by Akemi Tamanaha, AsAmNews Associate Editor
Civil rights organizations and advocacy groups say a mistake in subregion classifications made by the U.S. Census Bureau could prove costly for Hmong Americans.
Last year, the Census Bureau released new data sets from the 2020 Census as part of the Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics File A (Detailed DHC-A). Hmong and Southeast Asian-focused groups discovered in the DHC-A data sets that the bureau had classified Asians by subregions and mistakenly classified Hmong people as “East Asian” instead of “Southeast Asian.”
A few weeks ago, a coalition of 12 Hmong and other Asian American and Pacific Islander organizations, led by the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) sent a letter to U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert L. Santos urging him to prioritize reclassifying Hmong as “Southeast Asian.”