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The Bay Area is home to half of California's Asian population, and more than one in four Bay Area residents is Asian. 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 most people think Asians always do very well in school, in fact, many do not finish high school, and in San Francisco alone nearly 29% of the high school drop outs 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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