Several Taiwanese-American organizations on Friday issued a joint letter, calling on the US Census Bureau to include a “Taiwanese” option to answer the ethnicity question in the next US national census in 2020.
The US Constitution requires a national census once every 10 years and according to the US Census Bureau, an individual’s response to the ethnicity question is based on self-identification.
The census forms do not have a “Taiwanese” option, which had prompted Taiwanese American Citizens League, which also signed the letter, to urge Taiwanese-Americans to check the “other Asian” option in the ethnicity category and write “Taiwanese” in the 2010 census.
In Friday’s letter addressed to Chair of US Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee Ditas Katague, the organizations said there are large discrepancies in government information on the Taiwanese-American population in the US, pointing to the 2010 census that set the population of Taiwanese-Americans at 230,382, whereas 2014 US Homeland Security data on Lawful Permanent Residents showed that the number of Taiwanese-Americans who have registered in the US between 1950 and 2010 was 450,673.
“Taiwanese-Americans all over the nation have expressed their concern and frustration about not knowing how many Taiwanese-Americans there are in the US. We campaign for a separate check box for ‘Taiwanese’ because Taiwanese-Americans want to be counted,” said the letter, which was backed by 12 organizations, including the Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA), Taiwanese Association of America, Formosan Association for Human Rights and North America Taiwanese Medical Association.
FAPA, a nonprofit Washington-based lobbying organization, has since 1997 been calling for a check box for “Taiwanese.”
At the time, it was told by the bureau that a 1997 US Department of State memorandum stipulated that “any listing of ‘Taiwanese’ as a race in a census questionnaire would inevitably raise sensitive political questions ... contrary to US government policy and US national interests.”
FAPA said in a statement that since the US Immigration and Naturalization Service already maintains a separate quota for Taiwanese coming to the US, there should be no reason for the bureau to continue omitting a Taiwanese check box.
“No foreign country should dictate how our own Census Bureau counts its citizens. Taiwanese-Americans today recognize that they are a separate ethnicity from Chinese-Americans and we must honor and respect that,” the letter said.
The Council of Agriculture yesterday signed a Taiwan-Australia Agricultural Cooperation Implementation clause to open a new export market for the nation’s pineapple crop. The clause is an addition to existing cooperation measures, it said. China on Friday last week abruptly announced that it would suspend pineapple imports from Taiwan starting on Monday, on grounds that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful organisms” in shipments of the fruit. The public and private sectors have since joined hands to purchase the local fruit to help the nation’s pineapple farmers. Canberra has requested that all pineapples for export to Australia have their crown buds removed,
POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS: As China attempted to promote its national image through humanitarian aid, its targets include New Southbound Policy countries, an expert said China’s “vaccine diplomacy,” which has become central to its foreign policy this year, might hamper Taiwan’s efforts to build relations with developing countries, an expert said. “China, as one of the few countries other than the United Kingdom and the United States to have produced a COVID-19 vaccine, will certainly use that as a diplomatic tool,” said Kung Shan-son (龔祥生), an assistant research fellow at the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research. Beijing’s major goals in its “vaccine diplomacy” are to promote its national image through humanitarian aid and to solidify its relations with countries that are included in its
A Tainan taxi driver is the Taiwanese with the longest name, after he last month changed it so that it now contains 25 characters, the Anping District Household Registration Office said. The 47-year-old man, formerly known as Huang Hsin-hsiang (黃鑫翔), applied for the name change on Feb. 26, in the hope that it would bring him good luck. His new name starts with Huang Da-lan (黃大嵐) and adds another 22 characters, meaning “Huang Da-lan is the blessed darling and sweetheart of the god of joy, god of wealth, god of misfortune, god of Earth and all the gods,” it said. With
Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group might have lost its right to distribute the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 and the ability to fulfill a contract in Taiwan, civic groups Taiwan Citizen Front and the Economic Democracy Union said yesterday. In a radio interview on Feb. 17, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), head of the Central Epidemic Command Center, said that last year, Taiwan was close to signing a contract to buy doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but that the deal was halted at the last moment, with some speculating that Chinese interference was to blame. On Monday last week, the center
RSS