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The Bay Area is home to half of California's Asian population, and more than one in five Bay Area residents is Asians. Although the Asian American community is the fastest growing and most diverse segment of the U.S. population, its needs and concerns are often overlooked or completely hidden from view. For instance:
Although Asians are typically praised for their high educational achievements, nearly 15 percent of Asian Americans do not have a high school diploma. Seventeen percent of high school dropouts in the Bay Area are Asian.
Asian Americans represent half of all tuberculosis cases, and subgroups of the Asian population suffer disproportionately high rates of diabetes, lung cancer and heart disease. One in five Asians lack health insurance.
An alarming 20 percent of Asian immigrant children grow up in poverty.
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Asian Americans are the fastest growing population in the U.S.
Some Asian ethnic groups have deeper levels of poverty than others. Nearly 58 percent of Cambodians and 30 percent of Vietnamese in the Bay Area live in poverty, compared to 17 percent of all Bay Area Asians.
Twenty-six percent of Bay Area Asian households have no one over the age of 14 who speaks English well, and almost four in 10 Chinese and Korean households are linguistically isolated.
Nearly 18 percent of Asians in the U.S. lacked health insurance coverage, as of 2005.
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