Asian American Policy Review

The rise of hate against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to the need to better support AAPI communities across our country — communities that have historically been drastically underfunded and under-resourced. This article focuses on how the philanthropic community and beyond can close critical gaps […]

This piece was published in the 32nd print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. The intersection of religious rights, PPE constraints, and the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic made clear the need for better guidelines that fairly and consistently interpret the law and hold employers accountable when they fail to respect their employees’ rights. […]

This piece was published in the 32nd print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. The model minority stereotype initially embraced by many AAPIs was a welcome alternative to the prior “Yellow Peril” label, yielding an uneasy collusion that is now being exposed as the hollow prize it is in the era of COVID-19. An […]

This piece was published in the 32nd print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. With Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders constituting the fastest growing ethnic group sixty-five years and older in the US today, and the projection that fifteen percent of the total US Asian Pacific Islander population will be over the age of […]

Fifty years ago, James Baldwin penned the following words in No Name in the Street: “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” This year, amidst the weight of continued injustice that the COVID-19 pandemic has both revealed and exacerbated, Baldwin’s words are as […]

I argue that it is not The Joy Luck Club that inaccurately represents Asian people, it is Hollywood that is guilty of their misrepresentation by limiting depictions of Asian people to this singular film for twenty-five years. The Joy Luck Club (dir. Wayne Wang, 1993) not only exposed Western audiences to the hardships endured by Chinese immigrant women […]

For the millions of undocumented immigrants who have lived in the shadow of deportation for too long, a major expansion of the pathway to citizenship cannot be further delayed. “How much longer am I willing to wait?” asked an undocumented community member interviewed by one of the authors. “The older I get and as time […]

This piece was published in the 31st print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. Recognizing the gap between the reality our communities face and existing pandemic-mapping data, SAALT worked to capture the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. The article examines not only Covid-19 infection and fatality rates in South Asian American communities but also […]

This piece was published in the 31st print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. This experience reaffirmed the importance of a bottom-up approach to policy formation; we need to collect data on the issues which communities face to find emerging trends, and we need to ask the affected communities what changes they want. “We […]

This piece was published in the 31st print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. Thousands of Japanese Americans faced the same challenges as my grandfather. They faced discriminatory practices established by officials at the highest levels of our government and the lies perpetrated by these officials. Iyekichi Higuchi prepared to leave the Heart Mountain […]

This piece was published in the 31st print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. Though we have expanded access to rights over the last several decades, the fact remains that discomfort—whether driven by outright animus or inadvertent, implicit biases—is at the foundation of the US’s social and political institutions; institutions that were designed from […]

This article compares the wartime Supreme Court’s complete deferral to the government’s justification for the detention of Japanese Americans to argue that the modern Supreme Court repeated a similar tragic mistake almost seventy-five years later in Trump v. Hawaii. Introduction Without question, the Japanese American internment experience is relevant to the post-9/11 war on terror […]