-conscious admissions policies yield broad educational benefits. The research is so fuzzy and methodologically weak that some strident proponents of affirmative action admit that social science is not on their side.
    In reality, colleges profess a deep belief in the educational benefits of their affirmative-action policies mainly to save their necks. They know that, if the truth came out, courts could find them guilty of illegal discrimination against white and Asian Americans.
    Selective colleges began lowering the bar for minority applicants back in the late 1960s to promote social justice and help keep the peace. They felt an obligation to help remedy society's racial discrimination, even if they generally weren't willing to acknowledge their own. And with riots devastating the nation's big cities, they saw a need to send black America a clear signal that the establishment it was rebelling against was in fact open to it – and that getting a good college education, not violence, represented the best path to wealth and power.
    In the mid 1970s, when colleges talked about the educational benefits of race-conscious admissions, what they had in mind were the benefits reaped by minority students. And tellingly, the University of California had said nothing about the educational benefits of diversity in defending the UC-Davis medical school's strict racial quotas against the lawsuit brought by Allan P. Bakke, a rejected white applicant.
    When the U.S. Supreme Court took up that decision on appeal, however, the educational diversity argument was tucked into a few of the many friend-of-the-court briefs submitted in the case.
    Justice Powell would come to rely heavily on one of those briefs, in which Columbia , Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania joined in arguing, without any empirical evidence, that diversity "makes the university a better learning environment." Like the four other conservatives on the court, Powell rejected the social-justice rationale for such policies, arguing that the government should not be in the business of deciding which segments of American society owed what to whom for past misdeeds. Nevertheless, he did not want the court to be radically changing how colleges did business. Looking for a way out, he ended up saying the four elite colleges had convinced him of the educational benefits of treating some applicants' minority status as a "plus factor."
    Most selective colleges interpreted Justice Powell's controlling opinion in the case as a green light to keep doing what they had been as far as racial and ethnic-group admissions preferences were concerned. At the same time, they fretted little about how their campuses were actually becoming less diverse in socioeconomic terms as they jacked up tuitions and increasingly favored applicants from families wealthy enough to fatten endowments and pay their children's full fare. And despite a professed concern with viewpoint diversity, some colleges adopted rigid speech codes aimed at squelching statements that made minority students uncomfortable.
    Academe got a rude awakening in 1996. Californians passed a ballot measure in that year barring public colleges from considering race and ethnicity in admissions. And a federal appeals court rejected Justice Powell's diversity rationale in a lawsuit, Hopwood v. Texas , involving the University of Texas law school. In his book, "Diversity Challenged," Gary Orfield, a staunch advocate of affirmative action, says people in higher education looked around and suddenly realized "no consensus existed on the benefits of diversity" and "the research had not been done to prove the academic benefits."
    Over the next several years, education researchers scrambled to find such proof and repeatedly met with college leaders to discuss their progress. Their work took on a sense of urgency, on the expectation the Supreme Court would soon be revisiting Bakke. Yet again and again, their studies were shown to have gaping holes and deemed too weak to hold up in the courts.
    Fortunately for affirmative-action advocates, the Center for Individual Rights, which coordinated the legal assault on race-conscious admissions, made a tactical decision not to seriously challenge such research – out of a belief it could win on legal principle. When the Supreme Court waded back into the controversy, it reaffirmed Justice Powell's diversity rationale in a 2003 decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the University of Michigan law school. The opinions revealed that the majority of justices had been swayed by a barrage of friend-of-the-court briefs spinning and exaggerating what the research said about the alleged educational benefits of diversity.
    Proponents of race-conscious admissions policies have yet to produce a study of their educational benefits without some limitation or flaw. Many focus only on benefits to minority students. Others define benefits in nakedly ideological terms, declaring the policies successful if they seem correlated with the adoption of liberal views. A large share relies on survey data that substitute subjective opinions for an objective measurement of learning. The University of Michigan 's star witness, Patricia Gurin, a professor of psychology and women's studies, presented studies showing the educational benefits of classes and campus programs that promote interracial understanding. Those may exist at colleges that don't consider an applicant's race.
    Affirmative action advocates argue that it is unreasonable to expect more of the research, because no education policy has incontrovertible proof of effectiveness. But affirmative-action preferences are not just any education policy; they require some students to suffer racial discrimination for the sake of a perceived common good. In grounding his definition of that good in the shifting sands of social science, Justice Powell may have left colleges legally vulnerable for decades to come. The courts, after all, are known for diverse opinions.
    Mr. Schmidt is a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education and the author of "Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War over College Affirmative Action" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

6/14/08 The Jerusalem Post: “Asian-Americans, the new Jews, “
By Mariyn Henry
    "They" are taking over - overrunning American college campuses. "They" are concentrated in selective universities. "They" are a homogenous group, uniform in educational and financial achievement and culture.
    Once upon a time in the not-so-distant past, these were the stereotypes, the myths, the canards about Jews, who were subjected to unofficial quotas that limited their access to some of the finest American universities and employment prospects.
    These days, the "they" against whom such charges are leveled are Asian Americans. They are smart, determined, committed to education and advancement. This hardly sounds like a bad thing. They sound like Jews.
    Asian Americans are a "model minority," except that they are not. There are an estimated 17 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the US . We tend to think of them as the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans, but in fact they represent 48 national and ethnic groups, with different cultures, religions, languages and histories. (And let's not forget geopolitics; I am sure my Pakistani neighbors in New Jersey have been pretty uneasy with varying US sentiments about President Pervez Musharraf.)
    The composition of the Asian American population - like that of the Jewish community - reflects conditions in their former homelands and immigration opportunities. Some came to the US as refugees and laborers. Others arrived under recent American immigration policies that wooed financial stars and the highly educated who could fill significant economic or professional roles. The so-called preference category accounts for nearly 18 percent of the immigrants from Asia who arrived in the 1990s; they were the elites.
    DESPITE THE vast differences among them, Asian Americans tend to be lumped together in the eyes of the majority population. "They are all seen as the same studious, self-sufficient high achievers," according to a report issued June 9 that argues that the stereotypes and myths obscure the educational realities and the needs of Asian Americans.
    The report by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy at New York University and the College Board - "Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight" - contends, in part, that the "model minority" stereotype is harmful. In assuming universal academic strength, the report says, teachers and counselors often do not extend help to their Asian and Pacific students in the same way they do to other students. The idea seems to be that these minorities are so talented and motivated, we can just ignore them - even if we cannot always tell them apart and consistently confuse the Japanese with Chinese and Koreans.
    Some of the claims and quips are mean-spirited and painful. "UCLA really stands for 'United Caucasians Lost Among Asians'," the report said. Ouch.
    Some are laughable - unless they are directed at your group. The report debunks the myth that these students only pursue degrees in science, technology, engineering and math, also known as "STEM." What a surprise: as they are not monolithic in national origin, language and culture, they are not single-minded in their interests. A large proportion of Asian Americans seek degrees in the social sciences and the humanities.
    Imagine that.
    THIS ALL is reminiscent of what people (used to) think about Jews. Despite the myths, we don't all get degrees in law, medicine or something to do with finance. And we have had our share of cranks, cons, crooks - maybe one per extended family? I confess: my immigrant great-grandmother Bubbe Nessie made her money as a numbers runner. I suspect, however, that it serves our purposes for everyone to think we are clever, even if we sometimes cringe at the anti-Semitic stereotypes about how smart we are.
    That being the case, what's the down side? In the Asian American community, the "model minority" works against community interests, says John Kuo Wei Tchen, a historian at New York University who has studied linkages between Asians and Jews. Yes, there is a lot to be said for positive stereotypes. But the paradox, the price one pays for being a model, is that your community's issues and needs are generally ignored or misunderstood.
    Within the Jewish community, for instance, as America 's War on Poverty got under way in the 1960s, it took quite a while for folks to come to grips with the existence of "the Jewish poor." To too many people, including Jews, that sounded like an oxymoron.
    SO IT is for Asian-Americans. When 44 percent of Asian Americans obtain college degrees - which is almost doubt the American average - you have to be reminded that not everyone graduated from Harvard.
    Take language. A very high proportion of Asian American students - 79 percent - speak a language other than standard English at home. The rate of English proficiency for the group is high, but varies by ethnic group. Bilingual and bicultural students may be placed in inappropriate classes - perhaps special education classes - and often encounter ridicule and harassment from classmates and occasionally from teachers.
    Within the Asian communities, there are hierarchies based on wealth and historical advantages, Tchen says. The Cambodians, because of the killing fields, are at a distinctive disadvantage and therefore a lot of them, for historic reasons, have ended up in rural, underserved areas.
    But as a group, the Asians also suffer a racial stigma that Jews no longer face. "In this day and age, Asians are not seen as white, nor are they seen as Americans," Tchen says. "They are cast into this odd position of being perpetual foreigners in the US ."


6/11/08 Inside Higher Education: “Inquiry Into Alleged Anti-Asian Bias Expands,”
by Scott Jaschik
    A complaint by an Asian American student that racial bias blocked his admission to Princeton University has been expanded by the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights into a broader “compliance review” of the issues involved beyond his case.
    The complaint, filed in 2006, has been viewed as significant by critics of affirmative action who argue — as does the rejected applicant — that highly competitive colleges’ commitment to diversity results in differential standards for members of different groups, with Asian American applicants held to tougher standards. Many college officials — most of whom strongly support affirmative action — have dismissed the applicant’s complaint as sour grapes, noting that Princeton each year rejects thousands of well qualified applicants of every racial and ethnic group.
    The Education Department, responding to an inquiry, acknowledged the shift of the investigation from focusing on one complaint to Princeton ’s entire admissions system and its treatment of Asian-American applicants. A department spokesman stressed that converting the investigation did not mean that officials had come to any conclusions about the original complaint. But at the very least, the shift suggests that the government does not view the complaint as frivolous. OCR regularly shuts down complaint investigations, concluding that no violation of the law took place, and the agency has limited resources for compliance reviews. Compliance reviews cover much more ground than any single complaint, tend to take place on issues that the department believes are important, and are sometimes used to nudge other colleges to change policies when they see how one college fared in a review.
    Official OCR guidelines give three reasons for converting a single complaint into a compliance review: “(a) the complaint, because of its scope, involves systemic issues; (b) a compliance review would be the most effective means of addressing multiple individual complaints against the same recipient; or (c) the complainant decides to withdraw a complaint that includes class allegations.”
    Cass Cliatt, a spokeswoman for Princeton , said that the university was pleased by the broadening of the investigation.
    “We actually welcome the opportunity to talk about this,” Cliatt said. “There are a lot of misconceptions about how colleges and universities use the process. We’re happy to explain to OCR how we do this.” She stressed that the university in no way discriminates against any applicant on the basis of race or ethnicity.
    Princeton received a then-record 17,564 applications to Princeton ’s class of 2010, the class to which the student who filed the complaint wanted to be admitted. The eventual class that enrolled had only 1,231 students, of whom 37 percent were American ethnic minorities and 14 percent were Asian Americans. Cliatt declined to release information on the SAT averages or grades of applicants of different racial or ethnic groups, saying that Princeton doesn’t analyze data in this way and that to do so would be confusing since Princeton does not evaluate individual applicants based on race or ethnicity. “We don’t want to have the mistaken belief that we are making categories when we are not,” she said.
    The student who filed the original complaint against Princeton, Jian Li, arguably landed well after his rejection: He enrolled at Yale University . Li’s complaint stated that he received 800s on the mathematics, critical reading and writing parts of the SAT, that he graduated in the top 1 percent of his high school class, that he completed nine Advanced Placement classes by the time he finished high school, and that he had been active in extracurricular activities as well — serving as a delegate at Boys State, working in Costa Rica, etc. While Li left the ethnicity question blank on his application (as Princeton allows), he said that other questions that he was required to answer — his name, his mother’s and father’s names, his first language (Chinese), and the language spoken in his home (Chinese) — all made his ethnicity clear.
    In letters sent by OCR to members of New Jersey ’s Congressional delegation, the investigation of Princeton is described as focusing on the allegation that the university discriminates against Asian American applicants. But Li’s complaint and the analysis behind it attempt to shift the debate more broadly to one about affirmative action.
    Li is pointing to research by two Princeton scholars, published in Social Science Quarterly, that looked at admissions decisions at elite colleges. The scholars found that without affirmative action, the acceptance rate for African American candidates would be likely to fall by nearly two-thirds, from 33.7 percent to 12.2 percent, while the acceptance rate for Hispanic applicants probably would be cut in half, from 26.8 percent to 12.9 percent. While white admit rates would stay steady, Asian students would be big winners under such a system. Their admission rate in a race-neutral system would go to 23.4 percent, from 17.6 percent. And their share of a class of admitted students would rise to 31.5 percent, from 23.7 percent.
    The complaint and the allegations of anti-Asian bias have been sensitive at Princeton and elsewhere. Princeton, like other elite colleges, changed admissions policies in the 1920s as the number of Jewish applicants appeared poised to rise, and adopted an emphasis on “character” that scholars say was used to minimize non-Protestant enrollments. While Princeton has long abandoned such policies, some Asian American students see similarities between the treatment of Jewish applicants then and Asian applicants today. Many guidance counselors at high schools with many top Asian American students report that their Asian American applicants appear to need significantly higher SAT scores or grades to win admission to highly competitive colleges than do members of other ethnic or racial groups.
    When Li first filed his complaint, many Asian-American students at Princeton criticized him for not accepting a college denial. But when The Daily Princetonian’s joke issue last year featured a parody of Li, in mock Asian dialect, the satire infuriated many Asian American leaders on the campus and elsewhere and prompted broad debates over the status of Asian Americans at elite colleges.
    Just this week, a report issued by the College Board and a panel of experts on Asian Americans made the case that despite the successes of some Asian American students, more attention needs to be paid to the many who don’t get 800 SAT’s or take nine AP courses. The report argued that affirmative action does not hold back Asian Americans and cited studies showing that Asian Americans benefit from affirmative action in some cases, such as law school admissions.
    The section in the report on affirmative action briefly alluded to the study cited by Li that found that the elimination of affirmative action would get more Asian American applicants admitted to highly competitive colleges. The report argues that there are “no winners” in college systems losing black and Latino students, and warns that a focus on Asian American students and the impact of affirmative action on their admission bids are “excuses not to deal with the failure our education system and the complex and interwoven nature of how race and racism operate in the United States.”

5/24/08 Washington Times Editorial: “Jindal for vice president?”
    There are many things John McCain needs in a vice presidential candidate. The most obvious is a running mate who must be prepared to lead should the president be unable to. Other characteristics? Conservative. Youthful. Diverse. There is one name among those Mr. McCain is interviewing this weekend that fits the bill: Bobby Jindal.
    The newly elected Louisiana governor is an exciting breath of fresh air to the national ranks of the Republican Party. At age 36, Mr. Jindal is our youngest governor and the first person of color to serve as Louisiana governor since Reconstruction. A first-generation American (his parents are Indian immigrants), Mr. Jindal successfully won over Louisiana on a platform of change and ethics reform in the midst of Louisiana's notorious reputation of corruption.
    Among his first acts as governor, Mr. Jindal issued an executive order on Transparency and Ethical Standards, and in less than three months he was able to pass a sweeping comprehensive ethics reform package in a special session. Mr. Jindal calls it "the first bold step toward a new Louisiana ." Impressive. And among the many reasons that make this young conservative an attractive (and necessary) addition to the McCain ticket.
    A staunchly pro-life Roman Catholic, Mr. Jindal has the voting record to match his socially and fiscally conservative rhetoric.
    During his tenure as a congressman for Louisiana's 1st Congressional District (2004-07), Mr. Jindal voted in favor of energy reforms to address increasing gas prices, including a measure to crack down on oil company cartels engaged in price-fixing and making allowances for offshore drilling.
    Mr. Jindal has been an outspoken advocate (sometimes in contrast to the Bush administration) for more recovery and rebuilding funding for the Gulf Coast region after Hurricane Katrina. He has voted for legislation that would restrict independent PACs, require lobbyist disclosures of bundled donations and protect whistle blowers. His goals to reign in government spending mimic those of Mr. McCain, and Mr. Jindal supported making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Mr. Jindal also favors tough immigration reform — having voted for building a fence along the Mexican border (a position that helps to solidify Mr. McCain's flip-flop on the issue).
    Critics suggest Mr. Jindal is too young. We query, too young for what? Mr. Jindal meets the Constitution's age requirement in addition to boasting an impressive, experienced and accomplished record as a public servant at the state and federal levels (since 1995.) In fact, Mr. Jindal has more executive and legislative experience than both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama combined. The question is whether he has the ability to step in as commander-in-chief at a moment's notice. We have no doubt that he could.
    For Mr. Jindal's part, he recently spoke with Jay Leno of the vice presidential consideration: "It's flattering, but I like the job I've got now ... [I]'ve got the job I want."
    Maybe so, but we hope Mr. McCain will ask and that Mr. Jindal will accept. The great people of Louisiana will understand.

5/1/08 press release: Pelosi Celebrates Asian Pacific American Heritage Month,
   Washinton, PRNewswire-USNewswire -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi released the following statement today in celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, which begins today:
    "As May begins, we again celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, recognizing the contributions, reflecting upon the history, and embracing the diverse cultures of Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) across the nation.
    "The theme for this year's Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, 'Building Today for Tomorrow,' is fitting because what we do today will affect our nation tomorrow. I am proud to represent the 8th district of California , home to a diverse AAPI constituency that knows what it takes to build a better tomorrow.
    "Building a foundation for tomorrow requires a vibrant and strong economy. And with our economy in the midst of a slowdown, the AAPI community and their small business leaders have a crucial role to play in our efforts to create new jobs and strengthen the middle class. AAPI small businesses are growing rapidly, representing a wide range of industries across our country. Democrats recognize that more needs to be done to improve services to minority-owned businesses and are committed to ensuring that the American dream is accessible to all.
    "As this Congress continues to honor our veterans who have sacrificed their lives and families for the freedoms our nation is built upon, we are reminded of the Filipino World War II veterans who proudly wore our nation's uniform on the battle field. For many years have been fighting bravely for the recognition they deserve, and this month, as we should every day, we honor their sacrifice.
    "While the month of May is dedicated to celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islanders, we must extend the recognition of their accomplishments to the entire year and beyond. And as we build today for a brighter tomorrow, the relentless spirit and resolve of the AAPI community will be at the forefront of these efforts."
    To visit Speaker Pelosi's Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Web site, visit: http://speaker.gov/communities?id=0037.

4/23/08 diverseeducation.com: “Asian Americans Largely Ignored by Presidential Candidates, Political Scientists Say,”
by Lydia Lum
    Despite feverish efforts by presidential candidates to grab voters’ attention, they, along with public opinion polls and mainstream news coverage, have largely ignored Asian Americans so far, several political scientists say.
    “It’s kind of annoying,” says Dr. Andrew Aoki, associate professor of political science at Augsburg College . “It gives Asian Americans a feeling of being overlooked.”
    It’s possible the candidates will improve their outreach as the November’s election nears, but Aoki and other scholars aren’t sure whether it would be noticed much.
    “You rarely see an acknowledgement of Asians in national campaigns,” says Dr. Natalie Masuoka, an assistant professor of political science at Tufts University .
    Multiple, complex reasons have resulted in the near-invisibility of Asian Americans in the campaign, these scholars say.
    Nationally, Asian Americans compose about 4 percent of the population. While they are most numerous in states such as Hawaii and California , their ranks are rapidly growing in Nevada , Oregon , Minnesota , New Jersey and elsewhere. Yet this growth across many states, rather than just one or two, leads to perceptions that they don’t form enough of a voting bloc in each state to justify a candidate’s time.
    After all, a presidential election is based on winning the majority of votes in each state, not necessarily the popular vote nationally.
    Furthermore, it’s tough to convince candidates that Asians will even bother to cast ballots when considering their turnout during the 2004 election, says Dr. Karthick Ramakrishnan, assistant professor of political science at the University of California , Riverside . He cites the Current Population Survey, which shows that only 55 percent of Asian Americans voted in that election, versus 72 percent of Blacks and 74 percent of Whites. Among Hispanics, only 55 percent voted in 2004, but Hispanics outnumber Asians in the general population by more than 3-to-1, so politicians have a bigger pool of potential supporters in them. Ironically, surveys indicate that Asians generally earn higher incomes and reach higher levels of educational attainment than other racial demographics, Ramakrishnan says. These characteristics would typically make them high-propensity voters.
    Voter turnout among Asians is low partly because so little campaign outreach targets them, Ramakrishnan says, describing it as an example of the proverbial chicken-egg syndrome.
    Language diversity remains a challenge too. Unlike U.S. Hispanics who overwhelmingly share Spanish as a commonality, Asian Americans have languages and dialects as different and distinct as Vietnamese, Korean, Tagalog, Mandarin, Gujarati and Urdu — to name only a few.
    “Add it together and candidates don’t believe it’s cost-effective to target Asians,” Ramakrishnan says.
    “Asians don’t have extensive voting histories, so a candidate has no information to start with. And candidates don’t want to risk mobilizing voters who will vote for their opponents.”
    Similarly, public opinion polls in election politics rarely include Asian Americans because organizers don’t believe it’s worth the cost of providing so many different language interpreters for so few people being polled, says Aoki. He adds that the methodology of polling also has inherent drawbacks that work against Asian inclusion. 
    For instance, if a national poll calls for 600 respondents, that would call for 10 to 25 Asians to reflect their share of the general population.
    However, a sample of less than 30 in such a poll is too little from which to draw reliable conclusions, Aoki says. So Asians would be excluded.
    “I understand the methodology problem, but this just adds to the invisibility problem for Asians,” Aoki says.
    Ramakrishnan adds: “While there are defensible reasons for these decisions, there’s a larger cost to American democracy. Considering the growth of Asian American communities, it’s problematic for political parties and organizations not to invest in them. Hope fully, community organizations and foundations can play a role in changing that.’
    Neither he, Aoki nor Masuoka were aware Norman Mineta, a cabinet secretary under President Bill Clinton, is endorsing Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination until a reporter recently broached the subject. A Japanese American, Mineta also was a U.S. representative for 20 years. The airport in San Jose , Calif. , has been re-named for him.
    The three scholars criticized the mainstream news media for their relatively scant publicity of Mineta’s endorsement, especially when compared to the widespread coverage of Bill Richardson’s endorsement of Obama over Clinton . A Mexican American, Richardson was a cabinet secretary under Bill Clinton and currently is governor of New Mexico .
    The trickle of coverage involving Asian Americans this election season so far, Ramakrishnan says, has been reporters doing occasional man-on-the-street interviews in local Chinatowns about voter choices.
    “It reinforces false stereotypes that all Chinese, all Asians, live in Chinatown ,” he says.
    Masuoka has noticed more mentions of and references to Asian Americans in speeches by Obama as well as Clinton since the February “Super Tuesday” primaries in which Clinton not only defeated Obama in California, but also claimed Asian American votes in that state by a 3-to-1 margin.
    “That was a positive turn that did a lot for Asian American politics,” says Masuoka, who’s currently a visiting assistant professor at Duke University ’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Social Sciences. “Based on how both candidates reacted, they clearly saw how Asians can make a difference.”
    Aoki finds impressive the microtargeting and other strategies of Asian American political activists to try boosting voter turnout this fall. “They’re sophisticated strategies that political campaigns and parties understand,” he says. “Now, the parties need to do their part to bring out Asians.”

4/19/08 Austin American Statesman: “Bigots for the Left Discriminate Against Asian American with Perfect College Entrance Exam Scores,”
by Laura Heinauer
    Things were going, well, perfectly for Navonil Ghosh up until several weeks ago.
    The college-bound LBJ High School Liberal Arts and Science Academy senior racked up more than 400 hours volunteering in local hospitals and libraries. He plays the piano, is a first-degree black belt in Kung Fu and got a perfect score on both the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. Ghosh had mailed out all of his college applications and was just waiting for the acceptance letters to come pouring in.
    But the letters that began filling his mailbox were of a different kind.
    The first rejection came from Stanford University in California , but the hits kept coming. From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From Ivy League institutions: University of Pennsylvania , Princeton and Yale, where he was wait-listed. But the biggest disappointment came from Harvard University , which Ghosh had chosen as his "dream school" based on the course offerings. Even the Plan II honors program at the University of Texas turned him down.
    "I know this news must be quite difficult," the letter from UT's Plan II director said. "This year, however, with our number of applicants higher than any year of the last decade, we have been compelled to make an extremely difficult decision." Ghosh did get accepted to the California Institute of Technology, UT, Duke and Rice.
    Rejection letters are arriving in record numbers across the country this year, due to the large number of high school graduates and an increase of those applying to college.
    Overall, the acceptance rate for applicants at all colleges in the United States is still about 70 percent — about the same as it was in the 1980s — but acceptance rates at the top 200 schools in the country have dropped, said David Hawkins, director of public policy and research at the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
    He said three factors have contributed to this year's historically low acceptance rates at the more selective schools. First, there are about 3.3 million students graduating from high school this spring, according to the Department of Education, which is the largest number of graduates seen in recent years.
    Second, though there have been graduating classes nearly this big in the 1970s, for example, the number of students applying to college — now estimated to be 60 percent to 65 percent — is higher than ever.
    Finally, he said, students are sending more applications than they ever have, particularly to the most highly selective schools, due largely to the ease of submitting applications over the Internet.
    The surge likely won't get any better, he said.
    "Actually, we're projected to have even more students graduating," he said. "Because we don't see the tendency to submit more applications tapering off any, it's probably going to be even more chaotic. However, it is important to keep in mind that the overall acceptance rate isn't dropping, and there is space out there."
    Caitlin Cash, an 18-year-old Bowie High School senior, said she thought of UT as a backup school and didn't apply to any honors programs there. UT ended up being the only school of six she applied to that accepted her.
    "I'm in the top 1½ (percent) to 2 percent of my class.  I'm a varsity soccer player. I mentor eighth-grade girls. I'm the Student Council vice president and French Club president," Cash said. "I was extremely surprised. I was like, somehow, somewhere, they've messed up."
    Cory Liu, a 17-year-old senior at the LBJ academy, said he also had a tough time getting into some of the elite colleges this year, despite scoring 2240 on the SAT and getting a 4.2 grade point average on a 4.8 scale.
    Of the 11 colleges he applied to, only two accepted him: the University of Chicago and UT, which admitted him into a summer program for students who didn't make it into the fall class.
    Liu, who was president of his high school's Youth and Government Club, said he'll likely go to Chicago , which also reported a drop in its acceptance rate this year, from 35 percent to 27 percent.
    "I knew it was increasingly competitive, so I tried not to get my hopes unreasonably high. But it was still disappointing," Liu said. "I am very happy that I got into the University of Chicago ."
    Harvard officials said they rejected a record 93 out of every 100 students who applied. Officials at Yale, Dartmouth and Brown universities said they also turned away a record number of applicants.
    "We had an increase that was close to 20 percent in the number of applicants this year," said Marilyn McGrath, Harvard's director of admissions. She said it was because Harvard, which expects a fall freshman class of 1,660, increased scholarship opportunities and cut its early admissions process for the first time this year. "It was a very difficult year, because we had not only a large number of applicants, but they were also exceptional."
    It is not clear how many students were able to score both a perfect 2400 on the SAT and 36 on the ACT, because the tests are scored by different companies.
    But McGrath said fewer than 1 percent of Harvard applicants, 254 of 27,462, got a perfect 2,400 on the SAT. She said 3,368 applicants were ranked first in their class.
    Shannon Duffy, a college counselor at Bowie , said she has noticed more college aspirants this year and had quite a few surprises over who did not get into their top picks. She said the trend has affected schools such as St. Edward's and Texas State universities.
    "They've been bombarded with late applications," Duffy said, after recently speaking with a college admissions counselors at both schools. "Next, I would say students need to broaden their safety schools and really make sure they do a good job applying to them."
    "It was disappointing to know I did my best on those two tests, got the best possible score and it still wasn't good enough," said Ghosh, who is fourth in his graduating class. Ghosh, who is interested in biomedical engineering and medical school, said he is seriously considering CalTech and Rice.
    Ghosh's father, Nirmalendu Ghosh, said he is also upset about the slew of rejections. He quit his job three years ago so he could help shuttle his son to extracurricular activities, including to work at a UT research lab that he knew would impress college admissions officers.
    "My son was devastated, and I was really sad," he said, recalling the day they got the letter from Harvard. "My son told me he could not study any more and went to bed. I could not sleep that whole night."
    Ghosh's high school teachers were surprised as well.  They said it has been a tough year for all of the students at the school. Most students in the academy, one of the Austin district's most highly regarded magnet programs, apply to college.
    This year, however, the white board where students traditionally hang their rejection letters is more full than usual. The words, "April is the cruelest month," scrawled in red between all the letters, sum up many students' feelings.
    "Navonil is a really great, hardworking, serious student," said Jason Flowers, who was Ghosh's history teacher last year. "He does kind of stand out. I think we were all surprised he didn't get into any of the Ivys ... But one thing we've learned is that the admissions game can be very unpredictable."


4/14/2008 press release: "UCLA Violates Proposition 209; Holistic Review Reduces Percentage of Asian American Students Admitted,"
http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-admissions-data-show-high-48543.aspx
By Claudia Luther
    UCLA, the most popular campus in the nation, with 55,397 freshman applicants, announced today that it had admitted 12,579 prospective freshmen for fall 2008. Of these students, 18.1 percent, or 2,164, were underrepresented minorities - a 1.5 percentage-point increase over last year.
    The number of African American freshmen admitted rose to 440 (3.7 percent), up from 407 (3.5 percent) last year, while the number of Latino/Chicano admitted freshmen increased to 1,682 (14.1 percent), from 1,474 (12.7 percent) in 2007. Native American freshmen numbered 42 (0.4 percent), compared with 45 (0.4 percent) last year.
    This is the second consecutive year that UCLA has used a "holistic" process for evaluating applications, in which each application is read and considered in its entirety by two trained readers; in previous years, two readers reviewed student academic records while a third reviewed life challenges and other personal achievements. The UCLA Academic Senate made the change because the faculty believed a more individualized and qualitative assessment of each applicant's entire application would better achieve the University of California Regents ' goal of comprehensive review.  The holistic approach emphasizes students' achievements in the context of opportunities available to them and how students have taken advantage of those opportunities.
    Reflecting an increase in the overall number of applications, the university was able to admit 22.7 percent of all those who applied, compared with 23.6 percent last year. The university expects a class of approximately 4,700 to begin their studies in September.
    Academically, UCLA's admitted freshmen were again very strong. The overall grade-point average was 4.34, compared with 4.29 last year. The average composite score for the SAT reasoning test remained steady at 2,000, out of a possible 2,400. The average math score was 683, the average reading score was 653 and the average writing score was 664 - all approximately what they were last year. Admitted freshmen took an average of 19.9 honors courses and completed nearly 50.9 college preparatory semester courses - far above the minimum of 30 that is required.
    Of the admitted students, 4,804, or 40.2 percent, were Asian American, a drop of 2.6 percent from last year.  Asian Americans made up 42.8 percent (4,975) of the admitted freshman class in 2007, 45.6 percent (5,390) in 2006, 42.5 percent (4,710) in 2005 and 42 percent (4,049) in 2004.
    The percentage of whites/Caucasians was approximately the same as last year: 33.1 percent (3,953), compared with 33.2 percent (3,860) in 2007. That compares with 32.1 percent (3,791) for 2006, 33.6 percent (3,723) for 2005 and 33.5 percent (3,230) for 2004.
    In other categories, admissions data show that 7.4 percent (885) of admitted applicants declined to state their race or ethnicity and that 1.2 percent (138) identified themselves as "other."
    Information about admitted California freshmen at University of California campuses is available at www.ucop.edu/news/factsheets/fall2008adm.html. More than 60,000 high school seniors were offered admission at UC campuses.
    UCLA is California 's largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 37,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer more than 300 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Four alumni and five faculty members have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
    NOTE: Fall 2008 figures are extracted from March 31 files and do not reflect final figures. The data used reflect information about domestic students, except for the total numbers of applicants and admits, which include international students. This year's figures are compared with official data from 2007. Admissions numbers will change slightly, with final official data available in October 2008. Data provided by the University of California Office of the President are for California residents only.

4/9/08 Malden (MA) Observer: “The ‘race’ for president,”
By Rich Tenorio
    Malden - Race has become an oft-discussed topic of the 2008 presidential campaign. Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama has discussed the issue on many occasions, including a March 18 speech in Philadelphia . Obama has mentioned his diverse ethnic makeup — his father was Kenyan; his mother is a white American from Kansas — in campaign speeches.
    Yet, the national discussion on race this campaign season might not be wide-ranging enough, according to leaders of the Malden Asian-American community.
    In phone and e-mail interviews, several prominent voices of this community express a desire for more inclusion of Asian-Americans in the political process that will shape this nation for the next four years, and beyond.
    “I don't think any of the presidential candidates have done nearly enough in addressing the community,” Alice Leung, whose parents are from Guangzhou, China, and who has lived in Malden since she was five years old, wrote in an e-mail interview. “I’m not even sure if the candidates understand, or have made an effort to understand the issues that Asian American communities are concerned with.”
    Interviews with Leung and other voices within the Malden Asian-American community reveal a significant Asian-American presence within the city and this community’s concerns, which include issues that have drawn attention from both Democratic and Republican candidates.
     A community within a community
    Walking through Malden Square offers a glimpse into the city’s Asian-American population.
    Maldonians can buy Asian food at Super 88, and read the Asian newspaper Sampan at the Malden Public Library, where they can also check out Asian-language films. On the first and third Tuesdays of each month, viewers can watch Asian Spectrum, a program aired on Malden Access Television.
    “According to the census the last few years, I’d probably say that 18 to 20 percent of the Malden population is Asian-American,” said Mei Hung, the Taiwanese executive director of the Chinese Culture Connection on Highland Avenue , in a recent telephone interview. “Eighty percent of Asian-Americans in the city are Chinese.”
    However, Leung said that many other nations are represented within the city Asian-American population.
    “We have individuals and families from China , Vietnam , Cambodia , Laos , Thailand , India , Philippines , etc.,” she said.
    Hung and Leung each indicated that Asian-Americans in Malden can come from both working-class and professional backgrounds.
    “There is a growing population of Asian American professionals in Malden , but the majority is still working-class families,” Leung wrote.
    One of Hung's hopes is that “higher-educated people can look out to help and connect with less-educated people, who need help the most,” she said. “It’s good to have a diverse educational and economic and social background.”
    Addressing the issues — and candidates
    Whether working-class or professional, Asian-Americans in Malden seem to share candidate’' concerns over the economy and immigration.
    Leung, who worked as a community organizer in Boston’s Chinatown before entering an MBA program at Babson College, wrote that the majority of working-class Asian-American families in Malden “are struggling with issues such as affordable housing and healthcare, access to language and job skills training resources, and quality public education.”
    She added, “Most notably, the recent resurgence of conservatism in debates on immigrant rights in the national arena has brought about a lot of anti-immigrant sentiments that are negatively impacting many local communities.”
    “The economy stretches across all people,” said Diana Jeong, president of Asian Spectrum, in a phone interview. “It’s unfortunate right now — utility bills, mortgages, energies being so high. There’s also some concern about immigration, and how that might be used (in the campaign).”
    However, Jeong —a lifelong Malden resident whose mother is from China — suggested that the immigration debate might be trending toward a more flexible direction.
    “Even (Republican candidate Sen. John McCain) has a more open stance about that,” she said. “It’s always an issue for people from different countries who have families at home.”
    As for which candidates they would support, Jeong and Leung both mentioned Obama; Leung said she voted for him in the state primary in February.
    “Personally, I like Sen. Obama,” Jeong said. “That’s just me. I think, you know, there’s a lot of cynicism about politicians and government. I think he brings a lot of interest and excitement to the campaign.’
     However, Jeong added, “I’d be happy also if (Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton) got in.”
    What lies ahead?
    Those interviewed offered short-term and long-term suggestions for what could be done to increase Asian-Americans’ inclusion in the political process.
    In April or May, the Chinese Culture Connection seeks to create a forum on the acculturation process. Hung envisions many sessions, one of which will address the presidential campaign and how to get involved.
    “(The) growing number of Asian-American voters is much more noticeable in local and state elections,” Leung said, adding that the increasing voter numbers have received much more attention on these levels.
    “For example, the recent re-election of City Councilor Sam Yoon in Boston and the candidacy of two Chinese-Americans in the Quincy city council race have both energized Asian American voters and generated more news coverage on the city level.”
    Interviews indicated that one way to increase attention to the subject is by discussing it.
    “I don’t know if there’s really a consensus, if anyone’s favoring one person over another,” Jeong said about the city Asian-American community’s choice for president. However, she added, “Quite frankly, nobody’s ever asked.”

4/8/08 New America Media: “Study Reveals Health Care Woes of Asian Americans,”
By Ketaki Gokhale
    High numbers of the working poor in this community don't qualify for public assistance, yet can't afford private insurance. 
    National health care studies often treat Asian Americans as a homogenous, and largely healthy group, but a new study analyzing three years of government-compiled data has revealed substantial pockets of poor health and low insurance levels within the population. Korean Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders clock in with lower levels of insurance than African Americans and whites.
    The analysis, conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, found that the proportion of non-elderly Asians who are uninsured varies widely, ranging from 12 percent of Japanese and Asian Indians, 14 percent of Filipinos, to 21 percent of Vietnamese and 24 percent of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.
    Koreans have the highest rates of uninsured -- 31 percent. In comparison, 21 percent of African Americans, and 12 percent of non-elderly non-Hispanic whites are uninsured. Hispanics and American Indians and Alaska natives are two groups that have higher levels of uninsured than Koreans, with 34 and 32 percent uninsured respectively.
    "If you look at these groups in the aggregate, Asian Americans tend to do well," says Dr. Cara James, a senior policy analyst with the Race, Ethnicity and Health Care Team at the Kaiser Family Foundation.  "They are in good health and don't have as many problems with health coverage."
    Over 16 percent of the nation's 13 million Asian Americans and half-million Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are uninsured, giving the group a higher overall rate of insurance than African Americans, Hispanics and American Indians and Alaska natives. But look a little closer, James says, and "you have Koreans doing worse than African Americans, and equal to American Indians and Alaska natives."
    The low level of insurance in the Korean American community is not the result of poverty, as one might expect, but rather because most Korean Americans -- around 60 percent -- either own or are employed by small companies that can't afford to provide their workers with health insurance.
    Among those Koreans with insurance, only 49 percent have employer-sponsored health coverage. Asian Indians, on the other hand, had the highest rate of employer-sponsored coverage among all the Asian sub-groups, with 77 percent.
    The analysis was based on data from the 2004, 2005 and 2006 National Health Interview Survey and Current Population Survey (CPS).
    Much of the variation in health coverage among Asians may be due to how recently certain groups arrived in the United States , where they live geographically, income level, and the size of the firm where they work.
    "Because Asians are the 'model minority,' it's a surprise to most when they look at the specific groups and see lower rates of insurance and access to health care," says Deeana Jang, policy director of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum. "Within Asian American subgroups, there are groups with higher poverty rates, and lower education levels."
    Jang classes South East Asians, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders within that group, adding that there is a strong link between income and levels of insurance. Those whose income puts them below the poverty line often qualify for Medicaid, but it's the "working poor" -- people who don't qualify for public assistance but can't afford to pay for private insurance -- whose plight the study reveals.
    Jang hopes the study will drive the direction of the current presidential debate on health care. "The national debate is focused on health care reform, and if your goal is to achieve health care reform that truly reaches everybody, then you need to think of the Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Korean and Vietnamese American communities -- all of them individually," she explains. "We are hoping that this will show the diversity of our communities."
    "If you're going to have employer or employee mandates in your reform proposal, the affordability needs to be there. People in the Korean community would purchase insurance if it was affordable. And, for the Asian American populations that are just above the poverty level and don't qualify, maybe those public programs need to be expanded so they can cover more of the working class poor."


4/8/08 Austin American-Statesman:  “UT sued for considering race in admissions Rejected student, who is white, contends university discriminated,”
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz
    The University of Texas is violating the Constitution and civil rights laws by considering race and ethnicity in deciding whether to admit undergraduates, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court Monday by a white student whose application was rejected.
    The plaintiff, Abigail Noel Fisher, 18, lives in Richmond , southwest of Houston , and attends Stephen F. Austin High School in nearby Sugar Land . Despite ranking in the top 12 percent of her class, scoring 1180 out of a possible 1600 on the SAT, and playing the cello, she was rejected last month by UT, says the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Austin .
    UT and other public universities in Texas are required by state law to accept any student from Texas who ranks in the top 10 percent of his or her high school.
    UT considers race and ethnicity, among other factors, in deciding whether to admit other students as part of its effort to boost enrollment of Hispanics and blacks.
    "But for her race and ethnicity, it is our belief she would have been admitted to the University of Texas ," said Edward Blum, director of the Project on Fair Representation, a legal-defense group that fights the use of race and ethnicity in public policy.
    The group, based in Washington , is underwriting part of the litigation costs, and Fisher's lawyer, Bert Rein, is contributing some of his services for free, Blum said.    
    The lawsuit contends that UT has run afoul of a 2003 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving the University of Michigan that said race and ethnicity could be considered under certain circumstances. Fisher's suit argues that affirmative action is allowed only after race-neutral approaches are found inadequate.
    Patti Ohlendorf, UT's vice president for legal affairs, said the school's admissions policies comply with Supreme Court precedent and applicable laws.
    "Each year, we are very fortunate to receive applications from thousands of very able high school seniors. But as with many universities around the country, we are limited in the number of applicants we can admit," she said.
    This isn't the first time UT's admissions policies have been challenged in court. A 1996 federal court ruling involving UT effectively banned affirmative action at public colleges and universities in Texas .  That prompted state lawmakers to enact the top 10 percent law in 1997.
    After the Supreme Court's Michigan ruling, UT resumed considering race and ethnicity in admissions. UT officials contend that the top 10 percent law hasn't done enough to boost minority enrollment and have asked lawmakers to scale it back, saying that would allow them to enroll more minority students.
    Fisher's lawsuit asks the court to end UT's consideration of race and to order that she be admitted if she qualifies under race-neutral factors.
    Blum, a 1973 graduate of UT and a part-time Austin resident, said hundreds of other students have been unfairly rejected, and he urged them to join the case.

 
4/1/08 diversityinc.com: “7 Things Never to Say to Asian-American Executives,”
by Yoji Cole
    Jae Requiro remembers her friend's story vividly:
    Following a meeting in which her friend was the only Asian-American woman, a male colleague said to her, "You're not at all like my Asian wife … you speak up."
    "It was a big slap in her face. She didn't even know what to say to him," says Requiro, who is Filipino American and a manager of diversity consulting and inclusion strategies at Toyota Motor North America. 
    Stereotypes are like a slap to the face because they shock and sting. They are usually uttered without much forethought and reveal the speaker's ignorance. And in corporate settings, they can reveal why someone is excluded from after-work networking events or passed over for promotion. 
    Asian-American executives too often find themselves fighting to disprove the "model minority" stereotype, a group that works hard, is rarely controversial, but ultimately is not "American" enough for leadership opportunities. 
    Here are seven questions and comments Asian-American executives have frequently fielded from coworkers and why you should not repeat them:
    "You must be the IT person." 
    Linda Akutegawa, who is Japanese American and vice president of resource and business development for Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics (LEAP), says that too often it is assumed that Asian-American executives are not leaders but support staff. 
    "Implicit in that statement is that you're good at numbers and technology so you're good behind the scenes but not good at leadership," explains Allan Mark, who is Chinese American and the America 's director, diversity strategy and development for Ernst & Young, No. 43 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list.

3/31/08 New York Times: “Dith Pran, Photojournalist and Survivor of the Killing Fields, Dies at 65,”
By Douglas Martin
    Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died on Sunday at a hospital in New Brunswick , N.J. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge , N.J.
    The cause was pancreatic cancer, which had spread, said his friend Sydney H. Schanberg. 
    Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation. His credo: Make no move unless there was a 50-50 chance of not being killed.
    He had been a journalistic partner of Mr. Schanberg, a Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia . He translated, took notes and pictures, and helped Mr. Schanberg maneuver in a fast-changing milieu. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Mr. Schanberg was forced from the country, and Mr. Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communists.
    Mr. Schanberg wrote about Mr. Dith in newspaper articles and in The New York Times Magazine, in a 1980 cover article titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” (A book by the same title appeared in 1985.) The story became the basis of the movie “The Killing Fields.”  The film, directed by Roland Joffé, showed Mr. Schanberg, played by Sam Waterston, arranging for Mr. Dith’s wife and children to be evacuated from Phnom Penh as danger mounted. Mr. Dith, portrayed by Dr. Haing S. Ngor (who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor), insisted on staying in Cambodia with Mr. Schanberg to keep reporting the news. He believed that his country could be saved only if other countries grasped the gathering tragedy and responded.
    A dramatic moment, both in reality and cinematically, came when Mr. Dith saved Mr. Schanberg and other Western journalists from certain execution by talking fast and persuasively to the trigger-happy soldiers who had captured them.
    But despite his frantic effort, Mr. Schanberg could not keep Mr. Dith from being sent to the countryside to join millions working as virtual slaves. 
    Mr. Schanberg returned to the United States and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia . He accepted it on behalf of Mr. Dith as well.
    For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, except for a false rumor that he had been fed to alligators. His brother had been. After more than four years of beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of a tablespoon of rice a day, Mr. Dith escaped over the Thai border on Oct. 3, 1979. An overjoyed Mr. Schanberg flew to greet him.
    “To all of us who have worked as foreign reporters in frightening places,” Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said on Sunday, “Pran reminds us of a special category of journalistic heroism — the local partner, the stringer, the interpreter, the driver, the fixer, who knows the ropes, who makes your work possible, who often becomes your friend, who may save your life, who shares little of the glory, and who risks so much more than you do.”
    Mr. Dith moved to New York and in 1980 became a photographer for The Times, where he was noted for his imaginative pictures of city scenes and news events.  In one, he turned the camera on mourners rather than the coffin to snatch an evocative moment at the funeral of Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, who was murdered in 1990.
    In an e-mail message on Sunday, Mr. Schanberg recalled Mr. Dith’s theory of photojournalism: “You have to be a pineapple. You have to have a hundred eyes.”
    “I’m a very lucky man to have had Pran as my reporting partner and even luckier that we came to call each other brother,” Mr. Schanberg said. “His mission with me in Cambodia was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through in a war that was never necessary. It became my mission too. My reporting could not have been done without him.”
    Outside The Times, Mr. Dith spoke out about the Cambodian genocide, appearing before student groups and other organizations. “I’m a one-person crusade,” he said.
    Dith Pran was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Siem Reap , Cambodia , a provincial town near the ancient temples at Angkor Wat. His father was a public-works official.
    Having learned French at school and taught himself English, Mr. Dith was hired as a translator for the United States Military Assistance Command. When Cambodia severed ties with the United States in 1965, he worked with a British film crew, then as a hotel receptionist.
    In the early 1970s, as unrest in neighboring Vietnam spread and Cambodia slipped into civil war, the Khmer Rouge grew more formidable. Tourism ended. Mr. Dith interpreted for foreign journalists. When working for Mr. Schanberg, he taught himself to take pictures.
    When the Khmer Rouge won control in 1975, Mr. Dith became part of a monstrous social experiment: the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people from the cities and the suppression of the educated classes with the goal of re-creating Cambodia as an agricultural nation. 
    To avoid summary execution, Mr. Dith hid that he was educated or that he knew Americans. He passed himself off as a taxi driver. He even threw away his money and dressed as a peasant. 
    Over the next 4 ½ years, he worked in the fields and at menial jobs. For sustenance, people ate insects and rats and even the exhumed corpses of the recently executed, he said. 
    In November 1978, Vietnam , by then a unified Communist nation after the end of the Vietnam War, invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Dith went home to Siem Reap, where he learned that 50 members of his family had been killed; wells were filled with skulls and bones.
    The Vietnamese made him village chief. But he fled when he feared that they had learned of his American ties. His 60-mile trek to the Thai border was fraught with danger. Two companions were killed by a land mine.
    He had an emotional reunion with his wife, Ser Moeun Dith, and four children in San Francisco . Though he and his wife later divorced, she was by his bedside in his last weeks, bringing him rice noodles. 
    Mr. Dith was divorced from his second wife, Kim DePaul.
    Mr. Dith is survived by his companion, Bette Parslow; his daughter, Hemkarey; his sons, Titony, Titonath and Titonel; a sister, Samproeuth; six grandchildren; and two stepgrandchildren.
    Ms. DePaul now runs the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, which spreads word about the Cambodian genocide. At his death, Mr. Dith was working to establish another, still-unnamed organization to help Cambodia . In 1997, he published a book of essays by Cambodians who had witnessed the years of terror as children. 
    Dr. Ngor, the physician turned actor who had himself survived the killing fields, had joined with Mr. Dith in their fight for justice. He was shot to death in 1996 in Los Angeles by a teenage gang member.  “It seems like I lost one hand,” Mr. Dith said of Dr. Ngor’s death.  Mr. Dith nonetheless pushed ahead in his campaign against genocide everywhere. 
    “One time is too many,” he said in an interview in his last weeks, expressing hope that others would continue his work. “If they can do that for me,” he said, “my spirit will be happy.”


3/25/08 www.angryasianman.com: “racist casting and 21,”
    There's been a lot of chatter and gripes lately about the movie 21, which opens in theaters nationwide this Friday. Longtime readers know  that this movie has been on our radar for several years, ever since it was announced that Sony had the film in development, with Kevin Spacey attached to the project. Based on the bestselling book Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich, it tells the story of how a team of gifted blackjack players from MIT developed a highly successful card-counting system and took Las Vegas casinos for millions. Based on a true story, it's a great premise, and the perfect idea for a big budget Hollywood movie. Right? Not exactly.
    You see, in real life, the blackjack team was a group mostly made up of Asian American students. This was actually advantageous to their strategy, as it happens, because Asian dudes winning big money at the casinos apparently aren't quite as conspicuous as white dudes who win big at the casinos. That's just the way it is. Anyway. As we all know, Hollywood studios seem to have a great of resistance to creating interesting, fully-fleshed, three-dimensional roles for Asian American actors. They seem to think we can't carry a movie, and more often than not, will instead create roles and stories for pretty white people instead. I know this, you know this, we all know this. Hell, they know this. I'm going to put it out there-I'm not necessarily in favor of a boycott, nor am I against one either. I'm not sure where I stand on that. But I'm certainly in favor of anything that draws attention and educates people on the issues at hand. This is a good one, because it brings scrutiny to the nature of Hollywood 's racist casting processes, with a very obvious, high-profile example. People are interested in this movie, without a lot of background knowledge, but this is an opportunity to create dialogue on a general practice that has systematically shut out Asians in Hollywood for years. I hope it prompts folks understand what's going on here, learn the details for themselves, talk about it, and perhaps approach 21 (and future Hollywood product) with a more discerning eye.

3/20/08 Capitol Weekly: “Philanthropists’ donations come under scrutiny for diversity,”
by John Howard
    Advocates for the poor are targeting California 's largest charitable foundations that donate billions of dollars annually to an array of nonprofits. Next week, the top executives at several foundations are meeting with a San Jose Assemblyman over his bill to require the foundations to disclose the racial, ethnic and gender breakdowns of their staffs and governing boards, as well as a similar breakdown of those who get the money. 
    The unusual proposal has received limited attention in California but is high on the radar of the national philanthropic community. 
    "Minorities make up more than 50 percent of California 's population, but we believe we are missing from some of the important dialogues on education, the environment, water, transportation," said John Gamboa, president of the Berkeley-based Greenlining Institute. "We've never had the investment that many other, white organizations have had. It's really an innocuous bill. It doesn't require anything but a little transparency."
    The Greenlining Institute advocates on behalf of the poor for education improvements and against discriminatory business practices such as redlining by banks. 
    The legislation was written by Gamboa's group and authored by Joe Coto, the chairman of the Latino caucus. The bill, AB624, would require some 30 private foundations in California , those with more than $250 million in assets, to disclose their own ethnic makeup. It seeks similar information from those who get the grants, although that information already is supplied by some 90 percent of those who get the money, the grantees. The idea is to track the demographic components of the flow of philanthropic money. 
    A study cited by Greenlining says that less than 4 cents of every grant dollar goes to minority nonprofits - a figure that the foundations contend is flawed. 
    The stakes are huge, although just how huge is unclear. Nationally, some $40 billion to $80 billion is given away annually, according to an estimate by former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich. California accounts for about 12.7 percent of the nation's philanthropic foundations, which, if California 's donations are proportional to the national level, means that the foundations here dispense perhaps $5 billion to $10 billion annually. 
    The foundations, viewed as the traditional benefactors of worthy causes, were surprised by the legislation. They believe the Coto bill may be the harbinger of a regulatory scheme for the philanthropic community. 
    "The broadest level of concern is that this is a camel's nose-under-the-tent issue," said Robert Ross, president of the California Endowment, which donates about $150 million to $160 million annually. "Is this the opening salvo for legislators to dictate the philanthropic work of private foundations? The legislation may seem to be just about reporting data, but what about the next (legislative) session? Where do they go if they don't like the numbers?" 
    Ross also questioned whether the foundations' donations could ultimately be directed to holes in the $154 billion state budget, which faces a $16 billion shortage over two years and which has had a nagging, $5 billion deficit for the past few years. "Taken to its extreme, this bill goes through and then in two years there's another budget deficit at the state level and the Legislature says, ‘Let's regulate the foundations.'" He noted that California foundations have received numerous inquiries from their national counterparts about the legislation. 
    Coto's bill, over the opposition of Republicans, was approved Jan. 29 in the 80-member Assembly by a 45-29 vote and sent to the Senate. But it has been made into a two-year bill, which means its first Senate vote is not expected until June. In part, the delay was due to wrangling over whether the reporting requirements should be voluntary as opposed to mandatory. Language sought by the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender Caucus to include sexual orientation among the reporting rules was hastily dropped amid complaints that it forced workers to disclose personal sexual matters. 
    Converting bills to two-year status is a tactic frequently used in the Legislature to kill unwanted legislation, but that doesn't appear to be the case here. The bill emerged easily from the Assembly, and Coto and his allies appear confident that there will be support in the Senate for the bill. The governor has not discussed his position. 
    Others, however, have weighed in against Coto's bill. "Many charities help individuals and groups who have low incomes or are temporarily in unfortunate situations with a way to lift them up. How is a state mandate on diversity reporting going to further these philanthropic efforts? In my opinion, not one bit. Perhaps, some legislators just want to make sure charities are supporting the ‘correct' people and organizations. How silly is this?" wrote Sen. Tom Harman, R-Huntington Beach , in a newsletter to his constituents. 
    On Wednesday, the leaders of several of California 's charitable foundations are scheduled to confer with Coto and his staff about the bill. The foundation presidents are expected to include Ross, James Canales of the Irvine Foundation and Paul Brest of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

March 2008 East West Magazine: "Empowering Asian American Women,"
    The 4th Annual Asian American Women in Leadership (AAWIL) Conference 
will take place on April 26, 2008 at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University with a diverse line-up of speakers. Top names on the agenda include SuChin Pak, MTV News correspondent; Kyung Yoon, Vice Chairman of Heidrick & Struggles; Becky Lee, attorney, founder of Becky Lee Women's Support Fund and cast member of Survivor (Season 13); and Jennifer 8 Lee, New York Times reporter.
    The conference, which aims to set forth strategic dialogue on the importance of leadership for Asian American girls and women, will explore various aspects of leadership, energize and equip attendees to seek out future leadership opportunities and create cross-generational networks among attendees.
    This year's conference theme is "Balanced Leadership: Maintaining Perspective," and a confernece highlight will be the presentation of the 1st Annual ASPIRE Outstanding Woman of the Year Award, recognizing a female high school or college student of Asian American descent for leadership and determination. 
    For more information, visit http://www.girlsaspire.org/conference/ 



2008 API Policy Summit
http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/apilegcaucus/policysummit.htm

Register Today!

Registration Packet & Summit Agenda Now Available.  Download the Registration Packet and Summit Agenda California Asian Pacific Islander Policy Summit Convened by the California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus

In partnership with:

Asian Americans for Civil Rights and Equality (AACRE) Asian and Pacific Islanders California Action Network

(APIsCAN)

California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus Institute Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs

Tuesday, April 15th - Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 Sacramento Convention Center - Sacramento , CA

Play a part in the annual California API Policy Summit!

• Demonstrate collective power and increase visibility of APIs in the state.

• Advocate for laws that advance fairness, justice, and access for our communities.

• Bolster our community’s political influence, expand your knowledge, and put your advocacy skills into action through Capitol legislative visits, legislative hearings, coalition building, and workshops.

• Integrate policy advocacy into your organization’s mission.

For more information, please contact:

Pam Chueh or Linda Tran
Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus
916-319-3686 or pam.chueh "at" asm.ca.gov or
916-319-3594 or linda.tran "at" asm.ca.gov

Vivian Huang
Asian Americans for Civil Rights and Equality (AACRE)
916-321-9001 or vhuang "at" aacre.org
A Partnership of Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC), and Asian Law Caucus (ALC)

Diane Ujiiye
Asian and Pacific Islanders California Action Network
(APIsCAN)
310-532-6111 or apiscandiane "at" sbcglobal.net

Capitol Office Consultant
State Capitol
P.O. Box 942849
Sacramento , CA 94249-0049 Pam Chueh
Phone: 916-319-3686
Fax: 916-319-3628
Email: Pam.Chueh "at" asm.ca.gov 

3/10/08 Associated Press: “Study: Asians and black patients more likely to die after injury,”  
    Honolulu (AP) _ A study finds Asian- and African-American patients have a higher risk of dying than Caucasians after being admitted to hospitals for major injuries. 
    According to the study co-authored by the new dean of the John A. Burns School of Medicine, 2.1 percent of blacks and 2 percent of Asians died while the death rate for whites was 1.5 percent. 
    Dr. Jerris Hedges, the dean of the school, says the poorer survival outcome for the minority groups is concerning. 
    Hedges used data from Hawaii and 21 other states in his report called, ``Racial Disparities in Mortality Among Adults Hospitalized After Injury.''

3/3/08 AAA-Fund News: Who Are the APA Superdelegates?
by Gautam Dutta
    The race between Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama is tight — so tight that it might not be decided by the voters.
    If neither candidate garners a majority of delegates, the so-called superdelegates — party leaders who control 39.3 percent of the 2025 votes needed to win — will decide the winner.
    Over the past few weeks, a healthy debate has raged about how the superdelegates should vote: Should they vote for the candidate who has received greater popular support (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s view)?
    Or, should they base their vote on a combination of factors (Rep. James Clyburn’s view)? AAA-Fund will not take a position on this issue.
    According to Associated Press, Sen. Obama has won 1116 delegates from the caucuses and primaries, and has also secured the support of 164 superdelegates (for a total of 1280 delegates). Sen. Clinton has won 977 delegates from the caucuses and primaries, and has also secured the support of 241 superdelegates (for a total of 1218 delegates). However, since superdelegates are free to change their minds at any time, these numbers must be taken with more than a few grains of salt.
    For us, this raises two important questions. First, how many superdelegates are Asian American? The answer: 20 superdelegates, which amounts to 2.5 percent of the 796 superdelegates. To put that figure in perspective, just over 5 percent of the nation’s population is Asian American.
    Second, who are the Asian American superdelegates?
    Based on public sources, here is a list of these influential leaders (please let us know if anyone has been omitted):
    1. Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-HI), AAA-Fund Honorary Board 
    2. Rep. Madeleine Z. Bordallo (D-Guam), AAA-Fund Honorary Board 
    3. Rep. Eni Faleomavaega (D-Samoa), AAA-Fund Honorary Board 
    4. Rep. Maizie Hirono (D-HI), AAA-Fund Honorary Board 
    5. Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA), President, AAA-Fund Honorary Board 
    6. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI), AAA-Fund Honorary Board 
    7. Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA), AAA-Fund Honorary Board 
    8. Minnesota Rep. Mee Moua, AAA-Fund Honorary Board 
    9. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), AAA-Fund Honorary Board 
    10. Rep. David Wu (D-OR), AAA-Fund Honorary Board 
    11. Kamil Hasan, DNC Asian Pacific Islander American Caucus 
    12. Bel Leong-Hong, Chair, DNC Asian Pacific Islander American Caucus; AAA-Fund Board 
    13. Mona Mohib, Vice-Chair, DNC Asian Pacific Islander American Caucus
    14. Mona Pasquil, DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee 
    15. Keith Umemoto, Co-Chair, DNC Credentials Committee & Treasurer, Western DNC States Caucus 
    16. Alicia Wang, 2nd Vice-Chair, California Democratic Party
    17. Former Rep. Robert Underwood (D-Guam), AAA-Fund Honorary Board 
    18. Antonio Charfauros (Guam)
    19. Cecilia Mafnas (Guam)
    20. Taling Taitano (Guam)

2/28/08 New York Times: “ Louisiana Governor Pierces Business as Usual,”
by Adam Nossiter
    Baton Rouge , La. - Downstairs, legislators gnashed their teeth, while upstairs at the Capitol here this week, the new governor claimed victory against the old customs down below.

2/22/08 The Electric New Paper (Singapore): "Contenders court the Asian vote;
Small in number, but they may swing a win in tight race,"
    Asians make up about 5 per cent of the US population, but they are emerging as the swing voters who may make a difference for presidential hopefuls.
    Every one of their votes may count when the race is tight - which well describes the one between Democratic White House contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, reported AFP.
    And the top five states where Asian-Americans live - California, New York, Texas, Hawaii and New Jersey - are, with the exception of Hawaii, 'very, very significant' in the presidential elections, according to Mr Don Nakanishi, director of the Asian-American studies centre at the University of California, Los Angeles.
    Those four states each carries a high number of electoral votes.
    'If this is a close election, then the ways in which the Asian-American vote swings could have a very decisive impact,' he said.
    The race is certainly close in the Democrat camp: Mr Obama, who won in Wisconsin and Hawaii yesterday, has 1,303 delegates, while Mrs Clinton has 1,233.
    Despite their significance, the voting power of Asian-Americans has been much less scrutinised than that of African-Americans and Hispanics, reported The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress. 
    Agreed Democratic lawmaker Mike Honda, chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus: 'It is time that due attention is paid to this rapidly growing and politically relevant community.'
    In Hawaii, nearly 60 per cent of the population is Asian-American.
    In California, Asian-Americans make up 8 per cent of the electorate population, reported Time this week.
    And their share of the population is set to grow, from 5per cent now to 9per cent in 2050. 
    WHO DO THEY VOTE FOR? 
    Asians tend to vote for the Democratic party. And so far, they have voted most consistently and overwhelmingly for Mrs Clinton
    In California, about 75 percent of Asian voters voted for her, compared to 23 percent for Mr Obama. 
    In New York, the Asian American Legal Defence Fund's exit poll concluded that 87 percent of Asian-American Democrats backed their state's Senator, reported Time.
    In New Jersey, it was 73 per cent. 
    The difference could be due to the attention paid to the community by the contenders.
    Some observers believe that Mr Obama is seen as neglecting the community, reported Time, pointing to some speeches on racial unity that mentioned only black and white.
    Mrs Clinton, in contrast, held a special event for the Asian-American newspapers in San Francisco.
    Pundits say, though, that Mr Obama is learning fast. 
    In a speech this month, he pointedly thanked more than just his black and white supporters.
    And some of his campaign employees and supporters have taken out advertisements in Asian newspapers and contacted Asian TV stations to cover his activities. 
    Mr Obama is expected to continue courting the Asian vote as the race intensifies. 



2/19/08 AmericanThinker.com: “Media angst over low Asian-American support for Obama (updated)”
By Thomas Lifson
    Barack Obama receives 90% of the black vote versus Hillary Clinton, but when another racial minority, Asian-Americans, shows signs of disproportionately voting for Hillary Clinton in primary elections, the media wrings its hands about possible racism. Lisa Takeuchi Cullen of TIME addresses these concerns:
    "Maybe it's just my cynicism speaking, but you look at those numbers and on some level there has to be some element of race," says Oliver Wang, a sociology professor at California State University at Long Beach . While not discounting the myriad cultural reasons that could explain the support for Clinton , "on a gut level my reaction is that at least some Asian-Americans are uncomfortable voting for a black candidate."
    Cullen notes that until very recently Obama has spoken of race almost exclusively in terms of blacks and whites. 
    ... some Asians were sensitive to being left out of Obama's rousing stump speeches on racial unity - speeches that mentioned only black and white, according to Don Nakanishi, director of the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California Los Angeles . But following his clean sweep of the Potomac primaries on February 12, Obama pointedly thanked a rainbow of ethnic groups, including Asian-Americans. "He can turn it around," says Nakanishi. "He has a story to tell, one that we would get."
    Cullen addresses a number of possible explanations for Asian-American support for Clinton over Obama, but strangely leaves out an obvious, if sensitive, issue: affirmative action preferences for blacks.
    Many Asian-American families value hard work, education and upward mobility. Before California voters outlawed state-sponsored racial preferences, the ability of black applicants to be admitted to the University of California system with combined grades and aptitude score tests that would get an Asian-heritage candidate automatically rejected was a very sore point. One of the very serious problems with affirmative action  programs is the resentment they sow against its ostensible beneficiaries. For competitive schools like UC Berkeley which have ten applicants for every slot, there are many, many rejected students (and their families) who resent the relatively small numbers benefitting from preferences. "But for preferences, I would occupy that slot..." goes the reasoning. Arithmetically incorrect, but all too human. 
    Of course, affirmative action is a taboo subject when it comes to Obama. Nobody is willing to even suggest that he ( Columbia , Harvard Law School ) or his wife (Princeton, Harvard Law School ) benefitted from preferences. I have never seen anyone even ask if either of them received scholarships. 
    Absent any evidence of race preferences enabling or financing either of the Obamas' educations, that would be mean-spirited and unfair, of course. But liberals are not so shy about claiming that Clarence Thomas was a preferences beneficiary, and he is regularly excoriated for alleged "hypocrisy" in opposing race preferences. Double standards applied to black conservatives are nothing new, of course.
    But just because a subject is taboo, it does not necessarily vanish from people's minds. Arguably, a taboo only enhances the amount of attention paid in the privacy of an individual's thoughts. Call it a sleeper issue. Of course, it will be used as evidence of racism against anyone or any group that fails to support the only man who can save America 's soul.

2/17/08 Huffinton Post blog: “Anderson Cooper Explains Little About Asian Americans,”
by Scott Kurashige
    (Summary: Ending the marginalization of Asian American voices and stopping the monolithic portrayal of Asian American political attitudes would be great strides toward eliminating the conditions that sustain the "bloc vote" mentality.)
    All this week, CNN has been hyping Anderson Cooper's special report on "Race, Gender and Politics." As expected, Cooper and his guests mostly rehashed the same arguments and opinions they've made four or five times a day for the past month. What has stood out for me, however, is that Cooper has been the national television news figure most interested in reporting on Asian Americans. (Sadly, that's not saying much.) A couple commentators made the obvious but still necessary point that we should not jump to quick conclusions or reproduce stereotypes about how Asian Americans think and act. No one pointed out that Asian Americans have switched dramatically from Republican to solidly Democratic over the past three to four presidential election cycles. Overall, Cooper's reporting has exposed how little the media understands the political dynamics within Asian American communities.
    Cooper's main goal has been to explain why exit polls from the California Democratic primary showed Asian Americans voting nearly three-to-one for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. It began with his anchoring coverage on the night of Super Tuesday. As pundit David Gergen was discussing the significance of the Latino vote to Hillary's win in California , Cooper interjected that she also registered a sizable win among Asians. Gergen's tangential response was "well, they're in play here, too." Then, Gergen continued with his point about Latinos. This was, of course, a misstatement. "In play" for the political pundits analyzing the horse race means that the battle to win a state or a demographic segment of the electorate is highly competitive, not lopsided. What Gergen really meant by the Asians are "in play" comment was something more like, "We don't normally view Asian voters as significant, but here's one isolated case where they happened to make a difference."
    Next, Cooper did a very short feature on Asian American voters during his February 8 show. In its entirety, the segment consisted of brief comments by four random Asian Americans plus 38 words from a political science professor whose primary area of study is Latinos in politics.  The consensus: Hillary Clinton is better known because her husband was president; also, recent Asian immigrants might be uncomfortable with the idea of change and maybe a little wary of a black candidate. In response, an Asian American political action committee called the 80-20 Initiative launched a petition against CNN saying it was "outraged" by this "2 minute segment."
    CNN subsequently interviewed a representative of the 80-20 Initiative, S.B. Woo, for the "Race, Gender and Politics" special.  Woo delivered the night's big new thesis: the strong Asian American backing of Clinton in California was the result of none other than the 80-20 Initiative's campaign to organize Asians into an ethnic bloc vote for Clinton. The group has declared on its website, "Let the word go forth that we've learned how to reward political leaders who share our rightful concerns, and punish those who don't." While Woo is no doubt overstating his group's influence, the actions of the 80-20 Initiative help us to appreciate in the crudest manner how a particular type of ethnic identity politics functions. Since Anderson Cooper fell well short of "explaining it all," I'll try to demonstrate how this works.
    First, a group of self-identified leaders get together and declare themselves the representatives of their ethnic (or other form of interest) group.
    Second, the group identifies a narrow set of positions purporting to represent the self-interests of the entire group. In the case of the 80-20 Initiative, the group asked candidates to pledge to "break the glass ceiling" for Asian Americans in employment and "nominate more Asian American judges." All questions on these points singled out Asian Americans. The 80-20 platform is not couched broadly as a civil rights initiative; it's only a call for the government to give certain Asian Americans treatment already afforded "other minorities."
    Third, the group takes it platform to the candidates and chooses a horse in the race. (A variation on this theme is petitioning a media outlet to remedy its allegedly biased coverage by devoting airtime to your group and its cause.)
    Fourth, the group attempts to mobilize a bloc vote by arguing that the chosen candidate best represents "our" interests. Finally, if the candidate wins and the group is seen to have delivered the vote, the symbolic representatives of the ethnic group get in line to cash in their rewards (e.g. patronage, federal appointments, dinner at the White House).
    What must be emphasized regarding the relative success of the 80-20 "bloc vote" campaign is that minority interest group politics of this nature conform perfectly to the niche marketing and service-delivery model of politics practiced by head Clinton strategist Mark Penn. Winning the 80-20 endorsement was but one part of a broader Clinton strategy to win endorsements from minority politicians, court ethnic community leaders, and advertise in ethnic media. This largely top-down approach seems to have worked in this instance (though it might have fallen short if the Obama team had developed a better ground game among Asians and Latinos in California ).
    Yet, the primary results are also proving that so many Americans are tired of politics framed by narrow self-interests that ignore the intersecting relationship between race, gender, class, sexuality, ecology, education, health care, and a million other issues. 
    While there are some interests unique to ethnic groups, there are also ways to address these concerns within the context of struggling for a greater good and a higher purpose. Memo to Anderson Cooper: your next task, if you choose to accept it, is to find the tens of thousands of Asian Americans who see politics and activism in this light. Ending the marginalization of Asian American voices and stopping the monolithic portrayal of Asian American political attitudes would be great strides toward eliminating the conditions that sustain the "bloc vote" mentality.
    Scott Kurashige is an associate professor of American Culture, History, and Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan and author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2008).

2/15/08: Members of Congress Call Upon CNN and MSNBC to Cover Asian Vote Washington, DC – Today, Several Members of Congress sent the following letters to Jonathan Klein, president of CNN/U.S. and Phil Griffin, executive-in-charge of MSNBC to highlight the lack of coverage of the Asian American and Pacific Islander vote during the 2008 presidential campaigns:

February 15, 2008 

Jonathan Klein
President 
CNN/U.S. 
One Time Warner Center  
New York , NY 10019

Dear Mr. Klein,

We are writing as Members of Congress who have strong interests in issues affecting the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities in the United States .  We are deeply concerned that the lack of coverage of Asian voters in the 2008 presidential race by CNN and other media outlets unfairly suppresses a growing and significant political constituency.  We request a meeting to discuss these matters, and have also provided specific recommendations below.

sian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up the fastest growing racial group in the United States .  Nationwide, approximately 7 million Asian American and Pacific Islanders are eligible to vote, and close to 3.5 million have registered to vote.  Nearly 3 million Asian American and Pacific Islander voters cast ballots in the last presidential election.  Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders currently make up more than 5% of the U.S. population, and by 2050, the AAPI population is expected to grow 213% to 33.4 million.  It is time that due attention is paid to this rapidly growing and politically relevant community.

The 2008 Presidential primary cycle has already seen contests in states with significant Asian American and Pacific Islander populations, including: California , Nevada , Virginia , New Jersey , and New York .  CNN's coverage and exit polling data of Asian voters has been resoundingly lacking.  In California, where Asian voters represented 8% of the population polled by CNN, and exceeded the African American population by 1%, AAPI voters were nonetheless excluded in the exit polling analyses for the categories of "Vote by Age and Race," "Vote by Party and Race," and "Vote by Sex and Race."  This detailed analysis for the African American community, however, was provided when available.  In other key states with large pockets of Asian American voters, such as New Jersey , New York , Virginia , and Nevada , no data was provided at all.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are poised to play significant roles in the upcoming contests in Hawaii , Wisconsin , Ohio , Texas , Pennsylvania , and North Carolina .  Clearly, significant delegates remain at stake in this intensely close contest, and AAPI voters will turn out to cast their ballots.  Whether their voices will be heard in the political process will depend in large part on whether the media plays a part in recognizing or ignoring these voices. 

We are requesting that CNN:

·        Meet with the undersigned to discuss ways to improve coverage of the AAPI community;

·        Ensure that the upcoming CNN debate in Texas includes substantive questions and content related to the AAPI community, and that pre- and post-debate coverage include commentary about the significant AAPI populations in the state;

·        Ensure that polling data is collected on the AAPI community, particularly in the Hawaii, Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and North Carolina primary contests, and that the AAPI vote be discussed during the highly televised primary night coverage;

·        Provide more coverage and stories on the AAPI vote.  This should not simply be a matter of producing additional stories, but should involve substantive, in-depth coverage on our communities.  For example, while we applaud Anderson Cooper 360's decision to run a story on the AAPI community during the Washington Caucus, the segment provided only a superficial analysis of voter sentiments at best, and at worst, it was borderline offensive, particularly when the correspondent appeared to find humor in the limited English proficiency of one of the interviewees;

·        Make a committed effort to include more AAPI perspectives when covering larger issues that impact the AAPI community, including immigration reform, education, and healthcare;

·        Work with the undersigned to develop a roster of interviewees, experts and guests who are able to speak intelligently on the AAPI community and these policy areas; and

·        Designate a CNN representative from CNN's diversity council, as well as a specific producer, to have responsibility and oversight for ensuring that the AAPI community is represented in news coverage, particularly for this election cycle.  This representative and producer should engage in an ongoing dialogue with the undersigned.

We thank you in advance for your attention to this matter, and look forward to your timely response. 

Sincerely,

Rep. Michael M. Honda
Rep. Eni F.H. Faleomavaega
Rep. Madeleine Z. Bordallo
Rep. Neil Abercrombie
Rep. Xavier Becerra
Rep. Al Green
Rep. Mazie K. Hirono
Rep. Doris O. Matsui
Rep. Robert C. Scott
Rep. David Wu

2/14/08 New America Media: “Asian Americans Outraged by CNN Election Report,”
By Jun Wang 
    Editor's Note: A CNN report that blames Asians' support of Clinton on their hesitancy to vote for a black president is insulting and inaccurate, argue Asian Americans.
    Asian Americans are outraged over a recent CNN report that attributes their support for Hillary Clinton to their hesitancy to vote for a black president.
    The three-minute video piece, “Asian Americans to Vote for Hillary Clinton Across the Nation,” aired on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees on Feb. 8. 
    People with different Asian accents unanimously spoke out one name -- “(Hillary) Clinton ” -- when asked for whom they planned to vote. The report identified two major causes for Asian Americans’ support of Clinton , according to viewers: that they were “fearful of a black presidential candidate and/or fearful of change.”
    Samson Fu, 27, a health care project manager with no former political experience, started circulating a petition among the Asian community on Feb. 10. The petition gained sponsorship from the “80-20 Initiative,” an Asian American political action committee headquartered in New York .
    The petition called CNN’s coverage “a misleading portrayal behind why 75 percent of Asian Americans voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton. Gary Tuchman (the reporter) seems to insinuate those Asian American votes as racially motivated and/or fearful of change.”
    On the contrary, the petition points out that Asian Americans, especially first generation immigrants, “by their choice to come to a new land, are by and large the least fearful of changes.”
    It urges CNN to take the video off of their Web site and run another segment with balanced reporting and include the rise of political cohesiveness within the Asian American community.
    The petition collected more than 2,000 signatures and about 900 comments in two days. A copy of the petition letter, with more than 800 pages of signatures and comments, has been sent to CNN.
    Samson Fu and S.B. Woo, the former lieutenant governor of Delaware and founder of the “80-20 Initiative,” have been in conversation with CNN’s top executives. John Liu, New York City councilman, plans to hold a press conference late this week if CNN doesn’t respond to the petition.
    The CNN video is “biased, more of an opinion piece than investigative reporting,” Fu told New America Media. “CNN should be held responsible for making Asians appear racist, which is not true. Fu added that many of his friends were equally insulted by the report. “I initiated the petition to capture their feelings.”
    Asian American viewers were also critical of CNN’s choice to interview only Asian Americans with heavy accents. One comment on the petition asks, “What is up with white people choosing only the non-fluent Asian population for the interviews… making Asian people look like dumb-asses, who don’t know English? I’m thinking prejudice and racism… What do you think?” 
    Another comment on the petition agrees, saying, “Many Asian Americans are educated and speak English very well. Perhaps you should represent our community more accurately.” 
    From Filipinos to Asian Indians, Asian Americans are a diverse group, says Samson Fu. They come from dozens of countries and cultural backgrounds. In cities like Seattle , Fu adds, it isn’t hard to interview a larger variety of Asians – instead of just talking to people in a Japanese teahouse.
    Born in Hong Kong, Fu came to the United States at the age of five and spent 19 years in South Carolina before moving to Los Angeles three years ago. He says he didn’t know any other Asians in South Carolina . 
    “ South Carolina ’s population is black and white,” he says, “but I experienced no racial tension there at all. My black friends invited me home and cooked for me. They treated me like everyone else.” 
    As an Asian American growing up with black friends in South Carolina , Fu says he appreciates the idea of having a black president of the United States . “If you’ve ever traveled outside this country, you know that when people talk about America , they think of Caucasians, white people,” says Fu. “A black president will let people know we’re a multiracial country.”
    Asian Americans have supported Clinton in large numbers for a variety of reasons, Fu argues in his petition. “One important factor in Asian Americans’ preference of Sen. Clinton over Sen. Obama may be the endorsement of Sen. Clinton by the 80-20 Initiative, because she signed an iron-clad promise to bring equal opportunity in workplaces for all Asian Americans a month and a half before Obama did.”
    The election is “not about race and skin color,” Fu adds. “We African Americans, Asian Americans and other racial groups are one America .”
    S. B. Woo, who was born in Shanghai and moved to the United States in 1956 at the age of 18, shares Fu’s perspective of the unity of Americans and is hoping for a “win-win” resolution with CNN. 
    But with the American civil rights movement deeply rooted in his heart, Woo is more interested in uniting all Asians. His wish, reflected in the name “80-20 Initiative,” is to direct 80 percent of Asian Americans’ votes in one direction for the equal opportunity of all Asian Americans and the benefit of the nation. 
    When he moved here in the 1950s, Asians represented less than one percent of the American population. They were almost invisible. In half a century, Asian Americans have increased to more than four percent of the U.S. population, but their voices have still largely gone unheard.
    One comment posted by Jo Ann from North Royalton , Ohio on CNN’s website touches on the invisibility of Asians, a race that she says “hasn’t been considered.” “It does seem that whenever we talk about race we seem to forget about the Asian-American population,” she writes. “I often wonder why it is that they never seem to complain about being left out. Shame on us for not considering them without being prompted!”
    Woo says he has learned a lesson from “older Asian Americans” who he says surrendered too easily in the face of challenges. When he immigrated to the United States , African Americans were suffering greatly from discrimination. But they fought back and gained from the civil rights movement. Asian Americans, he says, also need to stand up.
    “We Asians benefit from blacks. But we should not take it for granted,” he says, stressing the need for Asian Americans to take action to realize their own dreams.

 

2/6/08 press release from Asian American Legal Defense Fund: “Asian American Voters Favor Clinton and McCain in New York and New Jersey Presidential Primaries,”
    New York …  Asian American voters in New York and New Jersey, two states with the largest Asian American populations in the Northeast, gave overwhelming support to Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) in the "Super Tuesday" presidential primary elections.
    The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) today released preliminary findings from its multilingual, nonpartisan exit poll of 700 Asian American voters at 9 polling places in New York City and 6 polling places in Palisades Park , Fort Lee and Edison , New Jersey .  
    AALDEF Executive Director Margaret Fung said:  "Asian American voters have demonstrated strong interest in the Presidential elections, and they made their voices heard on Super Tuesday."
    A summary of the preliminary results appears below: 
    NEW YORK
    Over 530 Asian American voters were polled in New York City :  Manhattan 's Chinatown; Flushing, Elmhurst , and Bayside, Queens; and Sunset Park and Midwood, Brooklyn .  61% were Chinese Americans, 21% Korean Americans, and 12% South Asian Americans.
    -Among Asian American voters polled, 95% were Democrats and 5% were Republicans. 
    -Asian American female and male voters polled were split 50%-50%. 
    -30% of Asian Americans polled were 70 years and over, followed by voters aged 60-69 (19%), ages 50 to 59 (16%), ages 40 to 49 (13%), and 11% each for voters aged 30 to 39 and aged 18 to 29.
    Democratic Primary
-86% of Asian American Democrats--women and men of all age groups--supported Clinton , with Obama receiving 14% of the Asian American vote.
    -Among Asian ethnic groups, the greatest support for Clinton came from Chinese American voters (90%); followed by Korean Americans (81%) and South Asian Americans (70%).  
    -91% of Asian American women voted for Clinton and 9% voted for Obama; Asian American men also favored Clinton (80%) over Obama (20%).
    -Asian Americans in all age groups (18-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70 and over) preferred Clinton .  Obama did best among younger Asian Americans, receiving 29% of voters aged 19-29, as compared to 9% of Asian American voters 70 and over.
    Republican Primary
    -68% of Asian American Republicans voted for Sen. John McCain, followed by 12% for Mike Huckabee.  Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney each received 8% of the Asian American vote.
    -Asian American women and men in all age groups favored McCain over the other candidates.
    NEW JERSEY
    Almost 170 Asian American voters were surveyed in New Jersey .  75% were Korean American, 15% South Asian American, 9% Chinese American, and 1% Other Asian American.  Voters were surveyed at 6 poll sites in Palisades Park , Fort Lee, and Edison .  
    Democratic Primary
    - Clinton won 73% of the Asian American vote, with 22% supporting Obama.
    -Korean American voters, the largest Asian ethnic group polled in New Jersey , favored Clinton by 80%, with 16% for Obama.  
    Republican Primary
    -McCain won 56% of Asian American Republicans polled, followed by Giuliani (20%), Romney (16%) and Huckabee (4%).
    AALDEF coordinated the 2008 exit poll of Asian American voters with the assistance of co-sponsors Korean American Voters' Council of NY/NJ and YKASEC: Empowering the Korean American Community.  
    The exit poll questionnaire was available in English, Chinese, and Korean.  More than 100 attorneys, law students, and community volunteers conducted the poll and spoke seven Asian languages or dialects, including Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, Urdu, and Gujarati.  
    AALDEF's multilingual exit polls reveal vital information about Asian American voting patterns regularly overlooked in mainstream voter surveys and provide a snapshot of Asian American voter preferences on candidates, political parties, and policy issues of concern to Asian Americans.  
    In the 2004 Presidential election, AALDEF polled almost 11,000 Asian American voters in 23 cities in eight states.  AALDEF's exit poll reports from the 2006 midterm elections and 2004 presidential elections are available online at www.aaldef.org/voting.php

2/5/08 Dallas Morning News: “Candidates court California Asians,”
by Christy Hoppe
    Los Angeles – In the past few days, Asian-American leaders have been stumping the state for Hillary Rodham Clinton, AsianWeek endorsed Barack Obama and John McCain announced high-ranking Vietnamese-American supporters.
    Beyond the high-visibility pitches for Latino and female voters, the presidential campaigns have reached out to Asian-Americans, one of the fastest-growing California constituencies and a group that could play a big role in who takes home the delegates.
    Asian-American and Pacific Islanders are 12 percent of California 's registered voters – and almost evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.
    But because of tight-knit communities, the AAPI, as they are known, are much more powerful in pockets of the state – for instance, they are 30 percent of the Democratic voters in the San Francisco area.
    "Both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates have been courting the AAPI community," said Republican state Assemblyman Van Tran, who represents a part of Orange County with an Asian-American population of about 450,000.
    He said candidates have held fundraisers and met with AAPI groups beginning months and, in some cases, years ago.
    Because California delegates will be determined by the winner in each of the 53 congressional districts, the AAPI could help award dozens of delegates.
    " California is the big enchilada in terms of delegates," Mr. Tran said. "The AAPI is going to have impact."
    Sunnyvale City Council member Otto Lee, a leader for Mrs. Clinton's outreach campaign, said the main issues for AAPI Democrats are the same as others: economy, education and health care.
    "The overall trend is that the younger people are still more excited with Barack Obama. When you talk about the older voter, the idea of knowledge and strength is what matters, and they tend towards Hillary Clinton," he said.
    Although the AAPI population is equally divided between the GOP and Democratic Party, Mr. Lee believes that the immigration issue and open-door policy for independents will probably drive record numbers into Democratic voting booths today.
    Almost a third of Asian-Americans are registered independents, and the GOP primary in California is open only to registered Republicans.
    On immigration, many in the AAPI are concerned that the tougher Republican stance will prevent family members from being unified, Mr. Lee said.
    Mitt Romney has national Asian-Pacific leaders as advisers and leaders in his campaign, but his efforts have not been as visible as Mr. McCain's.
    "I've been working closely with him," said Mr. Tran, adding that the Arizona senator has visited his district numerous times dating to the 2000 presidential campaign.
    Recently, the campaign has been hit with a revival of a comment that Mr. McCain made on the 2000 campaign bus, when he used an ethnic slur for Asians and said: "I will hate them as long as I live."
    Mr. McCain later explained that he was referring only to his sadistic Vietnamese captors, but the quote remains offensive and is something Mr. Tran has been dealing with lately.
    "They're trying to throw everything at him" now that he's the front-runner, Mr. Tran said, predicting that Mr. McCain will nevertheless win California and the AAPI vote.
    "Senator McCain is perceived as a man who is firm with his conviction and straightforward with his opinion," he said. 

2/5/08 Asian Week: “How Prop. 93 May Affect APA Legislators,”
by Wendy Leung
    Although Proposition 93 is labeled as “Limits on Legislators’ Terms in Office,” its larger effect will allow members of the California Assembly and Senate to serve nearly twice as long in their current seats.
    Prop. 93, while shortening legislators’ overall time in office from 14 to 12 years, lets them serve their entire term in one house. Currently legislators are allowed six years in the Assembly and eight years in the Senate, for a total of 14 years.
    This complicated calculation has placed most APA state politicians in a catch-22.
    Term limits have typically opened doors for APA and other minority candidates. But ask Wilma Chan or Carol Liu, two assemblywomen who termed out in 2006, about these restrictions, and you will find that strict limits also mean that experienced APA lawmakers can get kicked out regardless of their records.
    “Six years is too short, but forever is too long,” said Assemblyman Mike Eng, who backs the measure.
    Freshman legislators like Eng, whose term in the Assembly would have ended in 2012, could stay until 2018 if the initiative passes.
    The Legislature’s leadership has the most at stake with this measure. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, who would normally be termed out this year, could serve three more two-year terms under Prop. 93. Passage of the proposition would also buy Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, who is also facing his final term, four more years.
    While APA lawmakers would serve longer terms in one chamber if this passes, if it fails, there will be a leadership reshuffle, opening up plenty of opportunities for APAs to move into the most powerful legislative positions.
    Most APA legislators are publicly backing Prop. 93, particularly after heavy pressure from Nunez and Perata. But privately, many are also looking to advance their political careers should Prop. 93 fail.
    Eng, who said budget woes have him focused on issues more pressing than the possibility of an open speaker seat, thinks the APA community needs more time to get to know their elected officials.
    “If you had a doctor that you liked a lot and somebody said after six years you’d have to get a new doctor, you’d think that was crazy,” he said.
    Strict term limits seem unfair to Eng, who succeeded his wife, the termed-out Judy Chu.
    “We were complaining that there were no opportunities for Asian Americans to get elected,” Eng said. “Then we allow them to be elected, but we don’t allow them time to do their jobs well.”
    Opponents say the initiative unfairly lengthens the terms of current lawmakers by allowing incumbents to serve 12 years, whether or not they have served in another house.
    For instance, Sen. Leland Yee — who served four years in the Assembly before being elected to the Senate in 2006 — would see his time in the Legislature stretch to 2018.
    Supporters of the measure say six or eight years in one house is hardly enough time for lawmakers to gain the expertise needed for good policy-making.
    “When you’re a freshman,” said Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, who is serving her first term, “you don’t know who’s who, how to get things done or even where the bathroom is.”
    Ma pointed out that 12 out of the 34 Assembly committees are chaired by first-year legislators. That kind of inexperience, she said, leads to problems such as stalled budgets.
    Some argue that longer terms in one house mean less dependence on lobbyists, because lawmakers would have the expertise and clout to say no to them.
    “If a lobbyist knows that you have another eight or 10 years, they would have to deal with you; they can’t really wait you out,” said Assemblyman Ted Lieu, who would be termed out in 2010 if the measure fails. “If you only have two years, it’s easier for them to stymie things.”
    Lieu said Prop. 93 strikes a balance by letting lawmakers gain experience, while still keeping term limits that let fresh faces enter the political field.  “Rapid turnover can lead to institutional damage,” Lieu said. “More than half of Assembly Democrats were elected in the last election. That’s just a strange way of running one of the largest economies in the world.”


1/29/08: STATE OF THE ASIAN AMERICAN AND PACIFIC ISLANDER COMMUNITY 
    Washington , DC – Today, Congressman Mike Honda (D-CA) issued the following statement on the State of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community: 
    "As the nation reflects upon the State of the Union , Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities must not be forgotten. There is much to be proud of. The Asian American and Pacific Islander community is the fastest growing and most diverse racial group in the United States . While our presence has traditionally been concentrated in a few states like California , New York , New Jersey , and Hawai'i , the population is rapidly growing in other states, such as Texas , Minnesota , Michigan and Nevada , with 48 ethnic groups among our ranks. As a diverse community, we have made tremendous economic, political, and social contributions to the United States . Politically, this year, Hawai'i elected the newest Member of Congress of Asian descent, Rep. Mazie Hirono, who is also the newest member of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.
    Economy
    "AAPIs contribute immensely to the U.S. economy. AAPI-owned businesses grew 180 percent between 1987 and 1997. Despite our successes, AAPI communities are in need of greater resources and attention from the Administration and Congress. Like many other communities, our families have been hit hard by the dire state of the economy. Homeownership rates of AAPIs continue to lag behind the national average of 66.2 percent. Among Asian Americans, 53.2 percent live in owner-occupied housing; among Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders the figure is even lower, at 45.5 percent. The use of subprime loans among Asian Americans grew by 181 percent from 2004 to 2005. As a result many borrowers are placed in risky mortgage products that do not reflect their risk.
    Education
    "To strengthen our economy, we need to invest in long-term solutions such as education. For Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, it may be tempting to assume that all of our students are faring well in school. The picture looks very different when we take a real look at our diverse community. While the AAPI community as a whole has a higher rate of individuals holding a bachelor's degree (BA), (i.e. 38% compared to 21% of the general population), Southeast Asians have significantly lower percentages of individuals holding a BA. Only 17% of Vietnamese Americans, 7% of Laotian Americans, 6% of Cambodian Americans, and 3% of Hmong Americans hold BAs. 
    "English Language Learners (ELLs) face some of the toughest challenges among AAPI students, yet they are largely underserved. ELLs are often not given enough time to develop English-language proficiency before being required to take the same assessments as their native English-speaking peers, and schools do not often provide adequate transitional bilingual education or supplemental services to ELLs. We must ensure that ELLs have access to adequate services to help them achieve the same level of success of their native English-speaking peers.
    "If we do not dispel the myth that all of our students are doing well in school, we will miss the opportunity to fully engage these students, who have so much potential to contribute to our communities. One major problem is that lack of disaggregated data of school performance for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. I will continue to fight hard to ensure that accurate data is available for our community, one of the most diverse and fastest growing communities in the nation.  
    Healthcare
    "There are many health disparities that still exist among our communities. At least 17.7% of Asian Americans and 21.8% of Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders do not have health insurance compared to 11.2% of non-Hispanic whites. This represents a total of 2.3 million AAPIs who are without health care coverage. Studies show that as many as 54% of Korean American, and 32% of Vietnamese American adults, age 18-64, are uninsured, compared to 15% of the total population. AAPIs are also less likely than white Americans to have job-based health insurance coverage. Additionally, AAPI women have the lowest rate of cancer screening compared to other ethnic groups and AAPIs make up over half of the cases of chronic Hepatitis B. CAPAC along with our Tri-Caucus partners have introduced the Health Equity and Accountability Act that would bring us closer to closing the racial and ethnic disparities in our communities. 
    Language Access 
    "I have heard many stories of failed access to services because of language issues. 24.7% of the AAPI population is linguistically isolated. When disaggregated, the percentages are even greater in the Southeast Asian community: 45% of Vietnamese Americans, 31.8% of Cambodian and Laotian Americans, and 35.1% of Hmong Americans are linguistically isolated. Patients with limited English proficiency are less likely to understand explanations of medical procedures, medication instructions, and less likely to receive needed financial assistance for health care. A Hmong man had the wrong leg amputated because there were no interpreters available. Vietnamese shrimpers were left behind when they needed critical emergency assistance after Katrina and Rita hit. Language access pervades all public arenas including voting rights, education, and other government services. We need to do more to integrate newcomers into our communities. That is why I will be introducing legislation in the spring that will help individuals and families learn English and will support community-driven integration initiatives. 
    Immigration
    "On the immigration front, we must enact true comprehensive immigration reform to fix our broken immigration system. Two million in our communities are waiting to be reconnected with family members, stuck in decades-long immigration backlogs. Those working hard in the shadows of American society without documentation include 1.5 million Asians. We must also restore due process, fairness, and respect for civil liberties in the immigration system. 
    "Recently, the Administration entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Vietnamese government that will lead to the repatriation of thousands of Vietnamese. I am very concerned that the agreement was entered into without accounting for potential political persecution of those deported when they return to Vietnam . I will continue to monitor the situation to ensure that human rights concerns are at the forefront. 
    Military
    "With respect to the military, there are 62,378 AAPIs who are on active duty in the military, disproportionately constituting 4.5% of those on active duty. There are also 7,904 AAPIs who are currently deployed in the global war on terrorism. Active duty members are also disproportionately racial minorities. 35.9%, or 492,735, of active duty members identify themselves as racial minorities. We must ensure that our brave men and women in uniform have the resources they need to do their jobs. At the same time, our country needs a new direction in Iraq in order to bring our troops home as soon as possible. 
    Filipino Veterans
    "Furthermore, we have an obligation to uphold our promises to those who have valiantly served in our nation's military. During World War II, more than 200,000 Filipino soldiers served alongside U.S. troops, making vital contributions to the defeat of Japan . The American government promised that all Filipino soldiers who fought under the Stars and Stripes would be treated as American veterans with full benefits. In 1946, in one of its least decorous acts, Congress rescinded this promise. The time has come to recognize Filipino soldiers as full U.S. veterans, making this aging population eligible for U.S. veterans' benefits, including access to quality medical care at Veterans Affairs facilities. 
    Conclusion
    "As Chair of CAPAC, I urge this Administration and Members of the 110th Congress to make these issues a priority. I will work with other Members of Congress, particularly with Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus, to keep the American Dream of equal opportunity alive. I also welcome President Bush's call for bipartisan efforts and hope that the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders will work with us to address these issues."
    The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC) is comprised of Members of Congress of Asian and Pacific Islander descent and members who have a strong dedication to promoting the well-being of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. Since 1994, CAPAC has been addressing the needs of the AAPI community in all areas of American life. For more information on CAPAC, please call (202) 225-2631 or visit http://www.honda.house.gov/capac.

1/23/08 Sacramento Bee: "Citizenship applicants should expect long wait; For 20 people, last step comes just in time for voter sign-up,"
by Susan Ferriss
    Immigrants waiting to become U.S. citizens "shouldn't get their hopes up" that projected long delays in processing applications will be shortened, said Emilio Gonzalez, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, who was in Sacramento on Tuesday.
    "Becoming a citizen is so special, you can't fast-track it. What we won't do is sacrifice security," said Gonzalez, who responded to criticism of the delays during an interview at the Leland Stanford Mansion in Sacramento.
    Gonzalez was at the mansion for a special ceremony to swear in 20 new citizens from Northern California. He was visiting immigration officials in Sacramento, where his federal agency has an office. Citizenship Services is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 
    Gonzalez's agency reviews citizenship applications. It is facing criticism that hundreds of thousands of people won't be allowed to vote in November because of delays that could have been avoided.
    Tuesday was the last day to register to vote in California's Feb. 5 primary election. Some of the new Americans Gonzalez swore in said they were eager to mail in voter registration forms before the end of the day.
    The agency predicts that citizenship applications filed after last July could take almost three times longer to process in some cities than last year. The average wait has grown from seven months to 16 to 18 months in some cities.
    The reason, Gonzalez said, is a dramatic surge in applications, especially right before citizenship fees increased 69 percent – from $400 to $675 – on July 30.
About 1.4 million applications were filed from October
2006 to September 2007, nearly double the amount filed the year before.
    Labor unions with immigrant members and Latino voting rights advocates – who began a nationwide citizenship campaign a year ago – say Gonzalez's agency should have been prepared for the flood of new applications, which was widely predicted.
    Now the agency has to manage the surge in applications from last year, on top of a backlog of hundreds of thousands of applications that already were piled up in offices before the fee increase. The agency requested the fee increases last year, arguing that it needed more money so it could whittle away at the backlog and offer financial aid to the FBI, which conducts background checks on applicants.
    Gonzalez said his agency has hired several hundred new employees and is aiming to hire or retrain a total of 3,000 workers to tackle the applications. Spokespeople for the agency have suggested that it might be able to shorten delays, but Gonzalez was firm Tuesday that he doubts that will be possible in general.
    "It's not a question of money now," he said, explaining that it takes time to train staff to examine applications and test applicants. "I would just tell folks they have to be patient."
    Prolonged delays could still be avoided with better planning and reorganization inside the agency, according to Arturo Vargas, executive director of the Los Angeles-based National Association of Latino Elected Officials, who testified Thursday at a congressional immigration subcommittee hearing probing why Citizenship Services is anticipating such long delays.
    FBI checks of applicants' names are a primary reason why some applications are delayed, Gonzalez said.
    At the congressional hearing, Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, said that separate FBI name checks are simply duplicating what obligatory FBI fingerprint checks already do and could be eliminated without risk to national security.
    But Gonzalez said Tuesday that a thorough review is needed to prevent the naturalization of people with histories that should disqualify them.
    He said that in the 1990s demands to quickly process citizenship applications resulted in "unmitigated disaster," with failures to detect applicants who were not eligible.
    Two new citizens sworn in Tuesday consider themselves lucky to have completed the citizenship process in seven months.
    Walter Leal, a University of California, Davis, professor, and his wife, Beatriz, are natives of Brazil. They had envelopes ready to mail voter registration forms they had brought with them.
    Leal said he plans to vote in the Democratic Party primary for Hillary Rodham Clinton. He came of age in Brazil when that country was ruled by a military dictatorship, and he lived abroad after that.
    "I have never voted for a president in my entire life," he said.

  

1/19/08 Wall Street Journal: “Commentary: Terrorist Tort Travesty,”
by John Yoo
    War is a continuation of politics by other means, the German strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously observed in his 19th-century treatise, "On War."
    Clausewitz surely could never have imagined that politics, pursued through our own courts, would be the continuation of war.
    Last week, I (a former Bush administration official) was sued by José Padilla -- a 37-year-old al Qaeda operative convicted last summer of setting up a terrorist cell in Miami . Padilla wants a declaration that his detention by the U.S. government was unconstitutional, $1 in damages, and all of the fees charged by his own attorneys.
    The lawsuit by Padilla and his Yale Law School lawyers is an effort to open another front against U.S. anti-terrorism policies. If he succeeds, it won't be long before opponents of the war on terror use the courtroom to reverse the wartime measures needed to defeat those responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on 9/11.
    On Thursday, a federal judge moved closer to sentencing Padilla to life in prison. After being recruited by al Qaeda agents in the late 1990s, Padilla left for Egypt in 1998 and reached terrorist training camps in Afghanistan in 2000. American officials stopped him at Chicago O'Hare airport in 2002, based on intelligence gained from captured al Qaeda leaders that he was plotting a dirty bomb attack.
    President Bush declared Padilla an enemy combatant and ordered him sent to a naval brig in South Carolina .
    After a federal appeals court rejected Padilla's plea for release, the government transferred him to Miami for trial for al Qaeda conspiracies unrelated to the dirty bomb plot. Federal prosecutors described Padilla as "a trained al-Qaeda killer," and a jury convicted him of conspiring to commit murder, kidnapping and maiming, and of providing material support to terrorists.
    Now Padilla and his lawyers are trying to use our own courts to attack the government officials who stopped him. They claim that the government cannot detain Padilla as an enemy combatant, but instead can only hold and try him as a criminal. Padilla alleges that he was abused in military custody -- based primarily on his claim that he was held in isolation and not allowed to meet with lawyers.
    But enemy prisoners in wartime never before received the right to counsel or a civilian trial because, as the Supreme Court observed in 2004, the purpose of detention is not to punish, but to prevent the enemy from returning to the fight.
    Under Padilla's theory, the U.S. is not at war, so any citizen killed or captured by the CIA or the military can sue. In November 2002, according to press reports, a Predator drone killed two al Qaeda leaders driving in the Yemen desert. One was an American, Kamal Derwish, who was suspected of leading a terrorist cell near Buffalo . If Padilla's lawsuit were to prevail, Derwish's survivors could sue everyone up the chain of command -- from the agent who pressed the button, personally -- for damages.
    Padilla's complaints mirror the left's campaign against the war. To them, the 9/11 attacks did not start a war, but instead were simply a catastrophe, like a crime or even a natural disaster. They would limit the U.S. response only to criminal law enforcement managed by courts, not the military. Every terrorist captured away from the Afghanistan battlefield would have the right to counsel, Miranda warnings, and a criminal trial that could force the government to reveal its vital intelligence secrets.
    America used this approach in the 1990s with al Qaeda.  It did not work. Both the executive and legislative branches rejected this failed strategy. In the first week after 9/11, Congress passed a law authorizing the use of military force against any person, group or nation connected to the attacks, and recognized the President's constitutional authority "to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States ."

1/18/08 Washington Post: "U.S. Citizenship Application Logjam May Take Years To Unblock,"
by Spencer S. Hsu 
    The director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said yesterday that it will take the federal government three years to clear a huge surge of citizenship applications filed last summer and return processing times to a six-month standard. 
    USCIS received 3 million applications for naturalization, green cards and other immigration benefits last summer, compared with 1.8 million in 2006. Officials attributed the influx to immigrants seeking to apply before a well-publicized fee increase took effect July 30, concern over the harsh tone of the nation's debate over illegal immigration and interest in the 2008 elections. 
    As a result, USCIS announced it will take 18 months to process applications filed after June 1, 2007, up from about seven months. 
    Testifying to a House Judiciary Committee subcommittee, USCIS Director Emilio T. Gonzalez said that the agency has detailed 84 workers to regional service centers, and beefed up its contract staff. It has hired 274 of a projected 723 new adjudicators using new revenue from fee increases and identified 469 retired adjudicators that the Office of Personnel Management has given USCIS permission to rehire. 
    "Our two year response plan will help us accomplish reducing processing times to six months by the third quarter of Fiscal 2010," which ends June 30, Gonzalez said in his written testimony. 
    Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), chairman of the immigration subcommittee, said in an interview that she believes that Gonzalez "cares about this, but I also think that timeline is unacceptable. This was an entirely foreseeable surge. . . . We're going to do our best to get them the resources they need to properly process applications." 

1/15/08 Las Vegas Review-Journal: “Asians, Pacific Islanders rally for caucus,” by Lynnette Curtis 
    Three generations of the Koh family were at a Chinatown rally Monday afternoon meant to encourage more Asian American and Pacific Islander Democrats to participate in the upcoming presidential caucus.
    But the Kohs didn't need any encouragement. Even 4-year-old Jordan, the youngest of the clan, knows something about politics.
    When asked whom he supports in the caucus, the youngster, who was clad in a red, white and blue sweatshirt, answered: "Obama or Hillary."
    Though Jordan remained undecided, his grandparents, Zaida and Ambrocio Koh, are staunch Hillary Clinton supporters.
    "It's about time we had a woman president," Zaida Koh, 73, said.
    "I think she's more frank, more sincere" than Obama, Ambrocio Koh, 76, said.
    Jordan's mom, Katrina Koh, 41, said the concerns of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders mirror those of the rest of the community.
    "The economy, affordable health care, education, the housing market," she said.
    But some members of the group may have stronger feelings about immigration than other minorities because they haven't been able to bring their families legally to the United States, while people coming over the border illegally get in right away.
    Ambrocio Koh, for example, said he's been waiting years to bring his mother and sister over from the Philippines.
    "It's not fair," he said.
    Still, he favors a sympathetic approach to immigration reform.
    "It's important to give people a chance if they're already here."
    Monday's event may have been arranged partly in response to complaints to the Democrats that Asians were not being included in today's debate focusing on issues that concern minorities.
    Asians comprise about 7 percent of Clark County residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
    But the Kohs and others among the crowd of more than 100 people said Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, in order to get noticed, need to be more politically active than they have in the past.
    "We have to come up, to push more like we're doing now," said Leddie Garcia, a 42-year-old entertainer who was sporting a mohawk and who identified himself as having "this whole Chinese, Pacific Islander thing going on."
    Garcia said he's supporting Obama because of the candidate's ability to "pull everybody together."
    Nevada's Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Shelley Berkley attended the rally, along with Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., Rep. Eni Faleomavaega, D-American Samoa, and Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii.

Please write Yale to protest this harassment of an Asian American, especially if you attended Yale.

Harold Koh
Dean
Yale Law School
P.O. Box 208215
New Haven CT 06520-8215
203-432-1660
harold.koh@yale.edu or georganne.rogers@yale.edu

Bigots for the Left Harass Asian American
1/10/08 Wall Street Journal: Editorial: Yale and the Terrorist
    John Yoo can be forgiven if he's having second thoughts about his career choice. A Yale Law School graduate, the Berkeley professor of law went on to serve his country at the Justice Department. Yet last week he was sued by convicted terrorist Jose Padilla and his mother, who are represented by none other than lawyers at Yale. Perhaps if Mr. Yoo had decided to pursue a life of terrorism, he too could be represented by his alma mater.

Padilla is the American citizen who was arrested in 2002, and detained as an "enemy combatant" in a military brig in Charleston , S.C. , under suspicion of plotting to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a U.S. city. Padilla fought his detention on Constitutional grounds, losing his case in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In January 2006, the feds transferred him out of military custody to be tried in civilian court in Miami . The dirty bomb charge was never filed because the military hadn't read him his Miranda rights or provided him a lawyer when he was interrogated. A jury nonetheless took a day and half last August to convict him of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas. Padilla could get life in prison.

    Mr. Yoo is the former deputy assistant attorney general who wrote memos laying out some of the legal parameters in the war on terror. Those memos most famously pertained to interrogation techniques, some of which were used against such enemy combatants as Padilla. Mr. Yoo long ago returned to Berkeley , and we are happy to say he sometimes writes for us.
    Now, years later, Mr. Yoo is being harassed by a lawsuit claiming he is personally liable for writing those memos as a midlevel government official. "Defendant Yoo subjected Mr. Padilla to illegal conditions of confinement and treatment that shocks the conscience in violation of Mr. Padilla's Fifth Amendment Rights to procedural and substantive due process," the complaint asserts.
    But Padilla's rights weren't violated, and certainly not by Mr. Yoo, whose legal arguments at the time were accepted by his superiors, including Attorney General John Ashcroft. The decision to hold Padilla as an enemy combatant was made by President Bush, and defended in court by executive branch lawyers. They won that case in the most senior court in which it was heard, in an opinion written by then-Judge Michael Luttig of the Fourth Circuit. The Bush Administration later transferred Padilla to be tried in the Miami court, and the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. Padilla got his day in court -- on both Constitutional and criminal grounds -- and lost.
    What we really have here is less a tort claim than a political stunt intended to intimidate government officials. Nothing in the claim will change Padilla's future, and the suit asks for only $1 in damages, plus legal fees. Instead, the suit seeks "a judgment declaring that the acts alleged herein are unlawful and violate the Constitution and laws of the United States ." In short, the Yale attorneys are using Padilla as a legal prop in one more attempt to find a judge willing to declare that the Bush Administration's antiterror policies are illegal. And if it can harass Mr. Yoo with bad publicity and legal costs along the way, so much the better.
    This is nasty business and would have damaging consequences if it worked. Government officials have broad legal immunity (save for criminal acts) precisely so they can make decisions without worrying about personal liability. If political appointees can be sued years later for advice that was accepted by their superiors, we will soon have a government run not by elected officials but by tort lawyers and judges.
    The antiwar left has failed to overturn U.S. policies in Congress, or by directly challenging the government in court. So its latest tactic is suing third parties, such as the telephone companies that cooperated on al Qaeda wiretaps after 9/11. And now it is suing former government officials, hoping to punish them and deter future appointees from offering any advice that the left dislikes.
    Which brings us back to Yale. The real litigant here is the National Litigation Project at the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School . That sounds august, but this is really a leftwing bucket shop using Yale's sponsorship to achieve antiwar policy goals via lawsuit. We trust the dean of Yale Law, Harold Koh, is proud of suing an alumnus on behalf of a terrorist, and that Yale's other alumni know how their donations are being used.

1/10/08 Reuters: “Asian Americans voters face discrimination: report,” 
by Matthew Bigg
   Atlanta (Reuters) - Asian American voters fear the discrimination some faced at polling stations in 2006 could resurface as they cast ballots in November's presidential election, a civil rights group said on Thursday.
   Laws that enable Asian Americans from countries including China , Korea , Vietnam and the Philippines to get language and other kinds of assistance with voting were often flouted at the 2006 mid-term congressional elections, according to the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
   The group cited examples of Asian Americans being asked to provide more identification than other citizens, in contravention of federal law. Those not on voter rolls but still eligible to vote were often not given provisional ballots to complete, it said in a report.
   Under the landmark Voting Rights Act and a subsequent act, election officials in districts with more than 10,000 registered Asian Americans, or ones where their voting population exceeds 5 percent of a district's total, are mandated to provide certain help.
   The provisions also apply in areas where there are low levels of literacy and people speak an Asian language, and mandate help such as translators and translated ballots and registration forms.
   "Our major concern is that there is going to be a large number of newly registered Asian voters (in 2008) and many of the problems we have observed in 2006 will not have been fixed," said Margaret Fung, executive director of the fund.
   She said that on polling day in 2006 there were many examples of "racist and intimidatory" remarks to Asian Americans such as: "'How come you don't speak English?', 'Why don't you go back to your home country?' and 'You're turning this country into a dump.'"
   The group said it registered 200 complaints during monitoring of 172 polling sites and a multilingual survey of over 4,700 Asian American voters in nine states.
   The Asian American community is predominantly immigrant and some 670,000 are covered under the provisions of the Voting Rights Act. The majority live in Los Angeles or elsewhere in California . The next largest group lives in New York , followed by Hawaii , Houston and Chicago , Fung said.
   Mandarin or other Chinese dialects are the largest language group, Fung said.
   Exit polls taken in nine states in 2006 showed that four out of five Asian Americans voted for the Democratic Party but Fung said she did not know if the problems some encountered were an attempt to disenfranchise them for political reasons.
   "Asian Americans, even though they are citizens, are still perceived as foreigners. As part of an anti-immigrant sentiment that seems to be on the rise there is hostility and some sense that these people are newcomers and don't belong," she said.
   The economy and jobs were the most important issues for Asian Americans, followed by health care, the war in Iraq and education, she said, citing a survey. Many Asian Americans were also concerned about long waits to process paperwork needed to bring family members to the United States , she said. 

1/9/08 Wall Street Journal Editorial: Defining Diversity Down
    The world gets more competitive every day, so why would California 's education elites want to dumb down their public university admissions standards? The answer is to serve the modern liberal piety known as "diversity" while potentially thwarting the will of the voters.
    The University of California Board of Admissions is proposing to lower to 2.8 from 3.0 the minimum grade point average for admission to a UC school. That 3.0 GPA standard has been in place for 40 years. Students would also no longer be required to take the SAT exams that test for knowledge of specific subjects, such as history and science. UC Board of Admissions Chairman M