EMAIL TEMPLATE 1:
Dear Representative/Senator XXX:
I am writing to express my grave concerns over Bill H2681 An Act ensuring equitable representation in the Commonwealth, that requires every government agency that collects race or ethnicity information to report disaggregated data based on ethnicity and country of origin.
I urge you to oppose this Bill as this is a prime example of making a bad bill based on unsubstantiated claims.
The Sponsor of the bill claims that “knowing which languages are most spoken at a community hospital enables that hospital to hire the right translators so patients receive accurate information and understand what’s happening around them.” However, language spoken in a community is not equal to ethnicity – Spanish is spoken in many countries in Latin America, what is the value of separating people into Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Salvadoran, Dominican and Colombian? In addition, what the point of including second generation of Asian Americans in the disaggregated data as they most likely speak better English than the native language their parents speak?
The Sponsor seems to take the approach of “let’s throw it against the wall (collecting everything for everyone) and hope something sticks (maybe we will find some useful information later)” which is poor law-making.
Please oppose the bill and thank you very much.
Your name and address
Email template 2
Dear Representative/Senator XXX:
I am contacting you regarding a proposed Bill H.2681 and felt very nervous about what the bill would do to the Asian American community. Essentially this is just a revised version of the old bill H3361 which singles out Asian American for data disaggregation. Facing tremendous opposition from the Asian American community, the Sponsor of H3361 now proposed H2681 to include data disaggregation for all race groups. However, make no mistake, the bill is still focusing on the Asian American community:
Asian American subgroups mentioned by the bill: 19
Latino American subgroups mentioned by the bill: 6
African American subgroup mentioned by the bill: 7
I think you get the math.
I don’t think the H2681 is any different from H3361 in essence and urge you to oppose the bill.
Thank you,
Name and Address
Email Template 3
Dear Representative/Senator XXX:
I am writing to ask you to oppose House Bill H2681.
I understand that the bill is intended to address socioeconomic disparities among different ethnicity groups. However, the sponsors of bill seem to think ethnicity is the only caused of such disparities and the issue can be resolved by applying ethnicity targeted policies. This bill ignores that socioeconomic disparities are closely linked to income level, education and language skills. In each ethnic group, there are well-to-do and less fortunate populations. Focusing on ethnicity would only deprive us of the opportunity to look into the real causes behind the disparities and undermines the efforts to implement effective policies such as income-based assistance programs.
Thank you,
Your name and address
Email Template 4
Dear Representative/Senator XXX:
My name is XX. I am a resident of XX MA. I am writing to voice my concerns about the potential long-term negative impact of Bill H.2681 on minority groups and immigrants
I strongly feel that this bill will do more harm than good to minority groups and immigrants as a whole. When judging a proposed bill, we should not just take the face value of the intention of the bill, we should also consider how much harm it can inflict in the worst-case scenario. One of the biggest concerns is that the collected data can easily be abused. Data can be interpreted any way one wishes. For example, success of immigrants can be interested as “taking away American job”. Minority groups are historically under-represented in the political arena and are very vulnerable to political rhetoric. The exhaustive information collected by the government, when linked to individual ethnicity, is a powerful enabler for discriminatory policies in political sensitive times. When that happens, the minority communities would be the one that has to bear the full force of “fact-based” discrimination.
This is a bad bill and please oppose it.
Thank you,
Name and address
Email template 5
Dear Representative/Senator XXX:
I am writing to bring your attention to Bill H2681 whichrequires every government agency that collects race or ethnicity information to report disaggregated data based on ethnicity and country of origin.
The Sponsor think disaggregated data are “better” data and will allows policymakers to rely on “numbers and hard facts” when proposing new policies, programs, and services to help their communities.
However, the Sponsor of the Bill completely ignores the fact that how messy the ethnicity-based data are and how easily the data can be misinterpreted. For example, the Bill lists 19 ethnicity in the Asian American group, when you have such a large number of subgroups to compare, you will always find some differences between groups, but are these differences, for example, in income, are the results of ethnicity or other co-founding factors such as education level?
Simply put, more data are not equal to better data. Garbage in and garbage out. Bad data can actually do harm than good.
Please oppose the bill.
Thank you.