Hello, and welcome to USAID's first annual AAPI conference and career expo! I want to thank Cal State Fresno and York College for sponsoring this event, and all of you for attending.
I hope this week’s events encourage you to join or partner with USAID, but most of all, I hope this conference can help those of you interested in foreign affairs envision a career for yourself in this field. Because I know it can be difficult to see that you should represent your country when your communities have so often been told that they do not.
For generations, AAPI communities have been made to feel like they’re not a part of the American story – despite the fact that they helped write the American story.
Chinese immigrants were relentlessly mocked and scorned as they built the railroads, worked the factories, and tilled the farms that developed the American West. Japanese Americans, unjustly interned during WWII, volunteered to fight the spread of fascism in what is now one of the most decorated units in U.S. Military history. Filipino-American farm workers in California, exploited for cheap labor, striked for better wages, inspired Cesar Chavez to join their cause, and helped secure some of the most significant labor reforms in American history. Indian-Americans in tech fought stereotypes and discrimination to go on to lead companies driving American dominance in tech, like Google, IBM and Microsoft.
In spite of this history, however, in recent years, the messages telling people from AAPI communities that they don’t belong have gotten louder. After the pandemic struck, powerful officials in this country embraced language that demeaned Asian Americans, which quickly metastasized online and corresponded with a spike in hateful rhetoric and horrifying acts of violence that are persisting today.
So it’s no surprise that we hear from people in AAPI communities that they don't feel welcome in foreign affairs. And at USAID, we haven’t done enough to signal how serious we are when we say we want to build a workforce that looks like America – as is evidenced by the fact that, in USAID’s 61 year history, this is the first AAPI recruiting event we have ever hosted.
But we are committed to changing that – targeting communities we’ve previously neglected, and in building the most diverse team, building the most impactful team. And I hope we can persuade you to join us in that effort.
I know it can feel daunting to break into this field, especially if you don’t have prior experience. When I was a young Irish immigrant growing up in Pittsburgh and Atlanta, I didn’t face the same structural barriers or cultural discrimination that many of you have encountered. But still, having a role at USAID would have seemed incredibly far-fetched to me, even once I got to university. I could not have conceived that I would have something tangible to offer.
The fact is, however, we’re in serious need of your skills in all sorts of different areas. If you have business experience, you might facilitate partnerships with companies fighting the climate crisis. If you have agricultural skills, you could help us take on the global food crisis by supporting smallholder farmers. If you have clinical skills, you could aid the design of initiatives to combat disease. If you have worked for your school newspaper or run an active social media account, you can probably help us tell our story better. We work in nearly every sector, in every part of the globe, so there are actually few careers or experiences that would not be applicable to our work.
And more crucial even than these skills is the lived experience you would bring to the Agency. Our mission, at USAID, is to respect the dignity of every person we reach, something that AAPI communities in this country have long been fighting for. We need you to help inform our work, and to help uplift voices that are too often silenced and forgotten.
So I hope the rest of the conference allows you to discover a place for yourself here – and to see that USAID, and the foreign policy world more broadly, is a place not only where you belong, but where you can make a lasting difference.
Thank you so much.
Original source can be found here.
