Since the 2000 census, New York City's Asian population has increased 32%, the NY Times reported Thursday, "the fastest-growing racial group by far."
For the first time, according to census figures released in the spring, their numbers have topped one million — nearly 1 in 8 New Yorkers — which is more than the Asian population in the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles combined.
That milestone, in turn, has become a rallying cry for Asian New Yorkers who have been working for years to win more political representation, government assistance and public recognition. Many leaders have seized on the one-million figure as a fresh reason for immigrants and their descendants who hail from across the Asian continent to think of themselves as one people with a common cause — in the same way that many people from Spanish-speaking cultures have come to embrace the broad terms Latino and Hispanic.
One complaint is Asians receive "less than a quarter of one percent of the money for city social-service contracts," although
Median per capita income for Asians is well below the city’s average, and Asian households are on average more crowded than those of blacks, Hispanics or non-Hispanic whites, according to the American Community Survey. Asians also have the highest rate of linguistic isolation, a classification in which nobody older than 13 in a household speaks English well.
While more political clout is the goal, intra-group divisions, noted by Councilmember Brad Lander the other evening at Albemarle Neighborhood Ass'n, hinder building local coalitions, while inter-group conflicts undermine city-wide unity.