To many of San Francisco's immigrant Chinese American residents, the main problem for them to learn English is no child care service, as reported by by the National Economic Development and Law Center for the Chinatown Families Economic Self-Sufficiency Coalition.
About 1 in 5 San Francisco residents is Chinese American, making it the second largest ethnic group; whites is the largest.
The coalition, which was founded last year to help immigrant Chinese families achieve economic self-sufficiency, analyzed demographic and labor market information, interviewed focus groups and surveyed service providers to identify barriers that prevent Chinese residents from earning more money. Coalition members include Asian Women's Resource Center, Cameron House, Self-Help for the Elderly, and Wu Yee Children's Services.
Among its findings:
-- 35 percent of the Chinese population ages 18 to 65 earned less than $10,000 in 1999; only 16 percent of city residents as a whole earned that little.
-- Lack of affordable child care is a barrier to landing living-wage jobs. Many Chinese parents qualify for child care subsidies but there are not enough to go around. Others earn too much to qualify for publicly funded vouchers but not enough to afford unsubsidized child care.
-- About 1 in 3 working-age Chinese American adults in San Francisco does not speak English well. Many expressed a strong preference for job training to be held in Chinese or geared toward people with limited proficiency in English.
About 6.1 percent of Chinese workers in San Francisco are employed as cashiers and in retail, 5.6 percent in textile companies, 5 percent as office clerks, 4.9 percent in food preparation, 4.9 percent in housekeeping and 5.9 percent as accountants and financial specialists.
In San Francisco, 37 percent of immigrant Chinese Americans ages 25 and older do not have a high school diploma; the figure is 19 percent in the general population. Ten percent of the Chinese population has no schooling, more than double the rate of San Francisco residents as a whole.
About one-third of immigrant Chinese American residents have an associate's degree or higher, compared to about half of all San Francisco residents. The descendants of Chinese immigrants, however, attain much higher levels of education: only 2 percent do not have high school degrees, and 65 percent have an associate's degree or higher.
The income of working-age Chinese residents increases significantly the longer they live in the United States.
Almost 60 percent of the city's Chinese Americans who have lived here for less than 10 years earned less than $20,000 annually; the figure for those who have been here longer than 30 years is only 30 percent. (Source: Vanessa Hua, San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 21, 2005).