Remarks on Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 29, 2000

May 25, 2000

The President. Thank you. Thank you very much, and good afternoon.

I want to welcome all of you here. And a special word of welcome to a former Congressman, and now our chair of the Commission, Norm Mineta. Daphne Kwok, Jin Sook Lee, Karen Narasaki, Senator Akaka, Senator Thomas, Representative Becerra, Representative Eni Faleomavaega, Representative Underwood, to Bill Lann Lee and all the members of the administration who are Asian-Pacific Americans. We just had a picture of over 60 of us, about--not quite--90 percent of the total.

I want to thank those of you who work in the White House and to say a special word of appreciation to Laura Efurd, who worked very hard on this event. And to our Director of Public Liaison, Mary Beth Cahill, for her work and support. And I want to say a special word of appreciation to the Asian-Pacific American whom I have known the longest in this group, Maria Haley, who helped me put the Commission together. I thank her for her work.

I am very proud that I've had the opportunity to appoint more Asian-Pacific Americans than any President in history. I am proud of the difference you make every day, whether you're enforcing our civil rights laws, administering our Medicare program, representing America overseas, or in many other countless ways, you make a profound difference.

This month we celebrate the accomplishments of more than 10 million Asian-Pacific Americans in every aspect of our Nation's life from engineering to education, science to sports, public service to the performing arts. You might be interested to know that one of the performing arts is speechmaking, and the speechwriter who prepared this was Samir Afridi, one of the Asian-Pacific Americans in our administration.

You may be fifth-generation Americans or newcomers to our shores, but you have all enriched our county and reinforced our values of family, work, and community. We should recognize that, not just in one month but every day. Thanks to the inventiveness of people like Vinod Dham, we celebrate it whenever we use a computer with a Pentium chip. We celebrate when we read the works of writers like Amy Tan; when we visit the haunting Vietnam Memorial, designed by Maya Lin; when we benefit from the path-breaking medical research of Dr. David Ho; and from countless other Asian-Pacific Americans who are leading us to new frontiers of science and technology.

And I also want to say that just as we are enhanced when we tap the strengths of all Americans, we are diminished when any American is targeted unfairly because of his or her heritage. Stereotyping, discrimination, racism have no place. And if we can overcome it, America has no limit to what we can achieve.

I am proud of the progress that we have made together over the last 71/2 years, both here and around the world. This spring I was the first President in over 20 years to visit South Asia. Just yesterday we took an historic step toward normalizing trade with China and continuing our prosperity at home, and I think most important of all, giving us the chance to have a very different 50 years with the Asian-Pacific region in the future than the 50 years we have all just lived through.

I am very proud of the contributions of Asian-Pacific Americans to the longest economic expansion in history, to the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years. I am proud that we have worked hard to spread these benefits more equally across our society--poverty at a 20-year low and poverty among Asian-Pacific Americans declining by more than 10 percent since I took office.

Last year the SBA approved loans to Asian-Pacific Americans entrepreneurs totaling over $2.1 billion, more than 31/2 times the number of loans guaranteed in 1992, the year before we took office.

We beefed up our commitment to the enforcement of civil rights laws. And we know that, in spite of all the successes, we still face challenges to building the one America of our dreams. So today I'd like to touch on just a few of those, if I might.

First, we face the challenge of ensuring that every American is part of our prosperity. The Asian-Pacific American community is the fastest growing racial group in our country--also among the most diverse, with more than 30 different ethnic groups, with roots that stretch from Pakistan to Polynesia, Thailand to Tonga, Hong Kong to Hawaii. Some have referred to your community as a socalled model minority. But that label, like any one, while it has its truths and strengths, masks the rich diversity and the diversity of challenges and disparities we find within the Asian-Pacific American community.

For example, cervical cancer rates among Vietnamese women are nearly 5 times higher than those for white women. Why is that, and what can we do about it? Over half of South-Asian-Americans have earned a bachelor's degree, but less than 6 percent of Cambodian- and Laotian-Americans have completed college. Why is that, and what can we do about it? Despite the strong economy, almost half of all Cambodian-Americans and two out of three Hmong-Americans live in poverty. Why is that, and what are we going to do about it?