IMMIGRANT JUSTICE
Asian people are the fastest growing population of undocumented immigrants, with nearly 1.5 million Asian undocumented immigrants in the United States today. Since the country’s founding, many Asian Pacific Islander communities have endured the pain of either being excluded and invisible or actively targeted and discriminated against in national, state, and local immigration policies.
Far too many of our community members still cannot access the help they need from their local government. They experience exploitation at the workplace and live in constant fear of immigration enforcement, deportation, and family separation in an inhumane system, among other everyday indignities.
We are also witnessing a renewed rise in immigrant scapegoating with no end in sight. No matter where they were born, what language they speak, and whether they have papers or not, all AAPI Pennsylvanians should feel welcome in our state and live with freedom from fear.
ACCESS TO HEALTHCARE
The COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrates what’s been true in this country for a long time: the need for a healthcare system that puts all people – and high-quality, judgment-free, easily accessible healthcare – over profit.
Every year, hospitals, drug companies, and insurance companies force over 750,000 Pennsylvania residents to delay or forgo essential medical care and send more than 1.8 million Pennsylvanians a surprise medical bill. More than 1.5 million of us are now in medical debt.
So many of our Asian Pacific Islander communities historically receive little to no public health outreach and education, especially reproductive wellness information vital to ensuring our young people and families are safe and healthy. Both state government programs and health institutions must ensure Asian Americans and bilingual or multilingual providers are entering the healthcare system, especially the mental healthcare field, in order to bridge long-standing gaps in language accessible and culturally competent care.
Now more than ever, our API communities and all those across the Commonwealth deserve an expanded, culturally-competent, language-accessible healthcare system that emphasizes meeting the needs of our most historically underserved.
WORKERS’ RIGHTS
1 in 3 AAPI workers in Pennsylvania make less than a living wage. No Pennsylvanians should have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet while corporations and their bought-and-paid-for politicians see historic profit margins. When workers win, everyone benefits.
Pennsylvania’s government should guarantee paid sick leave and paid family leave for all workers in Pennsylvania and raise the minimum wage to a living wage of $15/hour or above. Large corporations should pay their fair share of taxes to ensure that government services, such as public education, infrastructure, and medical assistance have the funding they need. Our state should ensure that teachers, school service personnel, and all government employees have the right to organize and that all public employee unions have office space and paid time to conduct union duties.
In addition, the Department of Labor and Industry and the PA Human Relations Commission must prioritize tackling hiring discrimination against Asian Pacific Islander, immigrant and refugee, and Low-English-Proficiency workers, as well as provide and disseminate in-language labor law education and materials.
Small businesses
Our API small businesses, which form the backbone of so many of our communities, are far too often cut out from programs and resources afforded to other communities due to a systemic lack of language access and outreach. This needs to change, and it starts with ensuring that a just COVID recovery includes intentional outreach to API small businesses damaged not just by the pandemic but by anti-Asian racism and violence stoked by elected officials for political gain.
democracy
Thanks to the work of AAPI community organizations across Pennsylvania, the Asian American vote spiked to unprecedented levels in 2020, doubling the API vote share in our state. AAPIs in Pennsylvania had the highest vote-by-mail sign-up rate of any community in the Commonwealth and the second highest mail-in-ballot return rate. It is clear that our communities’ path to civic participation and making all our voices heard includes a robust, values-driven, language-accessible defense of the freedom to vote.
At the same time, we know that access to democracy remains fundamentally elusive to Asian Americans, and will continue to do so until we have full language access in our ballots, are free from intimidation and discrimination at the polls, and put an end to anti-democracy, anti-voting narratives about limiting access to the ballot and undermining our electoral process.To build Asian American democracy, it is thus crucial to both defend our historic expansions in voting rights and turnout, while expanding access to the ballot to all members of our communities.
Expanding democracy for AAPIs will meaningfully stitch us into the fabric of our society and secure justice and self-governance in the long term for all communities across the Commonwealth. Our diverse AAPI communities in Pennsylvania deserve to have full access and participation in the political processes that create the rules that govern our lives.
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Globally, Asian coastal nations and Pacific islands are being devastated by the impacts of climate change, while here in Pennsylvania our communities are directly suffering the effects of dirty air, lead in our water, and other forms of environmental racism. 84% of Asian Pacific Islander Pennsylvanians surveyed support a just transition away from fossil fuels that creates good jobs for our communities in the process.
Asian Pacific Islander Pennsylvanians from South Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and everywhere in between deserve a safe and clean environment that can sustain life for current and future generations and good, green jobs, rather than continuing to pad the profits of wealthy and powerful fossil fuel executives.
By joining together as a community, we can rewrite the rules so that every family has what we need to get and stay well, every working person has a safe, good job, and every community can protect our world for generations to come.
community safety
Incidents of anti-Asian harassment and violence are at a historic high, nationally and locally, and they occur at the individual, community, and institutional level in the United States. However, an over-reliance on a punitive policing and justice system, along with a pervasive lack of language access to community services to address violence and harm, have not created more safety for AAPIs in PA.
Overall, 69% of survey respondents to the AAPI PA Power Caucus’ statewide AAPI community survey stated they agree that the government should shift resources currently allocated for police departments to health and human services, including mental health responders, workforce development, and nonviolent alternatives. Community safety must include mental health and wellness.
All Pennsylvanians should be able to live in safe and connected communities across our state, with healing at the center.
GENDER & QUEER JUSTICE
So many of our API communities receive little to no public health outreach and education, especially reproductive wellness information vital to ensuring our young people and families are safe and healthy. Our health institutions must provide our communities with culturally competent, accurate, language accessible sexual and reproductive health information and care. We oppose all bans on reproductive healthcare, and note that sex-selective abortion bans, like the one Pennsylvania has on the books, have a history of being pushed through racist and sexist fearmongering about Indian American and Chinese American birth rates that have no basis in fact. We also support the passage of PA’s Fairness Act, which would ensure that LGBTQ APIs join our broader API communities in having legal protections against discrimination in the workplace.
EDUCATION JUSTICE
Overwhelming majorities of Asian Pacific Islanders in Pennsylvania agree that we need a fair funding formula for public schools. Regardless of where they came from, how they got here, or what their immigration status is, all students deserve an affordable college education. Student loan debt is a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution.
In contrast to national narratives about our communities’ values and priorities around education, AAPIs across the Commonwealth know that our experiences in the education system are far too often ones of violence and neglect. We have to contend with environmentally unsafe buildings, Islamophobic and anti-Asian bullying and hate, the chronic defunding of ESL classes and ethnic studies, and students feeling pressure to divest from their culture and heritage to stay safe and fit in, among other challenges.
Our students deserve to learn, grow, and thrive in the best possible conditions. We need a historic re-investment in our public schools across the Commonwealth in order to fully resource teachers, school administrators and other education workers, and our Asian Pennsylvanian students and families.
language access
78% of Asians and Pacific Islanders in Pennsylvania speak a language other than English at home and roughly 1 in 5 of Asian Pacific Islanders speak English less than well or not at all.
It is imperative that our city, county, and state governments take language access seriously by ensuring in-language resources across voting materials; social services, like hospitals and public health clinics; and employment agencies; educational institutions; law enforcement and legal agencies, such as courts.
Disaggregated data
While we are hard at work bringing our AAPI communities together as a single civically-engaged force capable of enacting change in Pennsylvania, we also know that not all our communities deal with the same issues when it comes to public health, housing, fair pay, access to education, and more.
However, because we are often aggregated into the categories of Asian and Pacific Islander — when given the option at all — data on these issues are so skewed that we are unable to accurately identify which ethnic communities in our AAPI umbrella are most impacted. We support the disaggregation of AAPI data in Pennsylvania to ensure that we are able to meet our communities exactly where they are and provide all necessary remedies for the diverse array of issues our people face.
