Jessica Lee
Hi everyone. It’s great to be here for our final episode.

Abraham Kim
Yeah, today is a milestone event. We’ve done 10 episodes of the Korean American Perspectives and I can’t believe that we’ve done so many episodes. At the start, when we said we were going to do 10 for the season, I thought it was a mountain too high to climb, but we’ve made it Jessica.

Jessica Lee
Yes, we have. And it’s been wonderful journey. It’s taken us to so many different parts of the country. I think you have a list of all the cities our speakers come from.

Abraham Kim
Yeah, we’ve had speakers from LA, Bozeman, Orange County, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and as far as Seoul, Korea. So we’ve had a really diverse menu of interviewees that we’ve spoken to over the past several months, ranging from musicians, civic leaders, business leaders to academia and philanthropists. And I think it’s important that we take a pause here and ask our audience for feedback as well as other people for other leaders that our audience would love for us to interview in the future. And in the best way to do that is to send us an email at podcast@councilka.org. That is the best way to communicate with us. But we can’t take away the focus on today’s important guests. Jess?

Jessica Lee
That’s right, thanks Abe. So we are very excited to share this episode with you all. It’s an interview that Abe conducted with Professor Taeku Lee, who teaches law and political science at the University of California Berkeley and is involved in a number of high-profile research and analyses related to the census, political representation of Asian Americans, and demographic trends. And so it was such a pleasure to listen to this interview and to learn a lot about how Professor Lee sees the world. What really stood out for me in the interview, Abe, was when he said he teaches his students not to think of democracy as a noun, but as a verb: something you have to continually do and pursue. That this is not a stagnant thing that we take for granted and that democracy and the democratic process is something that we need to be constantly nurturing and participate in for it to be alive. So this was a particularly enriching episode and we look forward to your feedback. So let’s turn over now to the interview.

Abraham Kim
My name is Abraham Kim, Executive Director of the Council of Korean Americans, and I’m your host for CKA’s podcast, the Korean American Perspectives. Today I’m pleased to be joined by Taeku Lee, George Johnson Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Co-principal Investigator of the National Asian American Survey for the Bay Area Poverty Tracker and the Managing Director of Asian American Decisions. He serves on a number of boards and councils, one of which is the National Advisory Committee for the U.S. Census Bureau. He’s also a CKA member, one of our newest members. Thank you for traveling all the way from the San Francisco Bay Area, Taeku. It’s great to have you on this show.

Taeku Lee
Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be a new member of CKA and honored to be part of this podcast.

Abraham Kim
We’re happy to have you here in our studio today, Taeku. I want to start off by asking you about your life and about your upbringing. I understand you were born in South Korea and then you moved to Malaysia. You spent much of your childhood there and then moved to the United States. How was that, moving from Malaysia to the United States? And do you recall those early days?

Taeku Lee
Increasingly as I get older, I don’t recall those early days. But I think they were certainly formative years and as I grow older, I’ve come to appreciate how some of my early experiences in life have really shaped a lot of not just the substance of what I do, but the way that I do it and the way that I think about the issues that I research and teach. So yes, I was born in — actually, while my father was serving as a military — as a doctor in the army off of a base in Masan, South Korea. I’ve come to realize that I’m part of the generation of Korean Americans that really have experienced the more remarkable contrast from the Korea of the time of our early childhood to the Korea that is today.

And seeing that span in one lifetime from a home country that was really a developing, poor country. I mean, I was born by somebody who was selling stuff off the streets because we were living off of the military base, you know. There was nobody there to deliver me. So my mother just had somebody go out into the street and see if there was anybody who knew anything about delivering a baby. So I think just the contrast between the Korea of that time to the Korea of today has really informed my perspective on things like inequality, economic development, and their relation to politics. I think my time in Malaysia did a lot of the same thing. I think Malaysia was very much a developing country at the time.

My father was there to do a lot of international health work. And the other part of my early upbringing was the constancy of migration, not just from country to country but within countries as well. So I don’t know how unusual this is because I know that part of the Korean diaspora is a history of displacement, many times over. But I moved 11 times before graduating from high school and I went to nine different schools before graduating from high school. So in a way I became enured to the social stresses and the social skills required to adapt to new societies. And in some ways I think maybe that personal experience has fed my interest in the ways in which immigrants in new societies become adapted, incorporated, and become politically active.

Abraham Kim
Was there a defining moment that put you on the pathway to political science and the things that you’re studying now?

Taeku Lee
Yes. And it didn’t happen until a bit later in my adult life because frankly I had a lot of the pressures that a lot of Korean American feel from their parents in terms of following a particular pathway. And I’ve given talks before where I share with the audience that I have two out of the three strikes that, I guess, disqualify you as being Korean. The first strike is to have gotten admitted to Harvard out of high school and not gone to Harvard. The second strike was to have gotten admitted into medical school and not having finished medical school.

So no Harvard degree, no MD. I guess the third strike would have been if I hadn’t married a Korean American woman. And I fortunately, you know, met the love of my life who happened to be Korean American. So at least I saved myself from that complete disqualification, but I was fully going down the track of immigrant success by virtue of being a successful professional physician. But I found that throughout my whole time in medical school, I was especially interested in a lot of political issues. So I will not share the percentage of classes that I attended in my first two years of medical school. But I will say I spent a lot of my time organizing around a lot of political issues. And you know, economists talk about the theory of reveal preferences that if you keep finding out that you’re spending a lot of your time doing something other than what you extensively say that you are interested in planning to do, then you’re telling yourself that actually you want to be doing something else.

And at that moment I realized, maybe medicine was not the right career path for me. I also knew that organizing was not the career path for me because frankly I was not a terribly good organizer because I often got too stuck in the mud thinking through a lot of philosophical issues involved with things like civil disobedience or what the proper pathway to participatory democracy is, and things like that. And I came to realize, again, that probably meant that I was more interested in engaging in the realm of ideas about politics than in the actual roll-up-your-sleeves doing of politics.

Abraham Kim
Moving forward a little bit, now you’re obviously teaching political science at UC Berkeley. it must be an interesting time to teach political science with the current political environment that we’re in. I’m curious how you teach. What kinds of things do you teach your students in the current environment about our democracy?

Taeku Lee
I’ll just take interesting as a euphemism for complicated, tortured and, occasionally stimulating. I think the politics of our time have really forced people like me who make their career out of thinking about politics…has really challenged a lot of the assumptions that we bring to what it is we’re doing. And oftentimes those assumptions start with assumptions about your fellow citizens, your fellow person and the way that they think about politics and what really motivates their politics. So in a way I’ve tried to rethink a lot of how I teach. I’ve also tried to address what I see are visible signs of anxiety among a lot of my students because a lot of the politics that they see being enacted by people a generation or two older than them are politics that will affect the future course of their own lives.

So I think it’s really important to give them a sense of empowerment about what they should be doing about it. And it’s not just the professorial, “here are some facts that you should know to help you along the way,” but I really want to try to empower them as well. So one of the things that I do in all my classes at least since 2016 has been to find some time during the class to get students to think about what seems like an inane phrase. But I think there’s a lot behind it which is to tell my students to think of democracy as a verb and not as a noun. And in terms of grammar, that’s obviously wrong, but if you think about why that’s wrong and what the value is of thinking about democracy as a verb rather than a noun, I think there’s a lot to that students seem to appreciate in that.

Abraham Kim
So your encouragement is for them to engage in democracy as an active exercise, active engagement, active involvement of students in order for it to thrive, like being a permanent state of something.

Taeku Lee
Yeah, absolutely. So I don’t want students to think in the way that a lot of us who are born in the United States and assume that democracy is something in the background and the only requirements of democracy are to register, vote, and to show up to vote if you have the time to do that. But I want them to think of democracy as something that’s constantly evolving. It’s a living thing and its health depends on whether or not the body politic itself, which in the definition of democracy is the people are willing to nurture it and feed it and restore it back to health, life and vigor.

Abraham Kim
I want to dig a little bit into some of the research that you do related to democracy. You are one of the preeminent social scientists who study the Asian American Pacific Islander community, collecting survey and data, and analyzing it and talking about the important implications of the data and the response you’re getting. And you gave a presentation to CKA at least twice this year, which was really eye-opening. I want to dig a little bit about some of the research that you’ve been doing there. You mentioned that there’s been a dramatic growth in the Asian American community. Right now we’re at around 22 million, and growing at such astronomical rates. You mentioned from 2000 to 2010 the growth rate has been somewhere between 43 to 46% per annum.

What was really eye opening for me was that by 2043, the majority will be the minority. And in fact, our minority community, what we consider minority communities today, will in fact outnumber white Caucasian population. And within that growing minority group, by 2050 the largest immigrant group will be Asian Americans and we’ll make up out 12% of the population. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s driving those numbers as compared to, say, the Hispanic community or the African American community? What’s driving that trend?

Taeku Lee
I think what’s driving the trend are longterm shifts in immigration, both in terms of the sheer number of immigrants coming to the United States and then the regions of the world that people are coming from. That’s since the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 where long-term quotas in terms of countries of origin were lifted, which effectively opened the doors to immigrants from the South and immigrants from across the Pacific ocean. Coupled with more recent restrictionist immigration laws and immigration politics, which have effectively limited the amount of legal immigration from South of the United States and increased flows relatively proportionately of immigration from Asia. So actually since 2005, the greatest share of newcomer students United States have been newcomers from Asia rather than newcomers from Central America or Latin America. Now, in terms of this future world in the United States where whites will no longer be in the majority and the current projections are that will happen sometime around 2043.

I would raise a very cautionary tale to accompany that demographic future. Too often I think people think of 2043 as some kind of magical pot of gold at the end of a demographic rainbow. And I think nothing special is going to happen in 2043. The day whites are no longer in the majority in the United States, they will be 49.999% of the country’s population. And the only magic to the number 50 as a percentage in a democratic society is if it has some kind of correspondence to what happens in elections. It’s the metaphor of the will of the people. And I think a lot of the politics around the will of the people in terms of demographic change are exactly the politics you are seeing playing out in the United States today in 2008 with a rainbow coalition of multiracial, multiethnic voters voting in overwhelming numbers to elect the first African American president of the United States.

And in 2016 with what many people interpret to be a backlash of disaffected white working class voters choosing to elect president Trump. So in a way, I think nothing magical is going to happen in 2043 and a lot of the anticipated politics around race are politics that are already affecting us today. I think the other thing to point out about demographic change that is specific to the Korean American community is that Korean Americans as a share of the Asian American population and also as a share of the nonwhite population in the United States is actually a proportion that is shrinking. And so part of the cautionary tale for me in terms of Korean Americans and their involvement in politics is that something that has to happen now — nothing magical is going to happen in terms of Korean American empowerment in 2043 as a result of are suddenly becoming a majority minority nation.

The politics of this country around issues of race and belonging and immigration are politics that are happening now. Korean Americans are better situated today to have a voice in what those politics look like now than they are likely to have in 2043, surely in terms of numbers. So I wouldn’t wait for anything special to happen several decades out. A lot of those important issues are issues that we have to have a say and a stake in.

Abraham Kim
Another interesting aspect of your research is showing a mixed portrait of Korean American community experiences in their achievements. You had mentioned that in general, Korean Americans are very highly-educated as a population. I think the data you had shown that the average BA recipient among mainstream Americans is about 32% nationally, but among Asian American in general it’s about 53.8%. Among Korean Americans, it’s 55.1%.

Slightly higher than the average of the Asian American community. But what seems to be telling about this data is that when you look at the median income of Korean Americans versus Asian Americans, for example, among Asian Americans, the median income is about $83,456. But the current American median income is much lower $67,870. There’s a disparity there of more than $15,000. So I’m wondering what’s causing that dip? if we’re of an very educated population and we think that correlate, but maybe that’s not the case. So what’s driving that trend?

Taeku Lee
In the language of economists, I think the biggest driver of that trend is what you would call a “labor skills mismatch.” And that is simply to restate — that’s a fancy term — to just restate the fact that for the level of education that Korean Americans have, their median household incomes do not keep up with that that level of education, which is a good instrument for thinking about what their level of training is for a range of different professions. So I think Korean Americans probably more so than a lot of Asian Americans and Asian Americans in general, this is a feature of their immigrant experience that a lot of Asian American immigrants with high levels of education will wind up having to take for reasons of lack of proper credentialing or lack of language skills jobs that are not the jobs that they were educated to follow as a career path or trained in as a career in their home countries.

Taeku Lee
So a lot of you mom and pop shops that Korean Americans run might be run by people with college degrees or post baccalaureate degrees. And that in part not only explains this mismatch between educational background and median household income, but some of the particular points of economic vulnerability that you see within the Korean American population. So the two data points that I shared in my presentation where if you look at overall poverty rates, Korean Americans don’t look more likely to be poor than the average American family. But if you look at poverty rates among the Korean American elderly, there are about double the rates of that you find in the general population. The other places to look is the continuing uninsured problem within the United States and the percentage of Korean Americans without health insurance or without adequate health insurance. So there’s uninsured and there is under-insured that continues to be significantly higher than that found in the general population.

Abraham Kim
Are you suggesting that — perhaps I heard you use this term — our community is bi-modal — and that perhaps the older population within the Korean American community are having are lower in the socioeconomic experience, and there are a lot of issues and problems related to that among the older population. But in the younger population that tends to be more educated professional, they tend to be better off. And so there’s this kind of almost this U shape within the community. Is that what you’re proposing or suggesting?

Taeku Lee
I have to say from my perspective, the data that are available are somewhat limited. So from the data that are available, I think the picture that I see is this bi-modal picture of two different Korean Americans. There’s a professional class of Korean America and working class Korean America. What I see as bi-modal, I’m not sure though, if it’s bifurcated. What I mean by that is, I don’t know if that’s within the same family that you’re likely to find within the same extended family that you’re likely to find some people who are enjoying these vaunted successes that you read about in mainstream media about Korean Americans, and within that same family, you might also have somebody who’s really struggling or if in fact these are two different parts of the Korean American community that really don’t have a lot of touch points with one another.

And in particular, what the story is in terms of local community organizations or local churches that are able to bring these two parts of the Korean American community together — that’s, that’s sort of a level of granularity that I’m not able to see or not able to think about. What are the easy data sources? Because I think that’s a different story, if there’s the potential for Korean Americans who have been enjoying or suffering different kinds of fates to be able to share their experiences, I think that’s how you build community. But if it’s really bifurcated, then the sort of institutional organizational points of connection aren’t there. That’s a higher hurdle that we have to face to try to build out a thriving Korean American community.

Abraham Kim
I want to go into the topic of political engagement, which you just spoke about. As a group, the AAPI community as a factor of their growth in population is also growing as a population of voters. And you mentioned in your research that whereas in 2016 AAPI voters were about 10 million, 9.8 million or so, that group will grow to approximately 11 million by 2020. The the possible voters from those eligible voters will be around 6 million — assuming that not everyone will vote, but at least 6 million will likely vote in 2020, that is a significant growth. From what it was in 2016, which was around 5 million. So that’s almost about a million more voters that are Asian Americans. I’m wondering what’s the significance of that from your perspective as a political scientist, the AAPI community growing by a million new voters. It’s something that you don’t really read about in the newspaper, the growth of this community as a body of voters.

Taeku Lee
I’m reminded of something that people told me when I first came to the United States, which has always stuck with me, which is, “You pick up a penny here, you pick up a penny there on the street and pretty soon you have some real money.” No one picks up pennies from the street anymore, except I guess I still do. But you can think about the same thing in terms of voting in elections. For a very long period of time, part of the baked-in logic for both the Democratic party and the Republican party with respect to Asian American voters was that they’re simply too small, except for states that are so clearly one-sided in terms of their partisanship like New York and California. Yes, they have very large Korean American populations. Yes, they have very large Asian American populations, but at this point in time, they are overwhelming Democratic.

And so it’s just not worth the investment in resources, the investment in on the part of candidates to really try to mobilize and bring out that segment of the electorate. When you think about demographic change at the rates at which Asian Americans have been growing as a segment of the electorate, and when you think about the location of that demographic change, you remember earlier in this podcast, we talked about this shift from traditional immigration date gateways to new destinations. A lot of those new destinations where you’re seeing 60, 70, 80% growth in the Asian American population are actually very hotly contested states, especially in the recent presidential election. Virginia, Florida, Georgia, Texas, Nevada, Colorado, those are states with very large increases in their size of the Asian American population. Those are the states where 20,000 votes here, 30,000 votes here, and you could really make a big difference in the outcome of the election.

And so I think for those reasons Asian Americans are no longer a segment of the electorate that can be ignored. Some of the best science out there, the science that political science have conducted using what are called field experiments, are able to demonstrate that it’s particularly with groups of voters like Asian Americans and Latinos that have been historically under-invested by campaigns and candidates where you’re likely to get your greatest return on investment from additional mobilization of dollar. In 2016, the main story that you read about voter turnout was a story of the demobilization of traditionally democratic segments of the electorate and the mobilization of the white working class in favor of the Republican candidate. There was also a hidden story in the 2016 election, which was the remarkable mobilization of Asian American voters who voted overwhelmingly Democratic. So in a year where most of the traditional segments of the Democratic coalition were actually voting a lower numbers Asian Americans as a group, we’re actually getting registered in significantly higher numbers and then turning out in significantly higher numbers. And that story continued on in the 2018 midterms.

Abraham Kim
You also mentioned in your research, and you alluded to this in your comments right now, that most of these AAPI community members are voting in in majority for Democrats. You mentioned in 2018, 72% of the Asian Americans voted for a Democratic candidate. Then you look at the current American data as well as you propose, and that’s fairly consistent even in the Korean American community, not just in the last election, but since 2012 30% of the Korean American community have voted for Republican while 70% has voted for Democrats. What’s driving that trend? Because traditionally you think small business owner who is Korean American tends to be a little more conservative, business-oriented. You would think that more people would be accustomed or supportive of the Republican party. They are churchgoing, tends to be socially conservative. But in fact the numbers tell a slightly different story.

Taeku Lee
Yes. If I can bring viewers back to the year 2015, this was a pre-Trump year when most of America expected former Florida Governor Jeb Bush to be the presumptive nominee for president on the Republican side of the party. Jeb Bush said in 2015 that Asian American voters are the canary in the coal mine for the Republican party. And the analogy there being, when a canary in a coal mine passes, then you know that the air quality is so bad that miners have to get out. and what Bush was saying is that if there’s a segment of the electorate that is wealthier than the average American that espouses the kind of family values that the Republican party believes their party members should espouse and that are church goers, that the rates that Korean Americans are church goers, that is not voting Republican, then that’s a serious sign that something is wrong with what the Republican party is doing.

And I think there was something to that. So the question is why have Asian Americans been so drawn to voting for Democratic candidates? I think there is, again, as with immigration, I think there are push and pull factors. I think a lot of the politics of, especially at the presidential candidate level of report, the Republican party candidates over the last several election cycles, has made the United States feel to a lot of largely immigrant based segments of the electorate, to be a less welcoming country than the United States has been before. So a lot of the nativist rhetoric with respect to immigration policy, a lot of the seeming hostility towards communities of color and so on. So I think there are certain factors that are pushing voters away from the Republican party and there are also pull factors. If you look at Asian Americans and Korean Americans in particular as a segment of the electorate and ask them, what is the most important issue for you going into this coming election in 2016 and 2018? It was healthcare. So there are real policies that they see as having been delivered on, at least in part by the Democratic party, that they would not like to see the next Republican politician take away from them. So if I ask Korean Americans, would you prefer to repeal the Affordable Care Act or improve it? Most, by an overwhelming margin, Korean and Asian Americans generally would like to see the Affordable Care Act improved on rather than repealed. And so healthcare is a vital issue that is keeping them in the Democratic tent. The last thing I would say is in general, and this is something that I think when I first started conducting surveys on this, it kind of surprised me because even though I’m a survey researcher, when I go out and field a survey of a population that I haven’t studied before, I often go based on instinct and intuition.

And in terms of surveying Korean Americans, for me, instinct and intuition is to think about my family. And my family for the most part is not overwhelmingly liberal across a wide range of issues. My parents are actually quite conservative on a lot of political issues. And so the thing that surprised me about Korean Americans and Asian Americans generally is across a really wide swath of policy issues, everything from the environment to compensatory wagers for men and women to immigration policy to healthcare reform, Asian Americans seem quite liberal, often on the scale of 60 to 70% favoring the liberal side of a wide range of policy issues. There are only a couple of issues where that’s not the case, but overwhelmingly, Korean Americans are liberal across a wide range of issues and that is going to make them more likely to vote Democratic.

Abraham Kim
I want to switch our conversation to Korean American mobilization. I’m just looking at the data here: Korean Americans relative to their Asian American counterparts are less politically involved or less politically engaged. Everything from being self-mobilized to donating money to candidates to volunteering and attending protests for example. And being Korean Americans, we kind of recognize that there is a issue here. I’m wondering from a researcher’s perspective and having studied many different groups, what can Korean Americans do to improve? What, from your opinion, can we do to do a better job in mobilizing our Korean American community?

Taeku Lee
That’s a great question. I think in general, I tend to be a glass half-full person. So I would first start out by agreeing with your characterization but then also adding to it. I think it’s absolutely true that in the data we see that Korean Americans across a wide range of different ways of getting politically engaged seem to be engaged at lower rates than Asian Americans. And so if that’s your reference point, I think that we have to think about. it’s not just about voting, it’s also about campaigning. It’s about attending rallies. It’s about talking to your friends and your neighbors about politics all the way to engaging in protest politics. Korean Americans seem to do it slightly less than other Asian Americans. I would say though, that if you look at the last few election cycles that’s relative to an overall story of remarkable mobilization for Asian Americans as a whole.

So if you just compare Korean Americans to the general population, I think that story holds for Korean Americans as well. Since in the last decade, Korean Americans have been a lot more mobilized than they have been in the past. So the rates of change look promising, but then the absolute rates of participation are part of the worry. And in terms of your question on what can Korean Americans do, I think the most obvious and important thing is to stand up and be heard and to participate. There are things that people can do individually to recognize their own agency and their own voice in the political process in the United States. But beyond what individuals can do is what institutions can do. So I think wherever Korean Americans live, I would ask listeners to think about how strong your community is at the organization level.

Are there the right kinds of community-based organizations where you live that are able to serve the community, that are able to bring people together? Sometimes becoming involved in politics is a matter of talking about politics with somebody else that you think are experiencing the same things that you experienced. So that could be some kind of after-church program that could be in the basement of a service providing organization. That could be any number of things. But if your community doesn’t have a strong organizational foundation to get engaged politically, it’s going to be a lot more difficult because as I mentioned earlier, it’s been the historical practice of the main political parties in their candidates to assume that Korean American voters are a segment of the electorate that you can ignore.

Abraham Kim
I can’t let you step away from this podcast without talking about the 2020 census. For those for our listeners who are not as familiar with the census, can you talk a little bit about the importance of this upcoming 2020 census? Why should we pay attention?

Taeku Lee
I think you should pay attention to the census because it is not just about collecting data and counting the number of Americans in the United States. It is about the instrumental use of what you learn about the population counts in the United States and where and how they are distributed. That affects fundamental things about how government runs, like what state is going to get how many members of Congress and where are those congressional districts going to be, and how billions of dollars of federal funding are going to be dispersed across which communities and in what particular ways. So fundamental questions about redistributive politics and distributed politics depend on the numbers that the decennial census decides to be the official population count of the United States. 2020 is a very politicized year for the census count.

I think in some ways, there’s been too much attention given to the Trump administration’s interest in having a citizenship question under the 2020 census. And by my reading as a political scientist, the fact that there has been that much attention on the citizenship question in some ways is a little bit of smoke and mirrors behind the fact that if there are political interest in politicizing the 2020 census the Trump administration has already won in the sense of the strategic goal. If you are facing an increasingly diversifying country and recognize that most of the diversity in the country tends to be voting Democratic in recent elections, then to take from that as a strategic goal to try to reduce the population counts of certain segments of the U.S. population.

I think the wheels have already been in motion, whether or not there is a citizenship question in terms of the expected population counts for the 2020 census. Now, what do I mean by that? What I mean is that there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that communities of color and immigrant-based communities are already incredibly distrustful and fearful of the 2020 census count and are unlikely to participate in 2020 census. The Census Bureau themselves, conducted a CBAMS survey, and I’m sorry that I can’t remember what the acronym stands for, but there are CBAMS survey of about 17,000 Americans and some 40 to 50 focus groups in different particular communities about what people are thinking about. In terms of the 2020 census the first alarming number out of the CBAMS study — a study that’s done two years prior to each decennial census — in 2008, the Census Bureau conducted a survey and 86% of respondents said that they plan to participate in the census. Now that 86% as a figure should already alarm you because census participation is actually mandated by law. So if 86% say they’re going to participate in a census, that should already be a low number. In 2018 when the Census Bureau conducted a CBAM survey for the 2020 census, that figure was 67%. For Asian Americans, that figure is 55%. So the numbers of Americans as far as we can tell who are planning to engage in filling out their census form two years before the census — at this point, it’s one year before the census is about be implemented — is alarmingly low.

So the CBAMS study is used so that the Census Bureau can really plan an outreach effort to really try to bridge the gap between 86% and 100%, and in this case, between 67% and 100%. But I have to tell you, getting from 67% to 100% is going to be really hard in 2020. And some of the real barriers are barriers that you find within the Asian American community. There’s not enough data there in the CBAMS study for me to be able to say what are the particular areas of concern for Korean Americans, but for Asian Americans, there are huge gaps in terms of people’s understanding about what the census data are going to be used for. So a significant percentage of Asian Americans misunderstand the census as being about data collection so that there can be information sharing between law enforcement agencies, local police departments, and the FBI for the purposes of doing their work. A significant percentage of Asian Americans misconceive of the Census Bureau as giving the Trump administration data so they could implement their policy to try to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible.

And one of the most telling statistics out of this CBAMS study is the percentage of Americans who know that census participation is required by law. And that figure in 2018 was 25%. So even without the citizenship question, there are enormous barriers facing the 2020 census and it can’t be stated enough how important census participation is and how important getting the right population counts are for the next decade of politics and federal policy in the United. So what can civic organizations like CKA and others do to help to close that gap in terms of participation in the census? I think a lot of the real work has to happen at the local level. I mean, the nature of American politics and American society today is that the great strength of the United States today, the social cement that still binds us together, are things that happen at the local level.

And I think for that reason, a lot of the Census Bureau’s efforts to maximize participation have been to work with community organizations at the local level. And so wherever CKA has ties either as CKA or as members of CKA to local organizations that are engaged in some kind of 2020 census effort, get involved. So you know, the simplest thing to do is to make sure that you’re not part of that percent of Korean Americans that doesn’t participate in the survey. The 2020 census I neglected to mention is the first census where you can actually fill out a physical form or you can also get online and participate in the census through their online format. That raises all kinds of other issues that we don’t have time to talk about. But there are multiple ways that you can participate in 2020 census yourself. Beyond your filling out the form about your being in the United States, I would just get involved with community-based organizations who are doing outreach efforts for the 2020 census.

Abraham Kim
Taeku, I feel like we can talk for hours about all of these different important political issues. Thank you very much for your time and your insights, and we appreciate your contribution to help promote, the Korean American community and the Asian American community. So thank you Taeku.

Taeku Lee
Thank you so much for inviting me. I really enjoyed it.

Abraham Kim
I hope you found our last 45 minutes together fascinating because I learned so much from interviewing Taeku Lee. I know that he had presented at multiple CKA events about some of the data that he had shown. But just sitting down and really digging deep on the stories behind the numbers was a fascinating journey for me. And I think it’s a great way to end the series. We started with Congressman Andy Kim, and his plea and pitch to the Korean American community was to get involved now. Get mobilized. And I think Taeku Lee, at the end of this series, is echoing the same thing. One of the interesting data points he says: by 2043 Asian American Pacific Islanders will become not only the fastest growing, but the largest group in the United States– but we shouldn’t wait until then. Instead, we should mobilize now. We should get involved now. We should build institutions now and get our community directly involved in the political process, in the civic process. So I think it’s a great way to end our series. What do you think, Jess?

Jessica Lee
I think that’s exactly right. It was a great book end to this whole first season. And you know, Professor Lee really is able to shed light on things that I think we all think about but don’t really have the data points to back up. And in particular what I thought he really highlighted very well was this notion of a bifurcated Korea America. Of a professional class and a working class. And that the challenge is going to be to find organizations and avenues for these two groups of people with different socioeconomic background and lived experiences to learn from each other, to support each other, and to lift each other up. And I think ultimately that has been a real part of the reason behind starting this podcast at CKA. You know, we believe that by sharing stories of Korean Americans in a platform that’s free and accessible to everyone, that we can democratize our stories and our organization to everyone and really connect more individuals to each other no matter where they live or what they do. So we look forward to your feedback, as said, on this whole series and look forward to really learning more about the various Korean Americans who are doing amazing things in this country.

Abraham Kim
Yeah. As Jessica said, we are very interested in your feedback and also recommendations of other leaders that we can interview in the future. Just as a reminder to send us an email at podcast@councilka.org. That’s the best way to reach us and to give us your feedback. So again, thank you very much for being with us on this journey of 10 episodes and also thank you to our producer, Kevin Koo, who has not only masterfully crafted all of these podcasts together, but also traveled with us across the country to meet with various leaders and making sure we don’t mess up the technology behind doing this podcast and making sure we sound professional on the air.

Jessica Lee
Yes, that’s right. So, be sure to download all of our episodes on our website, Podbean, and wherever you get your podcasts episodes and look forward to the next episode. Thank you.

Abraham Kim
Thanks.