Report: Chinese Americans increasingly seen as "threat" in U.S.
More than one in four Americans believe Chinese Americans are a threat to U.S. society, a new survey finds.
Why it matters: Five years after the pandemic-driven surge in anti-Asian hate crimes, Asian Americans — who constitute over 37% of San Francisco's population — are still battling harmful stereotypes and deep-seated misperceptions.
By the numbers: 63% of Asian Americans reported feeling unsafe in at least one daily setting, per the nationwide STAATUS Index released May 1 at the start of AAPI Heritage Month.
The same percentage said it was at least somewhat likely they would be victims of discrimination based on their race, ethnicity or religion in the next five years. By comparison, 33% of white Americans said the same.
Asian Americans (40%) are far less likely than white Americans (71%) to completely agree that they belong in the U.S., and they are the least likely among all races surveyed to feel they belong in online spaces/social media and their neighborhoods.
Between the lines: Anti-AAPI hate crimes in San Francisco jumped 567% from 2020 to 2021 as the coronavirus led to scapegoating and violent attacks, especially on older people.
That fear hasn't abated, the survey shows, even as attention to the issue faded.
Case in point: Lily Zhu, a 70-year-old Oakland resident, told Axios in Mandarin in February that while she's no longer scared to leave her house, most Asian older people in her circle stick to Chinese community spaces to avoid risk.
Zoom in: This year's survey found that a record percentage (40%) of Americans believe Asian Americans are more loyal to their countries of origin than to the U.S., up from 37% last year.
That's the highest since the STAATUS Index launched in 2021.
Norman Chen, the Bay Area-based CEO of The Asian American Foundation and STAATUS report co-founder, called it "one of the most alarming results."
About two-fifths of Americans support legislation prohibiting "foreign citizens" from certain countries, including China, from purchasing land.
Stunning stat: Fewer than half (44%) of Americans strongly agree that Japanese American incarceration — the forcible detainment of 120,000 people with Japanese ancestry during World War II — was wrong.
The big picture: The survey also found that most Americans continue to believe the harmful "model minority" myth of overachieving Asian Americans who are "good at math," according to Chen.
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To date, the federal government's approach to promote service in unprofitable areas has almost exclusively been to subsidize private companies. The first federal broadband subsidies go back to at least 1995. Since then, the U.S. has put more than $100 billion into broadband expansion, primarily into rural areas, across more than 100 federal programs. Like RDOF, many of these programs have severely underperformed. This is what happens when government loses the ability, or the will, to undertake more direct interventions in the market and to challenge, not merely subsidize, corporations. A century ago, America faced a problem almost identical to the broadband shortage: rural electrification. Well into the 20th century, life in much of rural America was little changed from the 19th. Without electric appliances—refrigerators, washing machines, even lamps—running a farm was backbreaking, round-the-clock work. By 1935, private providers had electrified more than 80 percent of nonfarm households but only 11 percent of farm households. That year, as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Congress created the Rural Electrification Administration to address this problem. At first, REA Administrator Morris Cooke hoped to partner with private electricity companies, not unlike our current subsidy-heavy approach for broadband. However, those companies argued that rural electrification would not be financially self-sustaining. Even with government support, they proposed building out to only 351,000 new customers, which would leave millions unconnected. The New Dealers recognized that subsidies to private firms could only go so far. So they turned to three other strategies. First, when the private sector was unable to serve all Americans, the REA organized communities across the country to develop their own, cooperatively owned electricity-distribution networks, funded by the federal government. The REA encouraged state laws to charter these cooperatives, provided engineering support to build infrastructure, and assisted cooperatives in negotiating for sources of electrical power. Second, the New Deal created public options. Federal government–owned providers, most famously the Tennessee Valley Authority, were established to generate electricity at affordable rates. These public options functioned as an important 'yardstick,' in Roosevelt's words, to evaluate the performance of the private sector. If the private sector refused to offer electricity at affordable rates, the TVA could step in to sell electricity directly to cooperatives instead. Third, private-sector electricity providers were classified as public utilities subject to strict regulation. The government couldn't build public plants to generate power across the entire country or successfully organize every community. So it required electric companies to expand services to cover everyone in their existing and adjacent service areas, even households that were unprofitable to serve. These utilities were required to set prices that allowed them to turn reasonable but not excessive profits. George Packer: How Virginia took on Dominion Energy The REA was a success. By 1940, a quarter of farm households were electrified, and by 1953, that figure had risen to 90 percent. That same year, retail rural electricity rates approximated rates found in urban areas. A similar approach could be applied to rural broadband today. Local governments could offer public broadband—as happened in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which has one of the fastest broadband networks in the world, run by the municipally owned electric company, a public option that competes with Xfinity and AT&T. Cooperatives could purchase internet service in the same way as they buy electricity. And public-utility regulations could require broadband providers to cover areas adjacent to their service areas at a reasonable price in exchange for rate regulation. So why has the federal government focused on subsidizing for-profit ISPs rather than using the mixed approach that worked during the New Deal era? Consider what happened in Chattanooga. After its municipal model proved successful, ISPs saw a threat and mobilized. They successfully lobbied lawmakers to pass laws restricting public options in broadband. Twenty-five states, including Tennessee, had such laws on the books in 2019, according to a report by BroadbandNow. In Congress, Democrats have repeatedly proposed federal legislation to preempt such state laws, but those proposals have languished. And although some of the state limits on public options have been repealed, 16 states still restrict municipal broadband. Lobbying from ISPs might likewise explain why the FCC has never used its existing legal authority to require ISPs to expand service at mandated affordable prices. (A conservative appeals court foreclosed that option for the FCC only recently.) The lesson of rural broadband is that some government failures are due not to procedural excess, but to giving up on regulatory tools that might antagonize Big Business. Unfortunately, learning this lesson again may now cost us $42.5 billion. Last week, the Department of Commerce rolled back many procedural hoops of the BEAD program—ostensibly with the same goals as RDOF. It's tempting to think that America can learn how to build again without having to wage difficult battles against powerful corporate interests, simply by eliminating bureaucratic red tape. But if efficient building were really so easy, we'd already be doing it.
