U.S. residents today face unequal opportunities and access to the American Dream. There are large variations among different communities of color and there are further differences within these individual populations, particularly among Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPIs). As policymakers craft interventions to best address inequality, it is vital that target audiences must be clearly identified. But population data that are broken down by race and ethnicity often only exist at highly aggregated levels, meaning that groups of people with very different cultural, social, and historical backgrounds end up being lumped into one larger group. This report discusses some of the data available on Asian Americans. It then presents and explains the challenges associated with the data and offers policy recommendations to address them.
