Asian American Policy Review

UPHOLDING THE CONSTITUTION AND PROTECTING CIVIL LIBERTIES DURING THE DARKEST OF TIMES IN AMERICAN HISTORY Lessons learned from the Japanese American internment during World War II are more relevant than ever. In a recent opinion-editorial in the New York Times, Karen Korematsu, Fred Korematsu’s daughter, and Executive Director of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, compared President’s […]

From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the policies that welcomed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees to this country from the 1960s onward, federal immigration policy has had a tremendous influence on the migration history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs). The most recent plan for immigration reform, the Reforming American Immigration […]

Every election season, it seems there’s another article about AAPIs “making their voices heard.” It’s a term I’ve grown to dislike, not only because I have seen it before, but because the idea of AAPIs “making their voice heard” reinforces the stereotype that AAPIs would otherwise be silent, docile, or meek were it not for […]

Last week, the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans (NCAPA), hosted Fast Forward 2060: Highlighting Legacy and Action in the Asian American and Pacific Islander Community Under President Obama and Beyond. We wanted to highlight some of the policy discussions at Fast Forward 2060, a conference hosted by the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and […]

Today, we’re launching our #TBT or #ThrowbackThursday series where we revisit some of these articles and, when possible, hear from the authors themselves. For 28 years, the Asian American Policy Review has brought attention to policy issues that affect the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. This is part of our effort to keep the conversation […]

Members of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition team made headlines when they doubled down on a proposal to reinstate a registry of immigrants and visitors from Muslim countries. While history has shown that blanket discrimination of Americans by race, national origin, or religion is both wrongheaded and ineffective, Trump’s team inadequately cited internment of Japanese Americans during […]

This piece was published in the 26th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. Introduction In this decade the U.S. Census and Asian American policy advocates have identified Asian Pacific Islanders as the fastest growing racial population in the United States.[i] This rise has been accompanied by scholars who point out that this demographic explosion […]

If You Don’t Know, Now You Know: An Interview with Eddie Huang Eddie Huang is a chef, writer, TV host, fashion designer, speaker, and producer based in New York City and Los Angeles, whose work is recognized for bridging food with music, culture, comedy, politics, and metropolitan life. He is widely known as the chef […]

Introduction This year marks the 40th anniversary of the first wave of Vietnamese Americans arriving in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Southern Vietnamese fled their homeland after the Communist North captured Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) on April 30, 1975. Over the next two decades, waves of political refugees breathed new life […]

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction; A Gesture Life; Aloft; and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Selected by the New Yorker as one of the “20 Writers for the 21st Century,” Lee is professor […]

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), much like women’s health, is a point of frequent contention in Washington and the courts. On June 30, 2014, those two points converged when the Supreme Court, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, dealt a blow to an ACA provision specific to women’s health: the birth control benefit. i The ACA […]

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has many implications for Asian Pacific Islander American (API) women’s reproductive and sexual health, including provisions calling for preventive services, increased funding for mental health and community health centers, and ethnically disaggregated data collection. The political climate following the passage of the ACA has given rise to […]