I want to take a moment to address directly all Asian Americans, Americans with roots in China, Korea, India, Vietnam, Japan, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Malasia, Indonesia, and elsewhere. You have been on my mind constantly throughout this campaign. I am thinking about you constantly, not just because you contribute so much to our country, our society, and our economy; not just because you are so smart and so driven.
I have a special relationship because I attended a public high school in San Francisco, Lowell High School, a high school that was seventy-five percent Asian at the time. Many of my closest friends were Asian during that period in my life. Moreover, I studied in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, and I not only speak Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, but I have written books, and given speeches, in those languages. I was a professor of Asian studies at the University of Illinois and George Washington University and Asian American concerns are my concerns.
Asian civilization will be a critical part of American civilization in the future and you are playing a critical role in the transformation of our nation and the convergence of Eastern and Western cultures. At the same time, I celebrate these developments, I am profoundly aware of a sly and sinister effort to get Americans to be suspicious of Asian Americans, to blame Asian Americans for the terrible things done to this country by a small handful of the rich and powerful.
The attacks on Asian Americans are going on everywhere, orchestrated by cynical figures who want to make sure we have conflicts between ethnic groups and not a united front against the rich. These attacks are at times violent, but more often they are subtle efforts to create legal and institutional barriers for Asian Americans and establish a mood of suspicion.
The focus today is on Chinese and Chinese Americans. The ability of Chinese to study in the United States, to immigrate here, is being radically limited by the unfounded assumption that all Chinese are a security risk, and potential spies. These attacks have been carried over to Chinese Americans, even Chinese Americans who have lived in the United States for generations.
The result is subtle and blatant, charges that Chinese Americans are disloyal. That means that Chinese Americans not getting jobs that are considered sensitive (especially in technology) not being promoted, and not being able to work in government. The situation is rapidly getting worse. But we should not make any mistake about the attention of the attacks on Chinese Americans. These are grave attacks on the rights of all Americans and we must stand with Chinese Americans on every front.
Moreover, we must remember that the Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882 was a racist effort to block all immigration, and limit travel, to the United States for Chinese. It was a blatantly unconstitutional act that led to broad racist actions against Chinese in the US—and against all Asians for a hundred years.
This Chinese Exclusion Act grew out of the Yellow Peril scares of the 19th century wherein the yellow media argued that Chinese, and Asians, had a dangerous inscrutable culture that would destroy the United States. This racist fearmongering was the product of the elites trying to find an enemy to blame for the suffering of American workers—other than the rich and powerful.
Immigration from Asia was limited from that time on, not only for the Chinese. The future of the US was determined in a racist manner by that act. If immigration from Asia had been allowed in the same manner as immigration from Eastern Europe and Italy was between 1880 and 1920 then we would have had a very different nation.
And then came the tragic internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two. Japanese Americans, because they were Asian, were singled out when German Americans and Italian Americans were considered patriotic. This blatant racist policy of putting Asians in concentration camps remains a terrible blotch on our nation’s history.
We did not get back to a reasonable immigration policy until after the Korean War.
There are efforts taking place everywhere in our country to brand all Asian Americans as dangerous foreigners. As an American politician who has many close Asian American friends, who speaks Asian languages, and who believes Asia is the future of the United States, I stand with you and I will not allow the rich and powerful to use anti-Asian rhetoric to deceive and divide.
