AAPI Nexus: Policy, Practice and Community

There is a serious lack of demographic and socioeconomic data about Asian Americans living in distressed areas. The approach suggested to address this problem is community development with professional and academics to provide updated information on many issues such as poverty, educational attainment pertinent to these disadvantaged AA communities. The article discusses the selection criteria employed to choose the fourteen distressed communities that is analyzed. Details describing demographic characteristics, such as most AA communities are racially diverse, are supplemented with statistics to provide concrete data. Unemployment and poverty go hand-in-hand and in distressed AA communities these problems are occurring in higher frequency than other communities. The typical depiction of an AA community as a rich ethnic-enclave is debunked. The dominant problems in these communities are also representative of the problems most immigrants face today. The motivation for this analysis is to compel policy-makers to develop further research into these communities to understand their problems in order to make policies effectively addressing their needs.