User:Allyokun/sandbox

Physical health

One study conducted among Cambodian Americans residing in Long Beach, California, found that 13.0% of the adult respondents were current cigarette smokers. When broken down by gender, 24.4% of smokers included in the study were male and 5.4% of smokers were women. The prevalence of smoking was found to be higher in Cambodian American males than in other males residing in California. Additionally, smoking rates are estimated to be higher among Cambodian Americans than among other Asian American groups, with the prevalence of cigarette smoking among the aggregate Asian population in the U.S. around 9.6% (with men and women combined).

History

Prior to 1975, most of the few Cambodians in the United States were children of upper income families or those having government-funded scholarships sent abroad to attend school. There was no history of immigration from Cambodia into the United States. After the fall of Phnom Penh to the communist Khmer Rouge in 1975, a few Cambodians managed to escape, but not until the Khmer Rouge was overthrown in 1979 did large waves of Cambodians began immigrating to the United States as refugees. Between 1975 and 1994, nearly 158,000 Cambodians were admitted into the United States. About 149,000 of them entered the country as refugees, whereas approximately 6,000 entered as immigrants and 2,500 as humanitarian and public interest parolees. In order to encourage rapid assimilation into American culture and to spread the economic impact, the U.S. government settled the refugees in various towns and cities throughout the country. However, once established enough to be able to communicate and travel, many Cambodians began migrating within the U.S. to certain localities where the climate was more like home, where they knew friends and relatives had been sent, or where there were rumored to be familiar jobs or higher government benefits. Consequently, large communities of Cambodians took root in cities such as Long Beach, Fresno and Stockton in California; Providence, Rhode Island; Cleveland, Ohio; as well as Lynn and Lowell in Massachusetts; and Seattle and Portland in the Pacific Northwest.

Since 1994, any Cambodians admitted into the United States have entered the country as immigrants and not as refugees, but the number per year is small. Most of the increase in the ethnic Cambodian population in the United States can be attributed to American-born children of Cambodian immigrants or people of Cambodian descent.

Areas of concentration: West Coast

Long Beach, California, has the highest population of people of Cambodian ancestry outside of Cambodia itself.

Assimilation

Cambodians faced many difficulties upon settling in the United States, such as possessing few transferable job skills, not knowing how to speak English, and having experienced trauma as refugees. These factors greatly impacted overall household income after resettlement. Many refugees arrived with a lack of formal education, since the educated and professional classes were targeted during the Khmer Rouge genocide. This contributed to the difficulty in learning to speak English and in assimilating to the American educational system.

Contemporary Situation of Cambodian Americans

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, resulted in many legal immigrants losing federal aid they had been receiving from the Social Security Administration. This especially affected Cambodian immigrants and other Southeast Asians, who at the time were the largest per capita race or ethnic group receiving public assistance in the United States. Under the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975, many Southeast Asian refugees were placed on federal welfare rolls as a temporary measure in order to integrate them into United States society, but by the time PRWORA passed they had been stripped of their refugee status. However, in 1996, nearly 80 percent of California's Southeast Asian population was either living in poverty and/or welfare-dependent. Because of this, the welfare cuts under PRWORA had a large impact on Cambodian Americans and other citizens of Southeast Asian descent. This is a contributing factor to the high poverty rates of Cambodian Americans that still exist today, and have existed since the first major wave of Cambodian refugees emigrated to the United States in 1975.

Another common phenomenon experienced by some Cambodian American refugees is a lack of familiarity with the history of their homeland. This is prevalent among refugees who were young children when they emigrated to the United States and are now adults. Because of their age, they are not able to remember or understand the historical developments in Cambodia that led to their family's migration. The quality of historical education in American public schools contributes to this unfamiliarity, as well as the resistance by older refugees to discuss the horrors witnessed in Cambodia.