Representing Georgia
The 2023 – 24 Georgia General Assembly has been called the most diverse ever, with 83 people of color among its 236 members. That includes over a dozen first and second-generation immigrants–and of those, at least 10 were just elected, the vast majority of them, Democrats. Brought to you by ACC x 285 South.
House District 98: Norcross, Gwinnett County
Age: 38
Occupation: lawyer
Education: B.A. from Emory University; J.D. from Yale Law School
Birthplace: Philippines
Three months after Marvin Lim became Georgia’s first Filipino-American state representative in January 2021, a 21-year-old white man walked into three different spas across Atlanta and shot and killed eight people, six of them Asian. Lim, who represents large Asian and Hispanic communities in Gwinnett County’s House District 98, covering parts of Lilburn, Tucker, and Norcross, was one of only five Asian-Americans in the 236-member Georgia Legislature at the time.
The shootings brought into sharp focus something Lim says he has known his whole life about the Asian-American community: “When a hate crime or even low level violations happen, we don’t tend to be comfortable reporting [it].”
He’s seen that same fear of authorities and government institutions in his own mother, who grew up in the Philippines under the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. When he told her he was going to run for office, he says, she was scared. “She would worry and be like, why are you posting on Facebook? Are you going to get in trouble?”
Lim was born in 1984, just two years before the Marcos regime ended, and his parents moved to the United States when he was seven in hopes of providing him a better opportunities. Instead of the political repression his parents had lived under, Lim grew up experiencing the realities of life for lower-income immigrants in America.
His family soon found out that living in the United States didn’t…
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