Friday, June 24, 2011

Asian New Yorkers Seek Power to Match Numbers

<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/nyregion/asian-new-yorkers-asian-new-yorkers-seek-power-to-match-surging-numbers.html?_r=1&amp;partner=rss&amp;emc=rss&amp;pagewanted=print">

Asian New Yorkers Seek Power to Match Numbers By KIRK SEMPLE Not so long ago, the phrase “New York’s Chinatown” meant one thing: a district in Lower Manhattan near Canal Street. Now it could refer to as many as six heavily Chinese enclaves. Koreatown was well known as a commercial zone in Midtown Manhattan, but now parts of Flushing, Queens, where tens of thousands of Koreans have moved, feel like suburban Seoul. The city has spawned neighborhoods with nicknames like Little Bangladesh, Little Pakistan, Little Manila and Little Tokyo. Asians, a group more commonly associated with the West Coast, are surging in New York, where they have long been eclipsed in the city’s kaleidoscopic racial and ethnic mix. 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. “We are 13 percent of this city’s population!” Steven Choi, 35, a community organizer and a son of Korean immigrants, yelled into a microphone to a crowd of Asian activists who gathered recently outside City Hall to protest threatened cuts to social services. “We are one million strong, and we are not going away!” The census shows a striking 32 percent increase in New York’s Asian population since 2000, making it the city’s fastest-growing racial group by far. The Hispanic population grew only 8 percent during that time, while the ranks of non-Hispanic whites declined 3 percent and blacks declined 5 percent.</a>

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