Hmong immigrants struggle still
By Brian Tumulty
Gannett News Service
WAUSAU, Wis. — Hard-working, well-educated and likely to start their own businesses are descriptions frequently used for the nation's estimated 8 million Asian immigrants.
Rob Orcutt • Gannett News Service
The family of Jay Lee, part of one of the smallest Asian ethnic groups that have relocated to the United States, belongs to that group, too.
Jay Lee, 50, helped found L. Jay Inc., in August 1989 in the Marathon County Incubator complex in Wausau, Wis. The firm makes shoes and helps create jobs for the Hmong immigrant community.
Jay Lee was part of the first wave of ethnic Hmong immigrants from the mountains of Laos to arrive in the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s. Because of their allegiance to the United States during the Vietnam War, they were political enemies of the Laotian Communist government and arrived as political refugees.
Lee is sole owner of L. Jay, a company founded by a group of Hmong in 1989 to create jobs for their ethnic community. A son is the business manager and a daughter runs a translation company.
But the Lee family's story is not typical among the Hmong living in enclaves across the country.
A 2002 Census Bureau survey shows that only about 6 percent of Laotian-born immigrants — either Hmong or lowland Lao — were self-employed.
By comparison, 26.5 percent of first-generation Korean, 19.4 percent of Pakistani and 15.1 percent of Japanese residents told the Census Bureau they were self-employed.
Entrepreneurship is an important factor in the economic success of most ethnic immigrant communities, experts say, because it provides employment for immigrants who usually face language barriers in seeking work.
In a central Wisconsin warehouse set up for incubator businesses, 15 employees of L. Jay work from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. five days a week operating heavy-duty Pfaff sewing machines to stitch together the upper parts of shoes and boots for the U.S. military. They are subcontractors for a Maryland company that makes the soles and does the finishing work.
One of Lee's three sons, Kou Lee, is the company's business manager.
Kou, 24, was born in a refugee camp in Thailand, came to the United States with his parents as an infant, graduated from a local Roman Catholic high school and earned a bachelor's degree in finance from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
And one of Lee's six daughters, Ying Lee, owns Urgent Translation, which has a contract with a local hospital and a few law firms to provide English translation services for Hmong patients and clients.
Lee and his family also grow ginseng with their four-acre operation turning a small profit after 10 years of cultivation.
But in such Wisconsin cities as Wausau, Green Bay and Appleton, the latest Hmong refugees who began arriving in the summer are practically all unemployed, according to Ya Yang, business manager of the Wausau Area Hmong Mutual Association.
This newest wave of Hmong immigrants, who have waited to be relocated since their relatives left the refugee camps back in the 1980s, are getting temporary federal refugee payments and other help from host families.
When they do begin looking for work, the new arrivals will find that many first-generation Hmong immigrants who arrived as many as 20 years ago are clinging to factory jobs or entry-level work in service industries.
According to Hmong National Development, a Washington-based advocacy group, an estimated 43 percent of Hmong men and 34 percent of Hmong women are employed in manufacturing. In Wisconsin, the figures are even higher. An estimated 56 percent of men and 45 percent of women work in manufacturing. And their poverty rate is 20 percent.
The median earnings of Hmong workers in 2000 were $15,835, according to an analysis by Hmong National Development.
"Among the Asian-American community, the poverty rates for Hmong are among the highest and the rate of unemployment are among the highest," said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education.
Wong rejects the cultural stereotype of Asian-Americans as model minorities, observing, "If you look at the history of Asian immigration overall, it's never been easy."
One basic difference for the Hmong is that they arrived in the United States as political refugees, while most other Asian immigrants made the move for economic reasons, according to Grant Ujifusa, a founding editor of the Almanac of American Politics.
"They are preliterate, which makes them very different," said Ujifusa. "Hmong tribal culture makes you more like Navajo than an economic elite which was part of the Chinese diaspora."
Hawai'i has a small Hmong population, numbering 22 based on the 2000 Census.
In Wisconsin, there are 150 to 200 Hmong-owned businesses scattered around the state, according to Charles Vang, a founding member of the Hmong Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce.
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