NJ Asian American advocates call for more detailed demographic data to improve public policy

RUTGERS

AANHPI students at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

A bill, AB 3092, requiring disaggregating data collected by the state of New Jersey in order to better serve the diverse Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities passed the New Jersey Assembly Wednesday by a vote of 71-2 with 4 abstentions, 

Below an article written before the vote is reprinted from the New Jersey Monitor.

By Dana Difilippo
REPRINTED FROM THE NEW JERSEY MONITOR

From doctor’s offices to new employers, people filling out forms are given usually just a few choices to define their race and ethnicity — white, Black, Hispanic/Latino, and Asian or sometimes just “other.”

In New Jersey, where Asians are the fastest-growing racial demographic and comprise 11% of the population, the catch-all categories of Asian and “other” can be frustrating.

“Our countries of origin span over 50 countries that speak hundreds of languages, with as many cultures,” said Laura Zhang Choi of advocacy group Make Us Visible New Jersey.

And for policymakers, such a broad category can result in bad policies that exclude or hurt the populations they’re meant to serve.

Several state lawmakers aim to right that oversight. They introduced legislation this year that would require state agencies to widen the demographic data they collect on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to include Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian and Indian diaspora residents.

The bill, which the Assembly’s state and local government committee advanced unanimously last week, is set for a full Assembly vote Wednesday. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a similar bill into law in December.

“The principle behind this is that good policy comes from good data,” said Assemblywoman Sadaf Jaffer (D-Somerset), a prime sponsor of the bill.

As communities become more diverse, breaking demographics into smaller, more specific categories — called data disaggregation — helps uncover trends and inequities in those groups, Jaffer said.

Such information, then, can help community leaders better target services and solutions to erase those disparities, said Assemblyman Raj Mukherji (D-Hudson), another sponsor. Mukherji said it’s unfair to “homogenize folks from an entire continent.”

(Photo courtesy of Laura Choi)

Laura Zhang Choi of Make Us Visible NJ rallies at the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice’s Immigrant Heritage Day of Action on June 22, 2022, at the Statehouse in Trenton. 

“And it puts certain subgroups at risk of being underserved. When you’re serving such diverse immigrant and ethnic communities, it’s important to break down the regional categorization so that you don’t make any one group invisible when you’re trying to figure out how to make government work for them,” he said.

People from different demographics can have vastly different experiences in everything from education to health care to financial stability, and those experiences should shape services and policies for those communities, said Assemblyman Sterley Stanley (D-Middlesex), another sponsor.

South Asians have higher risks of cardiovascular diseases than the general population and consequently have different health needs, Stanley said. Taiwanese Americans have far higher rates of educational attainment than people from Bhutan, where ethnic tensions created a refugee crisis, Choi said.

“Ensuring equity through data representation means we can get a better understanding of the health and socioeconomic needs of our Asian populations,” Stanley said.