PIVOT - The Progressive Vietnamese American Organization
Policy Platform
2017-2018
Submitted by PIVOT Policy Committee on October 25, 2017
Approved and adopted on October 29, 2017
Main Contact:
Thu Quach, PhD
Policy Committee Chair
tquachwork@gmail.com
PIVOT POLICY PLATFORM
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
PIVOT –– the Vietnamese American Progressive Association –– was formed to be a collective voice for progressive Vietnamese Americans who seek a just and diverse America. In 2017, PIVOT was established in direct response to a political landscape and physical environment that threatened the human rights and safety of many Americans, particularly disenfranchised populations (e.g., low-income, immigrants and refugees, people of color, LGBTQ populations, and women). Vietnamese Americans with progressive values came together from across the nation, to engage and empower Vietnamese Americans to work towards a better future.
Key to these efforts is our ability to advocate for policies that align with our values regarding: 1) Promoting human, civil, immigrant, and refugee rights; 2) Increasing cultural, linguistic, and financial access to quality education, health care, and economic opportunities; and 3) Protecting the environment.
To that end, we are focusing on four key priorities for 2020-2021: immigration, health and civil rights. Our policy platform for these priorities are outlined below:
Immigration
Support a pathway to citizenship for non-citizens;
End abusive enforcement and detention;
Advocate for due process and humane policies in deportation proceedings;
Protect immigrant and asylum seekers rights; and
Promote issues specific to Vietnamese-American communities.
Health
Preserve and expanding affordable health coverage;
Ensure that everyone has a right to quality healthcare, regardless of immigration status, sexual orientation/gender identity, and language/cultural barriers;
Promote awareness and utilization of mental health services;
Advance reproductive justice to promote health and well-being;
Eliminate health disparities (disproportionate burdens of health issues in select populations); and
Address the root causes of health disparities.
Civil Rights
Advocate for equal access to justice, healthcare, and other vital systems and services;
Preserve and expand access to voting rights for Vietnamese Americans and other marginalized populations;
Support all efforts to count Vietnamese Americans comprehensively and fully;
Stand in solidarity with other ethnic groups on some of the most pressing and urgent civil rights issues of today; and
Ensure equal access to economic prosperity by promoting fair protections for all workers.
Climate Change
Inform about the urgency of the issue
Build partnerships with groups active in climate change both inside and outside the Vietnamese American community for sharing information and resources.
Provide information about climate change to Vietnamese-Americans through social media, and English/Vietnamese-language press.
Help to communicate the impacts of climate change in human terms, such as forced migration, harsh weather, and loss of livelihood on health and well-being, and the disproportionate impact on disadvantaged communities including immigrants and refugees.
Mobilize to take immediate actions
Be a rallying point for Vietnamese-Americans interested in speaking out and participating in climate actions.
Identify key issues affecting climate and influence the Vietnamese-American for positive actions.
Offer accessible actions/ solutions that can be taken to reduce emissions and waste for the general population as well as targeted populations (e.g., specific workforces with high Vietnamese-American density)
PIVOT IMMIGRATION PLATFORM
Our Objective
We are immigrants in a nation founded by immigrants. The Statue of Liberty is one of our nation’s most significant landmarks, a reminder of our tradition and pursuit of welcoming those who come here to escape persecution, oppression, abject poverty or violence. Simply put, immigration is at the core of who we are as a nation.
Our current immigration system is broken.
There are over 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the shadows. Even when given lawful permanent resident status, immigrants are scapegoated for draining the nation’s resources and taking away jobs from citizens. U.S. citizens are forced to wait several years to be reunited with loved ones due to bureaucratic red tape and backlogs.
Our detention and deportation policies and practices also give rise to serious due process concerns.
We must fight for a new immigration reform that is common sense, humane, lawful and above all, consistent with the promises and image of an America we are proud to call home.
Our Plan
Support a pathway to citizenship for non-citizens.
Create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and other non-citizens
Emphasize reasonable wait for citizenship.
Minimize fees for naturalization.
Repeal the 3-year, 10-year and permanent bars, which force people into a cruel dilemma of either living in the shadows or leaving the country and family behind for years.
Allow eligible undocumented individuals to serve in the military and then receive expedited pathways to citizenship.
End abusive enforcement and detention
Provide Border Protection Agency (“CBP”) with modern equipment and technology while at the same time, ensure that CBP officers have adequate training and oversight to understand how their actions may violate human rights norms, including profiling or use of excessive force.
End state and local intrusions into immigration enforcement.
Reject all discriminatory bans on immigrants and refugees
End family detention, such as recent detention of mothers and children asylum seekers from Central America.
End private and for-profit immigration detention centers, because their approach does not align with human rights standards.
Advocate for due process and humane policies in deportation proceedings.
Push for prosecutorial discretion and due process in comprehensive immigration reform legislation and in immigration policies.
Provide bond hearings in deportation proceedings.
Ensure access to government-funded counsel in deportation proceedings, particularly for unaccompanied children.
Expand the use of humanitarian parole and the granting of Temporary Protected Status.
Prevent the unfair mass deportation of immigrants with criminal convictions who have already “served their time for their crime.”
Protect immigrant and asylum seekers rights.
Protect and enforce legal rights of immigrant workers vulnerable to labor abuses.
Ensure that all immigrants, regardless of immigration status, have access to quality and affordable health care.
Promote immigration integration, including increased access to language programs to encourage English proficiency, promote and fund early learning programs for children, increase funding for community organizations to promote outreach, increase job training opportunities, improve workers’ rights protections for immigrant workers, and expand fee waiver programs to reduce naturalization costs.
Challenge state and local discriminatory laws (inspired by Arizona’s SB 1070) that invite racial profiling and authorize the police to demand papers proving citizenship or immigration status from anyone it suspects of being in the country unlawfully.
Continue our country’s tradition of welcoming refugees fleeing persecution and violence, including increasing the refugee quota for the US.
Promote issues specific to Vietnamese American community.
End indefinite detention of Vietnamese immigrants with outstanding removal orders who cannot be deported because they entered the U.S. prior to the 1995 cut-off date (as provided by the U.S.-Vietnam Memorandum of Understanding on Deportation).
Inform Vietnamese-American community about practical (and oftentimes drastic) effects of immigration laws and policy on community members.
Inform community about resources (e.g. organizations, online…) to help them with immigration issues.
Prevent and expose frauds committed by unscrupulous attorneys or purported immigration “professionals”.
Help eradicate stigma and shame associated with immigration problems.
PIVOT HEALTH PLATFORM
The right to health is a fundamental human right. At the core of this statement is the assertion that every individual has the right to the highest attainable standard of health, both physical and mental. To attain health requires access to quality health care as well as access to food, livable conditions, healthy work environments, and a clean environment.
Much of the current policy debate around health has focused primarily on health care coverage and cost, with little discussion of health disparities and underlying causes of inequities. PIVOT recognizes that health encompasses health care as well as the many other factors that may directly and indirectly influence health. Thus, we are committed to advancing a health agenda that focuses on promoting health (including health care), reducing health disparities, and addressing the underlying causes of such disparities. To this end, we expand our health paradigm to consider issues around racial, income, and environmental inequalities, which are often root causes of health disparities.
Our Plan
Preserving and expanding affordable health coverage.
Protect the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from being repealed; and if repealed, promote a replacement that minimally provides the same number of people covered, and the same level of coverage without increasing cost to the consumer.
Ensuring that everyone has a right to quality healthcare, regardless of immigration status, sexual orientation/gender identity, and language/cultural barriers.
Remove restrictions on access to health care based on discriminatory policies around immigration status, English proficiency, and sexual orientation (i.e. LGBTQ individuals).
Promote workforce development that ensures cultural and linguistic competency and diversity among health care providers.
Promoting awareness and utilization of mental health services.
Given the stigma associated with mental health, the under-diagnosis and reporting of mental health issues particularly among Asian Americans (including Vietnamese Americans), and the under-utilization of mental health services, promote awareness of mental health issues and the importance of mental health care.
Increase behavioral health coverage, both for integrated behavioral health with primary care as well as specialty mental health services.
Promote mental health workforce development, and ensure cultural and linguistic competency training and diversity among mental health care providers.
Advancing reproductive justice to promote health and well-being.
Increase access to reproductive and preventive health care.
Protect a woman’s right to choose when it comes to decisions about her body.
Promote awareness around issues of human trafficking, including but not limited to sex trafficking (e.g., commercially sexually exploited children), and domestic violence; and support efforts to eliminate these abuses towards women and children.
Eliminating health disparities.
Promote the disaggregation of health-related data that can help identify hidden health disparities, particularly in the AAPI population.
Ensure strategic focus on communities/ populations at greatest risk.
Identify and support effective strategies to eliminate health disparities.
Addressing the root causes of health disparities.
Promote efforts to understand the root causes of health disparities, including factors related to race, income, and environment.
Support strategies that can address these root causes of health disparities, which can include (but are not limited to) language access and entitlement programs linked to income, food access programs, affordable housing, and employment opportunities.
PIVOT CIVIL RIGHTS PLATFORM
For decades, Vietnamese Americans have advocated for human rights for their country persons abroad, in their que huong, Vietnam. Unfortunately, in the United States, Vietnamese Americans also face human rights and civil rights threats and abuses that impair equal opportunity and equal access to systems. It is upon the following principles that PIVOT will build a civil rights and human rights platform that would focus on Vietnamese Americans, and elevate our needs:
Advocate for equal access to justice, healthcare, employment, and other vital systems and services. The Census 2010 found that approximately 67 percent of Vietnamese immigrants (age 5 or older) are limited English proficient.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act should be fully enforced, to the extent that many Vietnamese Americans are often discriminated on the basis of language (which is by Supreme Court law, proxy for national origin discrimination). Recipients of federal funding should provide language assistance to those who do not read, write, and speak English very well.
Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act should be fully enforced, to the extent that many Vietnamese Americans cannot access critical health information and services because of limited English proficiency (LEP). Health industry and health organizations must notify LEP Vietnamese of language assistance.
Preserve and expand access to voting rights for Vietnamese Americans and other marginalized populations. Over 76% of naturalized Vietnamese Americans are eligible to vote. PIVOT’S goal is to ensure maximum Vietnamese American voter participation in all elections.
Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act, which provisions for in-language voting information and ballots for certain districts, will be fully implemented – specifically in areas where there are high concentrations of Vietnamese that meet the legislative thresholds.
PIVOT will oppose efforts to disenfranchise Vietnamese Americans and all marginalized and minority voters, including efforts to request citizenship documentation.
PIVOT will support efforts to expand registration, including same-day and online voter registration.
Support all efforts to count Vietnamese Americans comprehensively and fully. When Vietnamese Americans are not counted, we are left out of policy decisions, funding decisions, and other critical legislative efforts. We are “invisible.”
Fully fund Census 2020, including a multifaceted – culturally and linguistically appropriate- outreach campaign that is inclusive of Vietnamese.
Maintain a mandatory American Community Survey and ensure that socioeconomic data points are disaggregated as much as possible.
Support state and local efforts to disaggregate race data so that Vietnamese Americans are counted.
Stand in solidarity with other ethnic, religious, and identity groups on some of the most pressing and urgent civil rights issues of today.
Support legislation such as the End Racial Profiling Act, which would prohibit profiling by federal, state, and local law enforcement on the basis of actual or perceived race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation. Oppose profiling or efforts to profiling.
Stand in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives. Stand in solidarity with Muslim, Sikh, Arab, and South Asian Americans and oppose hate and harsh rhetoric and negative policies (e.g. refugee ban) targeting these communities.
Ensure equal access to economic prosperity by promoting fair protections for all workers.
Educate the Vietnamese community around worker rights issues, including ending wage theft and protecting workers’ rights to organize.
Support efforts that promote fair wage.
PIVOT CLIMATE CHANGE PLATFORM
Environmental protection is a core founding value of PIVOT. Climate change from global warming is an environmental crisis unlike any other that humankind has faced. Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities have increased the global average surface temperature by almost 1 degree Celsius from the pre-industrial period, and the last five years are among the hottest on record.
The impact of this warming trend can be seen through the sea level rise caused by melting glaciers in the polar regions and mass die-off of corals in tropical oceans. In the United States, raging wildfires in California, devastating hurricanes in the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and the extreme heat waves and arctic cold blasts throughout the country brought misery to millions of Americans.
These natural disasters are harbingers of greater calamities if we do not stop the warming of our planet. The scientific conclusions of the 2018 IPCC report describe the catastrophic consequences of warming above 1.5 degrees. Severe heat waves, the most deadly kind of weather phenomenon, more deadly than floods and hurricanes, would occur regularly for 40% of the world’s population, with the poor and the elderly suffering the most harm. In the US, our frontline communities — low-income, people of color, women, children, and the elderly— would bear a disproportionate burden of the climate crisis. Sea level rises of as much as 6 ft is predicted with the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, submerging areas across the world larger than Alaska and displacing nearly 200 million people in the process.
To save ourselves from this future, we need to cut CO2 emissions by 50% by 2030, and completely eliminate net CO2 emissions by 2050. Moving away from a carbon-based economy requires fundamental changes in all aspects of our society: electricity, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, and physical infrastructure.
As our world transitions away from carbon-based energy, it must also develop sustainably to lift hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty and improve their health and well-being. Policies and solutions must be designed to reduce inequalities both between and within nations. All of these critical human needs must be met with net-zero CO2 emission by 2050.
Many promising solutions are being explored and developed, but they need to be accelerated and massively scaled up to meet the challenges that require urgent solutions at global scale.
The Paris Agreement of 2016 committed 200 nations to keeping the global temperature rise to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, the rate of progress to date has been insufficient to meet the targets of the agreement. Global emissions have continued to rise with no signs of peaking. The current trends will likely lead to global warming of 3 degrees Celsius by 2100 with all of its catastrophic consequences.
PIVOT believe it is time for urgent action to save our planet, for ourselves and our children. PIVOT will devote significant resources to mobilize the Vietnamese-American community to help address the climate crisis. The actions and policies we support will ensure economic justice, align with our focus on immigration, health and civil rights, and serve the interests of the Vietnamese-American community.
The United States is responsible for the most cumulative CO2 emission and 15% of total global emissions. Therefore, local actions in the US, and in our communities, will have an outsized global impact. Change the trajectory of US emission and we will change that trajectory for the world.
Our Plan
Inform about the urgency of the issue
Build partnerships with groups active in climate change both inside and outside the Vietnamese American community for information sharing
Provide information about climate change to Vietnamese-Americans through social media, and English/Vietnamese-language press.
Help to communicate the impact of climate change in human terms, the impact of forced migrations, harsh weather, and loss of livelihood on health and well-being, and its disproportionate impact on the most disadvantaged including immigrants and refugees.
Mobilize to take immediate actions
Be a rallying point for Vietnamese-Americans interested in speaking out and participating in climate actions
Identify key issues affecting the climate, and influence the Vietnamese-American for positive actions
Offer accessible actions/ solutions that can be taken to reduce emissions and waste for the general population as well as targeted populations (e.g., specific workforces with high Vietnamese-American density)