Asian America’s Poorest
How the booming economy is leaving many behind
By Janet Dang and Jason Ma

FREE LUNCH
Sallie Lu chatted excitedly with her friends sitting beside her at a table in St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco, just before the meal of lasagna and salad was served. A band played old jazz standards such as Stompin’ at the Savoy in the background.

Lu, along with hundreds of other seniors gathered in the church’s spacious reception area for a free lunch at the corner of Geary and Gough in the Western Addition.

“This is the third time I came out,” said Lu, who is in her 70s.

Sponsored by the Central YMCA Senior Center, the annual event has steadily drawn more and more people over the past few years, though that is partly due to increased awareness, said the event’s coordinator Ali Vogt.

Still, more than 400 showed up this year, with about two-thirds of them Asian American. In 1999, attendance was 330 and in 1998 it was only 200, Vogt said. The share of Asian American turnout for both those years was about half.

The bulk of those seniors attending were from the blighted areas of the Tenderloin and South of Market. The San Francisco Commission on Aging reports that there are 12,580 seniors living in those two neighborhoods with 65 percent of them low income -- earning less than $10,000 a year.

The Asian Americans living in those areas are compounded with those in other high-API neighborhoods like Chinatown, North Beach and the Richmond. They provide a stark contrast to the image of a prosperous city, inhabited by prosperous Asian Americans.

HIDDEN IN THE NUMBERS
These days, economic distress is easily overlooked considering the recent data. The U.S. Census Bureau reported last year that the nation’s household income has risen four years in a row, and that the poverty rate declined in 1998. California has seen a steady growth in household income, with Asian Americans’ income in 1997 averaging $45,300 -- just below the $49,700 average for white families, according to Belinda Reyes, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.

Among APIs in the state, the poverty rate remains at 16 percent, compared to 28.5 percent for Latinos and 23 percent for African Americans, said Reyes, who is editing a forthcoming study by the institute on race and ethnicity in California..

With an average household income of over $45,000 and a comparatively low poverty rate, APIs are the wealthiest of any minority group. For many Asian Americans, the future could not look brighter; entrepreneurs, engineers, and executives have enjoyed stockmarket success and unparalleled wealth.

But this economic miracle has left behind a growing proportion of the population, especially among new immigrant groups who are finding it harder to succeed in a more education-intensive American economy, Reyes said. The institute’s figures show that the number of Asian Americans living in poverty has actually increased slightly since the early 1990s -- when the state was mired in recession.

That increase is largely attributable to the influx of immigrants who traditionally start their new lives in America at the lower income levels, Reyes said. Indeed, the numbers of immigrants are growing, and their impact on California’s economy is evident from a study issued by the Public Policy Institute in December 1999, which found that immigrants accounted for 36 percent of the wages earned by males in California in 1997. That is up from 29 percent in 1989.

Asian American economic difficulty is readily apparent, especially among Southeast Asian Americans who had an average household income of $30,000 -- about what $15,000 below APIs averaged in 1997, according to Reyes. And while the overall poverty rate for Asian Americans in 1989 hovered around 10 percent, the rate for Southeast Asians was over 40 percent.

Despite the reputation of Asians for having high levels of education, various sub-groups of foreign-born Asian Americans have significantly lower levels. For example, 46 percent of immigrants from Southeast Asia surveyed in 1997 have less than a high school education, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. That is compared to 13 percent for all Asian immigrants surveyed that year.

This disparity in educational background is illustrated in a survey of Chinese American adults conducted by the San Francisco-based NICOS Chinese Health Coalition in 1997. The survey revealed stratification in the education levels of the respondents, with 30.3 percent saying that they had at least a bachelor’s degree and 27.2 percent saying they had the equivalent of an eighth-grade education or less.

During the previous wave of immigration, she said, poorly educated newcomers could find a low-skilled job without knowing much English.

But the premium that is now placed on education makes it harder for immigrants to succeed in America now compared to 100 years ago, admitted Reyes.

source: U.S. Census, March 1999 Current Population Survey

PATTERNS OF POVERTY
And in San Francisco, the bellwether locale for immigration, U.S. Census data show that in 1980, API families made up 21.7 percent of all the families in the city that were below the poverty level. By 1990, that share increased to 33.9 percent, making API families the largest group in the city living in poverty.

“Asians are schizophrenic; you have the richest and the poorest,” said Evelyn Lee, executive director of the San Francisco-based Richmond Area Multi-Services, which provides job-training job retention programs for many indigent Asian Americans.

While RAMS specializes in helping the mentally disabled, she said her organization has started vocational programs in the past two years.

Though the “miracle economy” of the United States has improved the quality of life for many Americans, Lee said she has still seen poverty in San Francisco -- the city that in many ways epitomizes the success story of the country’s economy. Ironically, though, poverty in Asian America is also partly a result of the successes of the U.S. economy.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, many professionals in Hong Kong and Taiwan chose to retire early, and with their pension money they immigrated to the United States, Lee said. They were typically highly skilled and educated and brought with them the money to learn new skills in their adopted country.

But by 1997, mainland China reclaimed Hong Kong from the British, shifting immigration patterns in East Asia. The change sent those who were nervous about Chinese rule to join their relatives in the United States.

Asia’s economy went into a recession that same summer, forcing many to look for employment opportunities in the United States, where the economy had been booming.

The fact that many of the these 1990s immigrants were middle-aged when they came to the United States has made the transition to integration difficult, according to Lee. And although the first wave of immigrants were more skilled, their age made them less motivated to retrain to receive American credentials that are necessary to practice their trade.

“The skills they had before may not transfer in the U.S.” Lee said.

For example, accountants in Hong Kong cannot work as accountants in the U.S. unless they obtain a license which can require four more years of schooling, she said.

The second wave of immigrants -- those who are not as highly skilled or educated -- face an even tougher transition.

“There’s a different type of immigration coming into town,” Lee said. “More non-professional groups are coming in.”

Consequently, this group has had a harder time adjusting to American life than their predecessors. And although the new immigrants were largely sponsored by their more established relatives, Lee said, many of them have been hurt by the 1996 welfare reforms that placed limits on the length of eligibility.

“Some people, they were able to make the transition to jobs, but many haven’t because of language,” she said. “Some of them really need welfare to survive.”

source: U.S. Census, March 1999 Current Population Survey

TOYS ARE A LUXURY
Even though $12 is a lot for Lan, she splurged and bought a Power Ranger video tape for her 4-year-old son. The money she spent on the video cut into her budget this month, but she didn’t seem to mind. “He keeps asking and asking and asking,” she said in Vietnamese. “Eventually I gave in.”

“I just won’t get him anything for New Years (Tet).”

The 30-year-old mother gets about $500 on welfare cash aid and about $170 on food stamps per month. She’s received welfare on and off since she immigrated to America in 1993.

Unlike other immigrants who had family members to sponsor and help them, Lan, who requested anonymity, is a single mom, relying on the monthly checks she gets in the mail; $450 of it goes to pay for the tiny room she rents in a 2-bedroom apartment she shares with another family of five in San Jose. And the food stamps help to put food on the table, she said.

Even then, every month she has some money saved up for what she calls luxury items. Sometimes it’s a video for her son, sometimes it’s a $10 calling card so she can call her mother in Vietnam.

“We get by. It’s when my son wants junk and toys like the video, that it gets hard.”

With no family members to turn to, she relies on a local church for support.

“I can’t complain. I don’t have a lot of money. But I feel very, very lucky. A bag of rice lasts for two months. I have my son. And when I see how he laughs all the time, it makes me happy.”

Santa Clara, one of the wealthiest counties in the nation, had a median income of $53,490 and a median housing cost of $939 in 1995, according to Dorris Ng, an attorney at Equal Rights Advocates, a nonprofit women’s law center in San Francisco.

The economic polarity is “striking in Silicon Valley,” said Rand Quinn, policy director of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights. “Everyone thinks of million dollar homes, start-ups and IPOs.” And though it’s hard to see beyond the glitz, it’s apparent that poverty is “heavily weighted in API communities,” he said.

And with the advent of the state’s 1997 welfare reform, said Ng, immigrant women are among those who face the toughest challenges in breaking out of poverty. In 1996, the federal government passed legislation imposing a 5-year lifetime cap on welfare. With that came a shift in priorities: jobs.

The work-first thrust of welfare reform traps many women in life-long poverty, Ng said. In fact, a study authored by Ng for the Equal Rights Advocates forecasts a bleak future for immigrant women. With their lack of English and skills, many immigrant women in the study found work in low-paying, immobile jobs with few advancement opportunities and no job security. Immigrant advocates like Ng have criticized the reforms, saying that the time restraint and the emphasis on prioritizing job search is unreasonable for new immigrants with limited English and little job training -- qualifications they need to earn a sustainable living.

THE ENGLISH BARRIER
Of the 150 Santa Clara women interviewed for the study, half are of Vietnamese descent; the other of Mexican descent. And almost all are on welfare. The study looked at the kinds of work assigned to these women, and how they fare. While many of the women were eager to work and preferred work over welfare, the lack of English training limits the work they end up doing and keeps them from holding a job for long.

When Lan enrolled in welfare again last October, she was put into a job search class, though she had wanted to be placed in an English class. “I really want to learn English,” she said.

Four years ago, Lan had been working at a high-tech company assembly electronics parts, earning $7. 50 an hour. She said that she wanted to do more responsible work, but without any English training, she didn’t have a choice. “If your boss sees that you don’t understand English, they will not want you for long,” she said. Still, she was eventually laid off when she became pregnant.

Lan was put into a nurse assistant training program. But she threw out her back from lifting patients. Now, she wants to take English classes.

Unlike Lan, 30 percent of those surveyed for the study never received job training, Ng said, emphasizing the need for better ESL courses and job training.

The problem, Ng said, is the way the state’s welfare-to-work program CalWORKS is set up. “[It] pushes people into the first kind of jobs they can get,” she said. For these women, “they have been pushed into these really bad jobs,” that are low paying, temporary and often times discriminatory, unsafe and unheathy. Still, the program is at least partly responsible for reducing the number of welfare cases by 25 percent, according to a 1999 study by the Rand Corp., a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan think tank.

Because of cultural preferences, many of the Vietnamese women surveyed also expressed reluctance to leave their children in the care of strangers. The Vietnamese women surveyed have an average of three children, making it difficult for some to work. “Immigrant women on welfare often feel torn between caring for their children and complying with welfare reform’s requirements,” the study stated.

Though welfare recipients are entitled to childcare supportive services, Santa Clara County alone reports that 14,000 eligible children are on a wait list for the 12,000 subsidized slots, according to the study. As a result, the women interviewed are attracted to doing work in the home, Ng said. Two women in the study were found to do work at home in electronics assembly that if added up, would not amount to minimum wage. “That is not the kind of job that we would promote...that the welfare office should be promoting.”

THE ELDERLY
Sallie Lu came to the United States 11 years ago from Shanghai after visiting this country several times as a flight attendant in the 1950s and 1960s.

When she arrived in San Francisco, Lu said she was too old to work and managed to subsist on her SSI payments. In addition, she receives Medi-Care and Medi-Cal, which she pointed out covers her visits to Chinese doctors and prescriptions for herbal medicine.

But Lu admitted she is more fortunate than some of her other peers. Lu lives in subsidized housing in the Tenderloin, at an apartment on O’Farrell Street and Jones. Since she does not have to pay high rent, her monthly checks allow her to get by. But that is not without some ingenuity of her own.

“I make my clothes,” she said, showing off the seams on her turquoise blouse. “Everything I make myself.”

Unlike Lu, who became a naturalized citizen in 1996, many other Asian American seniors residing legally in the United States as non-citizens have not been able to receive similar public benefits.

Coincidentally, the year Lu gained citizenship status was the same year the federal government reformed many welfare and immigration laws for legal immigrants, such as a the denial of SSI benefits to any legal residents who immigrated to the United States after the passage of the reforms. Those who immigrated before the reforms have been allowed to keep their benefits.

“Our crisis now is the people who came after 1996,” said Downtown Senior Center Executive Director Mary-Alice Stevenson.

Now, in order to receive SSI and other benefits, immigrants have to become naturalized, causing many senior centers -- including the one at the Central YMCA -- to begin offering English language courses to seniors for the citizenship exam, said Linda Breitbarth, program coordinator at the Central YMCA Senior Center. And even then, an immigrant cannot be eligible to apply for citizenship until five years after the date of arrival.

As a result of the changes in welfare laws, said Stevenson, the sponsors of seniors in addition to the seniors themselves have been detrimentally affected. While many Asian American seniors have family support or were sponsored by relatives upon arriving in the United States, often times the family has trouble paying for medical and housing expenses, said Breitbarth. “It’s hard if you’re bringing in your mother [from another country] and she has no income,” she said.

Moreover, because housing costs have risen city-wide, the standard SSI payment in California of $692 a month cannot cover all their living expenses, Breitbarh noted. Add to that the costs of medical care for immigrants who cannot qualify for Medi-Care or Medi-Cal and the amount that seniors can spend on other living expenses like food is further decreased.

Consequently Breitbarth said she is not surprised that many Asian American seniors are in economic distress in San Francisco. “People on Social Security and SSI; they’re low-income, because they receive low income,” she said. “The bottom line is SSI is not a lot to live on.”

Lu, who lives alone, said her daughter and grandchildren are still in China. She is afraid that she may not be able to afford sponsorship of them if they choose to immigrate.

So despite her relatively stable financial situation, Lu said, “I struggle for my life.”