Protesters gather outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston for a July 28 demonstration against a bill that would require state agencies to collected detailed data on Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Asian-Americans are an incredibly diverse group.

To help capture that diversity, some states have recently passed laws requiring state agencies to collect more detailed demographic data about the country's fastest-growing racial group.

Those policies have been met with a backlash from within the Asian-American community.

Massachusetts state Rep. Tackey Chan, a Democrat who in January introduced a bill calling for more Asian-American data, says his office started receiving a series of phone calls and emails raising concerns about the bill last month.

"To be honest with you, I was rather surprised by that," says Chan, a Democrat whose district includes Quincy, Mass., home to the second-largest Asian-American population in the state after Boston.

Chan says there's little to no information at the state or local level about Asian-Americans. If passed, his bill would require state agencies in Massachusetts to identify Asian-American and Pacific Islander respondents in surveys about, for example, health, schools and employment. And that data would have to be broken down by the state's five largest Asian-American and Pacific Islander ethnic groups, such as Chinese, Indian and Vietnamese.

"We are a data-driven society," he says. "It's hard to make public policy without data. And if you don't have data, you can't advocate."

States including California, Minnesota and Rhode Island have passed similar laws. Lawmakers say more data can help pinpoint unmet needs that can be hard to see.

'Obviously discrimination against Asian-Americans'

On a recent Friday afternoon, about 60 protesters waved picket signs and American flags on the steps of the Massachusetts State House in Boston. Almost all of the demonstrators were immigrants from China. Many of them connected through the social media app WeChat.

Linglan Zhang (right) of Lexington, Mass., holds a picket sign next to her son, Sean (left), and boyfriend, David Kates (right).

"Stop the racist bill!" they chanted, referring to Chan's bill. Some held signs saying, "Aggregation, not segregation," and called for Asian-Americans to be counted only as one group rather than separated by ethnicity.

"The fear is, you know, how you can guarantee the demographic data collected will not be abused or will not be misused for other purposes," said Andy Liu, a computer engineer from Sharon, Mass., who helped organize the protest.

Liu and other protesters questioned why the Massachusetts bill singles out Asian-Americans and not other racial groups for additional data.

"This is obviously discrimination against Asian-Americans," Linglan Zhang of Lexington, Mass., said in Mandarin.

Protesters in other states have also raised that concern, according to Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political scientist at the University of California, Riverside, and a longtime advocate for more Asian-American data.

Ramakrishnan has been following the organized protests and other activism against the data collection laws. He says this debate shows the divide between a new generation of Chinese immigrants and more established Asian-American groups who've been calling for more data for years.

"These mainstream Asian-American organizations are nearly completely absent from the spaces where a large and growing number of Chinese immigrants are active," he says.