Asian-American Groups Set Agenda for Presidential Campaign

Posted by on March 5, 2004

[posted from Demos: Democracy Dispatch]

Asian-American Groups Set Agenda for Presidential Campaign

A new coalition of Asian-American groups has released a 70-page platform in an attempt to get presidential candidates to focus on issues affecting their communities. Seventeen organizations called for new policies and programs to fight discrimination, secure the right to vote, and improve access to education and healthcare, among other things. The call for new measures to combat poverty was especially pronounced, given the fact that 38 percent of Hmong, 29 percent of Cambodians, 19 percent of Laotians and 16 percent of Vietnamese fell below the poverty line in 2000. The agenda also calls for immigration reform; two-thirds of Asian-Americans were born outside the U.S. “We felt that none of the candidates were really paying attention to our community,” said Karen Narasaki, president of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium. “In the area of civil rights, a lot of Americans tend to think that Asian-Americans are doing well… [but they] don’t understand that our community does face discrimination in many different forms.”

For more information, visit their website: http://www.napalc.org/ or go directly to the platform http://www.napalc.org/programs/2004_Call_to_Action.pdf