Opinion: Asian Americans complain about Vegas debate

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Just as Democrats moved to tamp down a racially tinged dispute between the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama presidential campaigns that caused many in the party to cringe, Asian Americans in Nevada have gone public with discontents of their own.

Cosponsors of tonight’s debate in Las Vegas among the Democratic White House contenders -- a forum that starts at 6 p.m. (PST) and is designed to spotlight issues of special importance to minority communities -- include groups representing blacks and Latinos.

Lacking is any Asian American organization. And that omission sparked complaints from Mike Vaswani, president of the Las Vegas Asian American Group, in an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

‘We don’t ask a lot of government, and we give a lot,’ Vaswani says in the piece. ‘We want to ask the candidates what they will do to support the Asian community.’

The oversight is all the more surprising given statistics supplied us from the Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote in Washington.

According to those figures ...

Asian Americans represent about 8% of the population of Clark County, which includes Las Vegas (Filipinos are the largest subgroup, by far, within this demographic).

The 41% growth rate of the Asian American population in the county between 2000 and 2004 was the highest for any racial group. And although Pacific Islanders account for only 1% of the county’s population, they had a growth rate of 37% between 2000 and 2004.

State Democratic Party officials took steps to make amends, issuing debate tickets to Asian American community leaders and asking their groups to submit questions. And we imagine that if the Nevada caucuses retain a spot in the early skirmishing in future presidential contests, Asian Americans will be a more prominent part of the political mix.

-- Don Frederick