As some Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders experienced difficulties voting in California's primary Tuesday, voter rights advocates and state officials kept a close eye on one northern county amid allegations of voter intimidation leading up to the election.
As California heads into what some are predicting to be a close Democratic primary, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community organizations in the Golden State have been busy pushing AAPI voters to head to the polls on Tuesday. One group is also planning to visit voting sites in central California to ensure language assistance is available to voters with limited English proficiency.
Actors George Takei, John Cho, Constance Wu, Sonal Shah, Vincent Rodriguez III, and Joey Quenga are joining forces in a new campaign to urge Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to vote.
Despite being the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, the AAPI participation in the voting process lags behind other groups.
Asian American voter registration has increased 600,000 per presidential election cycle. The number of congressional candidates from the Asian American community increased from 10 in 2010 to 40 in 2016.
In a small downtown Los Angeles office one May evening, Helen Xiang and her teenage son Sam sat side by side, calling a list of Chinese-American registered voters.
Sam spoke in English and his mother in Mandarin, but their message was the same: get to the polls June 7 and vote in the state primary.
“We have to encourage our people to speak out," said Xiang, a 52-year-old Alhambra resident. "Your ballot is really important.”
Immigrant nail salon workers are overworked and underpaid, according to one state lawmaker who is trying to help protect workers' rights.
The language barrier is one the biggest obstacles immigrant workers face. That is why Democratic Assemblyman Phil Ting is excited that his bill to protect them, AB 2437, is moving on to the state Senate after passing the Assembly in a 50 to 27 vote.
LOS ANGELES – After 30 years of defending civil rights, Asian Americans Advancing Justice launched a Tagalog helpline to extend their reach of legal services to the Filipino community in Los Angeles.
"We think this Tagalog legal help will help open up services and provide better opportunities so people can get jobs. We know that Filipino-Americans want to be U.S. citizens. There's a relatively good naturalization rate," said executive director of AAAJ LA Stewart Kwoh.
Senior Savenaca Gasaiwai is only one of around 30 Pacific Islander undergraduates out of over 24,000 at the University of California, Irvine.
That’s why he was surprised last year when a senior administrator at the school told him that that his population is actually not seen as “having any kind of problem or special needs in higher education.”
The complaint, drafted by the Asian American Coalition for Education, accuses the three Ivy League schools of denying admission to Asian-American students with near-perfect SAT scores and GPAs in the top one percent while accepting applicants of other races with similar accolades. The groups also allege that racial quotas and caps are used to maintain "ideal racial balances" that have kept the percentage of Asian-American students at these schools unchanged over the last two decades.
As California’s June 7 primary approaches, 20 organizations plan on calling 20,000 Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) registered voters in Los Angeles and Orange Counties in a campaign called “Your Vote Matters.”
In their first public comment since a federal court ordered them to pay $15.3 million in damages to 11 workers, the owners of the Los Angeles-area L'Amande bakeries insist they are the ones being victimized in the ordeal.
"The default judgment is a miscarriage of justice, brought about by the abuse of both the justice and immigration systems by the plaintiffs and their lawyers," Analiza Moitinho de Almeida told NBC News in an e-mail.
Almeida contends the suit was a ploy by the workers to enrich themselves and change their immigration status.
Advancing Justice-LA's helplines prioritize assistance to low-income persons in the following areas of law: family, immigration, public benefits, employment, housing, and civil rights.
| English: | 888.349.9695 |
| 需要協助嗎: | 800.520.2356 |
| 도움이 필요하십니까: | 800.867.3640 |
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Our mission is to advocate for civil rights, provide legal services and education, and build coalitions to positively influence and impact Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders and to create a more equitable and harmonious society.