11pm Immigrants Belong Here Program 04.07.2021

A half ago...a lexington business owner created a campaign that stands up to asian hate.

Today there are more than fifty businesses supporting it.

Abc 36's danielle saitta tells us about 'immigrants belong here'.

L3: abc 36 news white businesses rally around anti-asian violence campaign l3: abc 36 news white dan wu the immigrants belong here campaign l3: abc 36 news white businesses rally around anti-asian violence campaign l3: abc 36 news white emma crawford chocolate holler l3: abc 36 news white businesses rally around anti-asian violence campaign meet dan wu...like many small business owners...he's taken a hard hit sot: so we shut down not knowing if we were going to open he tells me in addition to local businesses like his....covid has also severely impacted something else...an entire community.

Sot: we've all heard the statistics that anti-asian violence has increased by 150 percent over the last year..and it's not just the vicious vicious murder that happened in atlanta its a lot of harassment take a look at these stats from the center for the study of hate and extremism...at the start of the pandemic you can see how the graph shows the google search numbers for americans using asian slurs to define the coronavirus.

But also look at how...less than a year after...in january 2021..these terms were still being used to define the virus.

Now look at the national report for stop aapi hate... according to one of its collected reports from mid- march of last year through february of this year...3,795 reports were received by the stop aapi hate reporting center.

To help reduce these numbers...on the organization's website...there's an option to report an incident in a variety of languages.

Wu says that it's not entirely covid- 19 related and that this hate has been going on a long time...and it needs to stop.

Sot: honestly it's nothing new they're just echoes of the kind of racism that our community and all marginalized communities have over the last several hundred years so he wanted to help on the local level by creating a campaign in lexington....called the immigrants belong here campaign.

And he's not running the campaign alone.....if you look on the instagram for his business...you can see a few of the supporting businesses.

Chocolate hollar in lexington is one of 70 or so.

Sot: choc hollar: i think it's super important to acknowledge where our biases are and recognize that we need to pay attention to the way we view things and i think having a campaign like this will ultimately help in addition to having posters for the campaign in windows....wu says businesses have donated some of their sales on certain days.

Money then goes towards national aapi hate organizations or local campaigns to help out immigrants and their families like kentucky equal justice.

In addition....this week only...wu organized a t-shirt campaign to help spread the word even more he believes that while covid has hurt his business...it's helped birth this campaign aimed to make sure...lexington stands behind the asian community sot: it's something that i wanted to get into every store front window..so that people