Locked in low-wage, dead-end jobs and socially segregated by limited English skills, working-class Vietnamese Americans in the state's welfare-to-work program are burning through their benefits much faster than other recipients, according to policy analysts, social workers and activists.
The effects have been most pronounced in Orange County's Little Saigon and in Santa Clara County, two of the nation's largest Vietnamese American communities, where thousands of immigrant working poor hold jobs that don't pay enough for them to keep up with California's cost of living.
In Orange County, about 80% of adults enrolled in the CalWorks program who had exhausted their benefits by September were Vietnamese, although they make up about 5% of the population, officials said.
Most were two-parent families with several children and a single low-wage earner. And tellingly, most did not take advantage of CalWorks training and life-skills programs designed to augment the cash assistance, officials said.
Los Angeles County, where Vietnamese Americans make up only 1% of the population, also reported that a disproportionately high number of those timing out were Vietnamese Americans -- about 12%, said Henry Felder, chief of research evaluation and quality assurance for the county Department of Public Social Services.
Contrary to public perceptions of welfare cheats scamming a free ride, those timed out of the system played by the rules, said Duc Nguyen, a director of Hope Community of Santa Ana.
"People think that people on welfare are lazy," said Nguyen, whose agency helps Vietnamese clients find social programs. "That's not the case. A lot of them are just so helpless. They don't have what it takes to find a [better] job."
California's Vietnamese community includes two economically disparate groups. At the end of the Vietnam War, tens of thousands of educated and wealthy Vietnamese escaped the Communist regime and set up profitable expatriate communities in the U.S. -- particular in Westminster.
A second wave of poor and relatively uneducated immigrants began to arrive in the late 1970s and 1980s, seeking a better economic future. Most of the working poor are among this group.
Statewide, about 15,800 recipients ran out of benefits in January, and about 3,000 recipients have been dropped from the rolls each month since, said Andrew Roth, spokesman for the state Department of Social Services.
