On Aug. 2, 1790, a year after the inauguration of the first US president, George Washington, the US held a census under the general direction of then-US secretary of state Thomas Jefferson. It was the first US population count, and the census now takes place every 10 years. There have been 22 federal US censuses.
Taiwanese-Americans started immigrating to the US as early as the 1950s and have been arriving steadily ever since. However, nobody knows — not even the US Census Bureau — how many Taiwanese-Americans there are in the US. Estimates range from 250,000 to 1 million.
Why is this number unknown? It is due to international political considerations and restrictions the US imposed on itself.
The Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA) is a non-profit organization that — among other activities — promotes the welfare of Taiwanese-Americans. FAPA, together with other Taiwanese-American organizations, is petitioning the census bureau to include a check box for “Taiwanese” under the race question on the next US census in 2020.
FAPA has been campaigning for such a check box since 1997. In 1998, then-FAPA president Chen Wen-yen (陳文彥) appeared as a witness at a meeting of the Subcommittee on the Census to testify on the matter.
Chen stated: “In the 1990 census, about 80,000 respondents identified themselves as Taiwanese under the race question. One hundred and ninety-three thousand marked Taiwanese as their ancestry. This discrepancy is caused by the fact that on the 1990 census form, Taiwanese was not listed as a separate category under the race question, while it was explicitly listed as an example under the ancestry question.”
In a 1997 memorandum, the US Department of State informed the census bureau that the “listing of Taiwanese as a race in a census questionnaire would inevitably raise sensitive political questions … contrary to the US government policy and US national interest.”
FAPA believes that the constitutionally mandated US Census is and must be a purely internal US affair, and should not fall victim to international politics and/or pressure.
In 2010, a write-in campaign was taken up instructing Taiwanese-Americans to write “Taiwanese” under the race question.
Nevertheless, the 2010 census demonstrated large discrepancies in the count of Taiwanese-Americans between US federal agencies. According to the 2010 census, there were 230,382 Taiwanese-Americans, while the 2014 Homeland Security data on Lawful Permanent Residents showed that the Taiwanese-American population in 2010 was 450,673.
Add this huge discrepancy in the count of Taiwanese-Americans to international political interference and Taiwanese-American indignation is understandable.
In 1994 the US House of Representatives and the US Senate passed legislation enabling Taiwanese-Americans to list “Taiwan” as their place of birth on their US passports, instead of “China.” Since then, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service — and since 2003 the US Citizenship and Immigration Services — have maintained separate quotas for Taiwanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans. If one federal agency can do it, why not the census bureau?
It is high time that the census bureau lifted this self-imposed restriction and included a Taiwanese check box on the census form in 2020. The US Congress is set to convene a census subcommittee next year. So the time for Taiwanese-Americans to speak out is now.
There is a need for accurate data on how many Taiwanese-Americans there are today.
We want to be counted!
Peter Chen is president of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs.
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS