The term ‘Asian’ may be overly broad but California is stuck with it

*This is very interesting! Many immigration projections have Asians surpassing Latinos in the not too distant future. Already, Asian immigration is growing at a fast pace. A recent letter to the editor asked “If Asian is to broad, what about “Latino”? It seems that Asians, lumped together as they are, are going through the same issues of identity politics as Latinos. VL

By Frank Shyong, The Los Angeles Times

Many of California’s Hmong immigrants arrived as refugees from war and genocide and have struggled, remaining one of the poorest ethnic groups in the state. By contrast, Taiwanese immigrants typically came to California with more money and education, and they now rank among the state’s most affluent groups.

About 70% of California’s Indian Americans older than 25 hold bachelor’s degrees, but that’s true for just 10% of California’s Laotian Americans. Differences like these are what motivated legislators to propose a bill that would have asked state colleges and universities and a health agency to collect more detailed data on at least a dozen specific Asian nationalities, rather than lumping them together in a single category.

AB 176 passed unanimously in the state Senate and drew just one dissenting vote in the Assembly.

Yet earlier this month, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed it, expressing concern about “an ever growing desire to stratify.”

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