Different Folks

(Cover; Documentary: John Wehman, Filipino-Americans: Discovering their Past for the Future, 1994)

According to the the 2005 Bureau of Census estimates, there are now about 14 million people who call themselves Asian-Americans in the United States - accounting for about a little over 5% of the total population. This estimate shows a growth of over 60% since the 1990 census, making the Asian-Americans the fastest growing of all the racial/ethnic groups. Such massive growth is expected in the future given that we are younger than the national population and our life expectancy the longest among all groups.

Why is such information important? Well, this means that as a political and social group, Asian-Americans is certainly a growingly important number to reckon with. As our numbers grow, so do our needs, our impact, and hopefully, proportionally, our influence too. The implications of these statistics on public policies and allocation of resources and services should be seriously considered. We should be at the forefront of such discussions if our interests are going to be well-served.

These days, such discussions often center around health care, access and costs. We must realize that we have unique health needs that are only magnified by our diversity, and that we are faced with barriers that affect our health and well-being.

The Office of Minority Health - an agency created by the Department of Health and Human Services in 1986 charged with improving and protecting the health of racial and ethnic minority populations - recognized this much. The following is an excerpt of the agency's profile of Asian American health:

Asian Americans contend with numerous factors which may threaten their health. Some negative factors are infrequent medical visits due to the fear of deportation, language/cultural barriers, and the lack of health insurance. Asian Americans are most at risk for the following health conditions: cancer, heart disease, stroke, unintentional injuries (accidents), and diabetes. Asian Americans also have a high prevalence of the following conditions and risk factors: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hepatitis B, HIV/AIDS, smoking, tuberculosis, and liver disease.

Information such as this should alert us about the areas that we must pay close attention to. Ideally, specific resources should abound that would lend us a ready hand when our needs arise, but sadly this is not yet so. But growing work is at hand to fill the the void where resources, research and information should be that are responsive to the needs of the Asian-Americans.

Meanwhile, we must equip ourselves with information that would be helpful in influencing policies and shaping public opinion. Politicians and policy-makers are famous about "knowing their constituency." We must do the same thing; we must know ourselves - who we are, what we do, what our needs are, and why we are relevant. Only by knowing it ourselves can we convince others of our own significance. Every policy or program that deal with populations begins with statistics - indeed, there is power in numbers so to speak. There is a wealth of information in our demographics. I suggest that we start getting interested about what the census say about us. I am posting two links on the Chop Reads section of this blog to two informative documents published by the US Census in 2000 and 2004. These two documents: The Asian Population: 2000 and We the People: Asians in United States, 2004 provide a details about the distribution and important health, economic, political and social characteristics of the Asian-American population.