The State of AAPIs

Seven years into the Obama Administration, here’s what the president has done on the issues we care about most

Tonight, President Obama will deliver his final State of the Union address. He is expected to offer his optimistic outlook for the nation’s future. As the White House previewed in an email, his speech will be “about who we are, where we’re headed, and what kind of country we want to be…”

Before we hear from the president this evening, here are our thoughts on the State of the Union for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, seven years into Obama’s presidency, as well our hopes for his final year in office.

IMMIGRATION

While President Obama will go down in history as the “deporter-in-chief” — a name warranted for deporting more immigrants than any president before him — he has also offered relief for many families when Congress failed to pass immigration reform, including:

• Filipino WWII veterans: In recognition of their service and sacrifice, President Obama’s administration announced in July 2015 that it would permit certain families members of Filipino World War II veterans to request special permission to live in the U.S. Due to the existing backlog for family-based visas, these veterans have been waiting years, and often decades, to bring their children to the United States. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will use a mechanism called “parole” to allow eligible family members of veterans to live and work in the United States.
• DREAMers: In 2012, Obama’s administration showed leadership when it implemented the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that allowed certain young undocumented immigrants to apply for two-year stays of deportation and work permits. The DACA program was a tremendous victory for immigrants. An estimated 110,000 AAPIs are eligible for DACA, which has been life-changing for people who received this relief.
• Families of DREAMERS: Building on the success of DACA and after a sustained campaign from immigrants, in 2014 President Obama announced an expansion of DACA to older undocumented immigrants and the creation of a similar deferred action program for undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents (known as DAPA). Over 4 million immigrants, including nearly 500,000 AAPIs, would benefit from DAPA and expanded DACA. Unfortunately, neither action was able to begin due to ongoing litigation. We are hopeful Obama will prevail in court and families can begin applying for this important relief.
• Spouses of temporary workers: Under President Obama’s leadership, DHS issued a new rule to allow certain spouses (H-4 visa holders) of temporary workers (H-1B visa holders) to apply for employment eligibility. The rule went into effect May 26, 2015 and is welcome relief for thousands of H-4 visa spouses who have been lawfully present in the U.S. but unable to work legally. In 2013, a total of 96,753 individuals were granted H-4 visas. Of those, approximately 86 percent were from Asian countries. Six of the top ten countries of origin for H-4 dependents are Asian countries, namely India, China, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, and Pakistan — with individuals from India making up the overwhelming majority of H-4 visa holders. DHS estimates that the number of people who would benefit from this change would be “as high as 179,600 in the first year and 55,000 annually in subsequent years.”

VOTING RIGHTS

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which had for decades prevented discrimination in voting practices in states and regions that had a history of voter discrimination. See how the Voting Rights Act has protected Asian Americans right to vote.

Since then, we’ve looked to Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act. President Obama has been a big supporter of restoring the Voting Rights Act to its glory, calling on Congress to take action and bring him a bill he can sign.

Last year, just one day after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, President Obama took the opportunity during his State of the Union to address the need to restore voting rights, following an election year when new voter ID laws caused confusion and made it more difficult to vote in some states.

“We can agree that the right to vote is sacred; that it’s being denied to too many; and that, on this 50th anniversary of the great march from Selma to Montgomery and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, we can come together, Democrats and Republicans, to make voting easier for every single American.”

In March of 2015, on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in 1965, the President marched with voting rights activists on Edmund Pettus Bridge.

In August of 2015, the President commemorated the 50th anniversary of President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law to protect the right to vote, noting that if the trend toward discouraging voters from voting is “allowed to continue unanswered, then over time the hard-won battles of 50 years ago erode, and our democracy erodes.” He once again called on Congress to get to work on a legislative solution, starting with the pieces of legislation already introduced.

HEALTH CARE

President Obama’s landmark health care legislation — the Affordable Care Act — has helped Asian Americans who are now taking advantage of having health coverage.

According to the Center for American Progress and Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum, before the ACA, one in every six AAPIs were uninsured. Among some AAPI groups — such as Korean, Tongan, Pakistani, and Thai Americans — nearly one in four people were uninsured. The ACA has expanded AAPIs’ access to high-quality health care. After the first round of enrollment, an additional 600,000 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders gained insurance coverage, and 121,000 young AAPI adults between ages 19 and 26 gained coverage under a parent’s employer-sponsored or individually purchased health insurance plan. By 2016, 2 million otherwise uninsured AAPIs will gain or be eligible for coverage.

Although language and cultural barriers have limited the reach of the ACA’s benefit to AAPIs, organizations have found effective ways to transcend these barriers. For example, Action for Health Justice partnered with local organizations and small businesses to translate health insurance marketplace materials into Hindi, Korean, Farsi, Mandarin, and Arabic Urdu, among many others, as well as to provide multilingual and multicultural assistance for the AAPI community.

There’s been a lot of good done over the last seven years. But there’s much left to do.

IN THE NEXT YEAR, WE CALL ON THE PRESIDENT’S ADMINISTRATION TO:

• Announce and implement parole for the Filipino veterans, as it has promised. It has been almost 6 months since the parole program was announced and it has not yet been implemented. The Administration has not even shared who will be eligible or what the application process will look like. Every day that passes without action represents a hardship for veterans and their family members. We urge the administration to act quickly to make good on this promising start.
• Conduct better outreach to the Asian American community to apply for DACA. As of DACA’s three-year anniversary, about 750,000 individuals had applied for DACA. But AAPI applications for DACA have been disappointingly low, suggesting that many of our community members are missing out on this critical opportunity. Given that the majority of Asian Americans are immigrants and nearly one-third are limited English proficient, it is incredibly important that DHS provides information in ways that our community can easily understand and access.
• Continue to fight for immigrant families at the U.S. Supreme Court. President Obama’s expanded DACA and DAPA programs were put on hold in the case U.S. v. Texas. We expect the high court to take the case up any day now, and that the U.S. Department of Justice will fully represent President Obama’s executive action so that up to 500,000 Asian American immigrant families can have relief.
• End the entanglement of local police in immigration enforcement. Community members and advocates remain deeply disappointed that the Administration continues to use local police to help carry out immigration enforcement actions. The president’s latest enforcement mechanism — the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) — continues to entangle local police in immigrant enforcement and lacks of transparency and information-sharing. We again urge DHS to end the PEP program or, at a minimum, to collect and release program data so we can see the real impact on our communities.
• Protect the rights of Asian American voters through the Department of Justice (DOJ). The DOJ should vigorously defend the provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) under constitutional challenge, and also aggressively enforce the VRA, including its general anti-discrimination provisions of Section 2, the minority language provisions in Section 203, and the right to assistance provision in Section 208.
• Continue outreach efforts to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders — in language — to help them get covered under the ACA. Improvements are still needed to ensure that AAPIs are able to benefit, such as making sure health coverage is widely available to undocumented individuals, robust enforcement of non-discrimination provisions, ensuring adequate funding for cultural and linguistically appropriately outreach and services to AAPIs, especially vulnerable populations and underserved areas.

Contributors include Director of Strategic Initiatives Marita Etcubañez, Director of Immigration & Immigrant Rights Erin Oshiro and Director of Census and Voting Programs Terry Ao Minnis