Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander communities realize the political importance of the revised standards of Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Directive 15, which requests and classifies information on specific ethnic categories. These counts or numbers by racial category provide crucial information to groups that lobby for resources for redistricting and policy development. The perspectives and methods used for conducting studies on these ethnic groups and on the data collected, besides having far-reaching policy implications, have as a goal providing communities with information critical to serving their health needs. The revised OMB Directive 15 is making a first step toward achieving this goal. This commentary highlights the areas of "invisibility" of Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, thereby pointing to the need for disaggregating the racial data for public health. The "Invisibility" of Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians/Pacific IslandersAsian Americans and Native Hawaiian/ Pacific Islanders have to a large degree been "invisible" in public health debates and their interests disregarded in immigration law and practices, and these factors have obscured our understanding of the sociocultural and ecopolitical factors that influence their health and quality of life. We will focus on a few areas that illustrate this invisibility: the concepts of health and health care, the diagnosis and detection of diseases, treatment and dosage levels, social histories, and, finally, immigration laws and practices.

These complex patterns defy easy generalization and illustrate why US cancer data should be stratified by socioeconomic position, along with race/ethnicity and gender, so as to improve cancer surveillance, research, and control.

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