NY governor signs bill to make AANHPI "invisible no more"

 A woman holds up signs during a Rally Against Hate to end discrimination against Asian Americans and
Pacific Islanders in New York City,

A bill signed last week by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul mandates that any state agency collecting data about ethnicity or ancestry will have to discard the overly broad "Asian American" category and break it down to specific ethnicities and nationalities.

In the future, state departments will have to have data on Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Laotian, Cambodian, Bangladeshi and Hmong communities as well categories for Pacific Islander groups, including Native Hawaiians, Guamanians, Chamorros and Samoans.

The new law signed by Hochul on Dec. 22 was hailed by AANHPI community groups that have pushed for data disaggregation for over a decade. As the AANHPI community has grown, the fastest growing group in New York, so has the community's needs. AANHPI make up about 6% of New York, or almost 2 million, most of whom are concentrated in New York City, according to teh 2020 Census.

Vanessa Leung and Anita Gundanna, Co-Executive Directors of the Coalition of Asian American Children+Families, said in a statement:

"Asian American communities across New York State embody much diversity in ethnicity, and also in experiences of poverty, immigration, and in languages, cultures, and histories. For too long, the systemic erasure of the inequities within the Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander communities has resulted in failed policy responses. With the passage of this bill through the Assembly and Senate, we are one step closer to dispelling the model minority myth and providing a better understanding of the real challenges facing New York's fastest growing population.

"Such data is critical to ensuring that Asian American communities across NY State are better understood and provided the resources and services needed to recover and heal from the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the recent increase in anti-Asian violence."

Community advocates united to form the Invisible No More Campaign to lobby for the disaggregation bill.

The wide disparities within the broad Asian American communities masks the needs of those groups who are on the low end of the economic scale, hides the health needs of different ethnicities and erases housing woes and poverty experienced by many Asian American groups and political representatives.

"Asian Americans are not a monolith. Our communities are the most impoverished but receive the least help, often due to the lack of culturally appropriate services or language access," state Assembly member Yuh-Line Niou, who sponsored the bill, said in a statement.

“As New York continues to face the devastation caused by the COVID-19 public health crisis, it is essential that the needs of all of our communities be understood and met," said Senator Julia Salazar, who led the effort in the state senate. "For the diverse Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in New York this cannot be accomplished without detailed data that recognizes and respects the experiences of the numerous groups that make up the AAPI communities. This law takes a bold step towards making that possible."

“For too long and too often, NYS has broken down data by race/ethnicity for other communities, but has completely omitted Asian Americans - often categorizing us as simply ‘others,’ said Rep. Grace Meng, who in 2011 first introduced a bill asking for the disaggregation of AAPI data.

"Without this broken down data, it has been very difficult to assess where the greatest needs are and to properly match language needs with populations who need the most help such as which students and their families need which types of language resources, which types of resources are needed to provide help to address mental health, which communities suffer from which chronic illnesses, etc.

"Even as Asian Americans, we don’t know the true extent as to who needs help the most. If we truly care about our Asian American community, we have to make sure that no one is left behind and no one is invisible, especially the poorest and most vulnerable amongst us," said Meng. "The amount of funding that has gone towards helping the AAPI community has for too long fallen drastically behind the rate of population growth, and this law will finally help us bridge some of that gap and provide long overdue resources and funding to our community.”

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