A DREAM deferred (2)

On Oct. 6, 2011, the United States government passed Senate Resolution 201 and the world moved on with little notice or fanfare. But I noticed the apology that came 129 years after the fact. More specifically, I noticed the contradiction the apology showed against the backdrop of present day law-making, but I’m getting ahead of myself. In 1882, 129 years ago, amid a floundering post-Civil War economy, a growing anti-Chinese labor sentiment encouraged the United States government to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, which heavily restricted the immigration of people from China. It has the dubious honor of being the nation’s first racist immigration law put into practice. It proclaimed Chinese “dangerous to the political and social integrity of the United States.” The act, which was proposed as a 10-year ban, would stretch six decades until its 1943 repeal. It took 129 years and persistent calls to action from the Chinese-American, Japanese and Jewish councils to extract an apology from the U.S. government for passing racist discriminatory practices into law.

In the same week that the U.S. Congress passed S. Res. 201 to apologize for “six decades of legislation that targeted the Chinese people for physical and political exclusion,” I traveled to the Hope Community Center in Apopka, Fla. as a part of alternative Fall break on immigration and gender. When our group arrived in Apopka, there had just been a police raid on the community. (S. Res. 201 regrets legislation that “induced trauma that persists within the Chinese community.”) At the Hope Community Center, we discussed recent immigration laws in Arizona, Georgia, Florida and Alabama that granted police the power to approach someone on the “reasonable suspicion” that they were illegal and ask for identification. (S. Res. 201 regrets legislation that “fostered an atmosphere of racial discrimination that deeply prejudiced the civil rights of Chinese immigrants.”) In my host family, the three eldest children left home at 10 p.m. to work for a cleaning service. The second oldest daughter paid thousands of dollars to attend a single community college course because she could not qualify for financial aid. (S. Res. 201 regrets legislation that “restricted the capacity of generations of individuals and families to openly pursue the American dream without fear.”)

The current presidential administration has had one of the harshest immigration stances, deporting more undocumented immigrants than its predecessors. Although it contends that its motivations are primarily to deport criminals, I saw families of undocumented workers who had to live in fear of deportation and who were not criminals, but rather students and honest working people in every other way but on paper. Now, I am hardly an expert on immigration reform, but it struck me as an incredible contradiction that the U.S. could acknowledge the racial wrongdoings it had perpetuated in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and continue to practice unconstitutional immigration laws in present day.

When I was little, my grandfather told me about his 12-year-old self, locked alone in an Angel Island cell waiting to be processed through immigration. My grandfather told me about the relief he felt when anti-Japanese sentiment rippled through America during World War II. He told me about the “I am Chinese” button he wore to distinguish himself from Japanese Americans who were taken from their homes and put into internment camps.

That my grandfather did not speak up for Japanese Americans interned during WWII, but instead rejoiced that he was no longer an “enemy” in the eyes of the U.S. government is a sad complicated truth, but it need not be repeated in history.

I cannot help but think the U.S. government has adopted an “act now, apologize later” approach to immigration law. And so this S. Res. 201 apology for the systemic racial discrimination against Chinese Americans and their descendants struck a deeply personal chord with me because despite Congress’s apology for the past, a system of restrictive immigration policy that encourages racial and ethnic profiling continues in present day. To pass an apology for racial discrimination 129 years too late, it took the political will of Asian-American senators in office and coalitions of Asian-American and Jewish activists. To keep history from repeating itself, it will take equal strength and courage from an outspoken group of voters like us.

Kristen Lee, Trinity ’13