China Overseas Chinese Network, April 8th. According to a comprehensive report by the American Chinese website, the new crown pneumonia epidemic has caused an impact on all ethnic groups in the United States, but the study found that the long-term unemployment rate of Asian-Pacific Americans is the highest in the United States.
With the economic recovery, the unemployment rate has returned to close to before the epidemic, but many Asian Americans are still uncertain when they will be able to return to work.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of the first quarter of 2021, there are approximately 615,000 unemployed people in the Asian community, and 48% of them have been unemployed for more than six months.
This ratio exceeds that of other ethnic groups.
In comparison, 43% of the unemployed people of African descent are long-term unemployed, and 39% of whites and Hispanics are respectively.
Experts said that the long-term unemployment level in the community reflects the slow recovery of low-wage industries, and these figures do not include those who did not apply for unemployment benefits because of language or cultural barriers.
Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, deputy director of the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said: “We do see that this epidemic has a profound impact on those with a high school or lower education.” She pointed out that as of 2020 In the summer, 83% of Asians with a high school degree or below applied for unemployment in California, compared with an average of 37% of other ethnicities.
Even if the overall unemployment rate for Asian Americans has fallen from a high of nearly 15% in the spring of 2020 to 5% in February, the situation is still not optimistic.
De La Cruz-Viesca said it is difficult for Asian Americans who have not received higher education to regain a foothold.
As the virus begins to spread across the United States in the spring of 2020, many jobs that require human contact have disappeared. Many of these jobs are held by Asian workers, such as retail, hotel and leisure, and personal services such as salons or elderly care. .
According to a report compiled by Donald Mar, an economics professor at San Francisco State University and Paul Ong, a scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, Asian employees account for a quarter of the nation in these people-to-person industries.
Mar said, "The recovery of these industries is very slow. Asian Americans are also concentrated in a few states, some of which have implemented stay-at-home orders earlier than the rest of the country. So Asian Americans lost their jobs earlier during the epidemic. "According to Mar's estimates, from January to March 2020, more than 233,000 Asian small businesses have closed their doors. Many Asian small businesses have been affected by the prejudice against the spread of the virus, and they had no business before the stay-at-home order took effect. do.