Anna Mae He Case: "Anna Mae Goes to China"

Here's a long article about a major milestone in the Anna Mae He case. I wrote about my reaction to this case last year. My opinion of the Bakers is of course very, very negative. However, I'm glad to note that both families seem to be working together a bit, at least enough to preserve the positive relationship between their daughters.

I just want to note that the tone of the ABC News article is really over the top and offensive at several points. I know that Anna Mae will go through culture shock in China. I don't want to minimize that. But children move between countries all the time. I've certainly experienced it myself. Also, I don't see the news media engaging in this kind of emotional outpouring over the many 9-year-olds who are deported to Mexico after spending their entire lives in this country.

Take this passage:

The child's cultural roots are evident. She thinks Hannah Montana is cool (but can't tell you why); she skates around on retractable roller skate shoes, and at every opportunity, she pulls out her Game Boy. She likes to read, is a straight-A student, and wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up.

And how well she fares in her new home in China is the big question on the lips and in the hearts of everyone from her adoptive parents in Tennessee, to judges who have ruled on her case, social workers who have sought to monitor the transition, friends and family of both the Bakers and the Hes, and an international television audience.

First of all, I wouldn't grant the Bakers the title of "adoptive parents". And secondly, there is NOTHING on that list of "cultural roots", besides Hannah Montana, that is specifically American. A Game Boy? I guess only Americans are allowed to have those. They're such an important part of our cultural heritage! It's as if the writers of this piece expect that the day after landing in China, Anna Mae will be forcibly stripped of her American gear, issued a pointy hat and a bucket and sent out into the rice paddies for the rest of her life.

Great Immigration Proposal: Transnational Unions

Not much going on right now on the personal or adoption front. I'm on Day 4 of the South Beach diet, though. I have to say, the name always put me off. Having lived in Miami slightly before South Beach got all glammed up, I've associated "South Beach" with good coffee and cheap, fatty Cuban sandwiches. After looking into it, I really like the healthy eating principles, and it seems very balanced. I can have miso soup with tofu for breakfast! Cutting out rice has been really tough, but I'll get to add it back in small amounts later on. I'm just looking to lose the bit of weight I put on after quitting smoking two years ago.

I read this short article about immigration a week ago, and it's been on my mind recently so I'd like to share it. The interim proposal for immigration is fantastic and it's very much along the lines of what I've been vaguely thinking ought to be done.

Ultimately, I'm an open borders radical. If a US company is allowed, and actually required, to make denim jeans in a factory in Mexico, where they pay workers less, why aren't those same workers allowed to move to the US and do a similar job for more money? The border is a joke... for corporations. For human beings it's very real and even deadly. If the corporation is allowed to travel to where the labor is cheaper, the labor chould be allowed to travel to where the corporations pay more. I also believe in eliminating all the legal indentured servitude visas... the H1-Bs and H2-As.

Unfortunately most Americans aren't prepared to accept this concept. We have to get to a more just system slowly, and by many steps. Here's one great step! It's called transnational unions. I'm thinking about buying the book referred to in the article.

NY Times
September 30, 2007
Worker Solidarity Doesn’t Have to Stop at the Rio Grande
By LAWRENCE DOWNES

Comprehensive immigration reform was supposed to overcome the debate’s dead-end disagreements — It’s amnesty! No, it’s not! — by tackling multiple problems at once. It failed, miserably, twice in two years. Congress tiptoed back to the battlefield this month with a modest attempt to legalize some immigrant children who go to college or serve in the military. That failed too. Federal agents, meanwhile, have been feverishly raiding immigrants’ homes, taking parents away in the dead of night. The illegal population has not left the country yet, but it is terrified.

And yet for all that, the country is still no closer to figuring out how to handle the stream of workers over its borders, or how to be a global fortress when it is already a global magnet. What we need is a better debate.

Jennifer Gordon, a professor at Fordham Law School who won a MacArthur award for her work with immigrant laborers, is offering one. In a recent article she presents a compelling way out of one of immigration’s trickiest riddles: how to manage the immigrant flow in a way that is realistic, workable and fair to both newcomers and to native-born Americans.

Sealing them all out is impossible, throwing the border open unthinkable. Creating a permanent underclass of guest workers has a long, nasty history.

The challenge is to build institutions that conform to reality but lessen its ill effects. “We can’t revert to the fantasy that we can just turn the tap off,” Professor Gordon said. “We have to engage with the question, not abdicate the debate to restrictionists on the one hand and a corporate-designed guest worker program on the other.”

In “Transnational Labor Citizenship,” published last spring in the Southern California Law Review, Professor Gordon offers a new way to structure labor migration.

Her proposal would link the right to immigrate not to a job offer from an employer but to membership in a cross-border worker organization — a kind of transnational union. Migrants could work here legally, but only after agreeing not to undercut other workers by accepting substandard pay or job conditions. The organizations would enforce the agreement and protect members’ rights here and in their home countries.

The goal, she says, is “to bring up the bottom, not by shutting immigrants out, but by organizing them before they come.” Workers who follow the rules would become “transnational labor citizens” — supporting their families and the American economy while offering a powerful check on under-the-table exploitation.

Professor Gordon readily acknowledges the implausibility of winning that One Big Union on a continental scale. But persuasive precedents for her approach exist. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee, an agricultural workers’ union, signed a contract in 2004 to protect thousands of Mexican guest workers in North Carolina. In 2005, it opened an office in Monterrey, Mexico, to further its organizing efforts and defend its members from abusive recruiters there.

Last year, the United Farm Workers and Global Horizons, one of the largest suppliers of agricultural guest workers, signed the first nationwide contract covering immigrants. It provides employer-paid medical care, a seniority system and a grievance procedure to ensure that employers comply with the law.

Doubters will insist that it is crazy to expect immigrants to risk their meager paychecks to defend their rights and abstract notions of worker solidarity.

But they have already shown that they will. Professor Gordon won her genius grant after creating the Workplace Project, an organization of Latino immigrants on Long Island that uses its members’ collective power to regain withheld or stolen wages. Worker centers like it around the country are providing a surge of energy and optimism to the labor movement. Latino day laborers, organizing themselves at hiring corners around the country, are putting a floor on wages and thwarting abusive employers.

That’s why John Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., went to the annual convention of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network in Silver Spring, Md., in August and lauded their shared struggle.

The heart of Professor Gordon’s proposal is the insight that we can enlist immigrants themselves in upholding the lawfulness and high standards we hold dear. An immigrant worker who is unafraid is better than one who is vulnerable and easily abused.

As she sees it, politicians who so bitterly oppose day-laborer hiring sites and other attempts to regularize the underground economy are unwittingly enabling the exploitation and lawlessness they profess to oppose. The “transnational labor citizens” Professor Gordon envisions, on the other hand, would uphold American working standards as they assert and defend their own.

Another complaint, this time against Lou Dobbs

Left at CNN.com via this form:

I am writing regarding your news personality Lou Dobbs to complain about his racist insults against Latinos. I received an email from the Southern Poverty Law Center with some shocking information which I am quoting below:

"Despite being confronted with undisputed evidence to the contrary, Mr. Dobbs says he stands '100 percent behind' the claim that there have been 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the U.S. in recent years. What's more, he has attributed part of the increase to 'unscreened illegal immigrants.'

The truth, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is that new leprosy cases peaked in 1985 at 361 and have declined since, even as the number of undocumented immigrants has increased. The source for Dobbs' outrageous leprosy claim is an anti-immigration zealot who once publicly stated that 'most' Latino immigrant men 'molest girls under 12, although some specialize in boys, and some in nuns."

This email was quite alarming to me, because here I was thinking I lived in the 21st century. What's next? Will Dobbs accuse Latinos of spreading the bubonic plague and poisoning our water supply? Stealing babies and mutilating cattle? Perhaps his next plan is to for America to gather them up and burn them at the stake! I cannot believe a modern news channel is supporting this superstitious claptrap.

Until the hate-spewing Mr. Dobbs is taken off your channel, I will not watch it anymore, and will let others know the news contained therein is simply not trustworthy.

Fugees Soccer

I don't have time for a long post on this, but I'd like to point people to a great article on Clarkston's refugee community and a soccer team:

Refugees Find Hostility and Hope on Soccer Field

[...]

The Fugees are indeed all refugees, from the most troubled corners — Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burundi, Congo, Gambia, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan. Some have endured unimaginable hardship to get here: squalor in refugee camps, separation from siblings and parents. One saw his father killed in their home.

The Fugees, 9 to 17 years old, play on three teams divided by age. Their story is about children with miserable pasts trying to make good with strangers in a very different and sometimes hostile place. But as a season with the youngest of the three teams revealed, it is also a story about the challenges facing resettled refugees in this country. More than 900,000 have been admitted to the United States since 1993, and their presence seems to bring out the best in some people and the worst in others.

Clarkston is very close to where I live. In fact, we seriously considered moving there last year. We've also done some work with the International Refugee Committee, which is not actually in Clarkston but right next door. The NY Times Magazine article was a great presentation of Clarkston, and also touches on how the traditional Atlanta white/African-American dynamic is getting more complicated as Atlanta becomes a diverse, international city. I recommend the above article highly. In fact, it's such a compelling story that there'll probably be a movie about it next year.

Universal buys soccer story: Studio ponies up $3 million

[...]

The article detailed the unlikely success story of the Fugees, a team of refugees from global hotspots including Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan. Placed by resettlement agencies, the kids were banned from playing on a grassy field in the local town park.

Part of the pic deal calls for Universal to pay $500,000 to build a soccer field for the kids. Part of the money will fund a foundation to benefit the team, and the dealmakers cut their fees so more of the coin would go to the teens.

The core of the story is the determined, Jordan-born female coach who recognized the need in these displaced kids and created a team for them. She also became active in helping their families find work and break through bureaucratic red tape as they tried to assimilate.

Odds are that the movie will turn out to be a horrible piece of mush, especially if they replace the Jordanian coach with someone more ethnically audience-friendly... hey, I have to say it, I'm a cynic. But who knows, maybe it will get made and end up being great. And even if it isn't, it'll do some good to have a big-budget, child-friendly, positive story about immigrants.

A Japanese Immigration Story

I touched on Japanese-Brazilians in a previous post entitled "Some Japanese are Insufferable Ethnobigots". I'm fascinated with their situation, and that of other Latin-American descendants of the Japanese diaspora. Their history is noble but tragic. In fact, they can be considered among immigration history's worst losers. Their ancestors rolled the dice and, economically speaking, came up with snake eyes. If they had stuck it out in Japan, their descendants would probably be enjoying one of the highest standards of living in the world. Instead, they're now Brazilians and Peruvians.

I've never been to Brazil, but I once visited Peru in the waning days of the Alberto Fujimori presidency. It has terrible problems of poverty, much worse than Mexico. The Japanese-Peruvians were better off than most Peruvians. This is because they have the right to get work visas in Japan. On the streets of Peru there are tons of right-hand drive microvans, some still with Japanese lettering on the side. Japanese-Peruvians buy them used in Japan and bring them over, or Japanese charities donate them to Peru.

I have certain Japanese citizenry rights through my father. My husband asked me recently what I could do in Japan (not that we have the slightest intention of emigrating there). I could get a work visa and with my teaching experience, probably find decent employment as an English tutor or teacher. But other returning ethnic Japanese, the nikkeijin, wouldn't be so qualified. If all they spoke was Portuguese or Spanish, they'd more likely get the jobs cleaning squid in a fishery. They'd save up their money and send it home to their family. The "regular" Japanese would look askance at them.

Japan is in a difficult position due to their aging population. They need a labor base to support their senior citizens. Recently, they've begun letting more Nikkeijin back in. But they refuse to abandon their ideal of a homogenous nation. It has got to change. I'm sure it will change. I tend to criticize Japan pretty harshly in this blog, but I also believe they have the power to change. I get totally disgusted with English commentators who wax poetic about the undying traditions of an immortal and unchanging Japan. Stereotypical garbage! That type of commentary is better suited to describing wax fruit. In fact, there are very few countries that have changed more than Japan has in the last 200 years.

You may also notice in this blog that I consider myself a patriotic American. This country offers me a home in a way that Japan never will... at least probably not in my lifetime. To be quite honest, when I think about the way my life could have gone, and being raised as a hapa in Japan instead of America, I feel like getting down on my knees and kissing the red Georgia clay.

This partly explains my strong sense of empathy for the Latin-American nikkeijin. My feelings about them are not all wrapped up in pity, though. I also feel a sense of envy. They know more about many things than I ever will. I have spent a lot of my life learning Latin-American Spanish, and for several years, I thought I would spend the rest of my life studying Mexican literature. One of the things that fascinated me about Latin-American culture was the parallel approach to immigration and race, the sense that "Latin" histories and "Anglo" histories were like a braid, sometimes converging and sometimes diverging in both suffering and achievements. In studying the history of Latin America, I was able to better understand U.S. history and my own place within it.

As a kind of example, many Mexicans I've talked to share a similar approach to thinking about the history of their colonization. It's a view rooted in cynicism, empathy and pragmatism... much like my feelings towards the returning nikkeijin. It goes something like this. "If the Anglos had colonized Mexico instead of the Spanish, today we'd be just as rich as the United States. The Anglos had the Protestant work ethic down cold. But then again, I might not have been born. Because the Anglos killed all the indigenous people or put them into reservations. The conquistadors were too lazy. They need the indigenous people to do all the heavy lifting for them, to pretend like they were real nobles as if they were back in Spain, so they didn't separate them away or kill all of them. So due to their laziness, I'm poor, I have to work harder than the Anglos do today, but at least I'm alive."

Economically speaking, Mexicans are losers in the global game. As the famous saying goes, "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!"

I had one professor in a class in Mexico City who was a dedicated neoliberal. He actually spent much of the class talking about how Mexico should be more like Japan. He said that in the 1950s, their situations weren't too far apart, but Japan surged ahead and left Mexico treading water. I thought his approach was boneheaded and stopped going to his class; I was only paying a nominal fee to audit these courses during the summer, so my grade didn't matter.

The hypothetical question "what if I had been raised in Japan?" has had a huge effect on my development as a human being. I don't know why it's so important. I'm still trying to figure out why it's so important to me. Sometimes I feel like a winner, but I also feel more in tune with the losers, and I get pretty angry with the whole game.

Japan Mulls Importing Foreign Workers - Saturday January 20, 2007 6:31 PM - By JOSEPH COLEMAN - Associated Press Writer

OIZUMI, Japan (AP) - At the Brazil Plaza shopping center, Carlos Watanabe thinks back on 12 lonely years as a factory worker in Japan - and can't find a single thing to praise except the cold mug of Kirin lager in his hand.

He and his bar mates, all Japanese-Brazilian, have plenty of work and steady incomes, but they also have many complaints about their adopted home: that they're isolated, looked down upon, cold-shouldered by City Hall.

"I want to go back to Brazil every day, but I don't go because I don't have the money," says Watanabe, 28. "Sometimes I think I should go home, sometimes stay here, sometimes just go to another country."

[...]

The prospect of a shrinking, rapidly aging population is spurring a debate about whether Japan - so insular that it once barred foreigners from its shores for two centuries - should open up to more foreign workers.

Japan's 2 million registered foreigners, 1.57 percent of the population, are at a record high but minuscule compared with the United States' 12 percent.

For the government to increase those numbers would be groundbreaking in a nation conditioned to see itself as racially homogeneous and culturally unique, and to equate "foreign" with crime and social disorder.

"I think we are entering an age of revolutionary change," said Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute and a vocal proponent of accepting more outsiders. "Our views on how the nation should be and our views on foreigners need to change in order to maintain our society."

[...]

At the bar at Brazil Plaza on a Saturday afternoon, Watanabe and friends were in a heated debate about whether they could live on Brazil's minimum wage.

Opinion was divided between those like Naruishi who feel they're making it in Japan, and those like Watanabe who long for their homeland.

Naruishi started out in Japan 13 years ago making tofu and now works in car sales. "Live in Brazil? No," he said. "The salaries there are too low."

But all agreed on one point: Japan is a tough society to break into.

"The Japanese don't like foreigners," said Cleber Parra, 30, who concedes he shares the blame because he doesn't speak much Japanese. "We're noisy and lazy - they don't like that."

The group moved onto another bar in the afternoon and evening, then gathered at around 11 p.m. at a club where a live band played "forra," a type of Brazilian country music.

After hours of shimmying on the packed dance floor, they spilled into the dark, quiet streets of Oizumi, laughing and chatting. A police car on the watch silently circled the block, red lights flashing.

Civil Rights and Immigration

I ran across a New York Times article today profiling the new Swedish immigration minister. Her name is Nyamko Sabuni and her parents were originally from Congo. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali in The Netherlands, she takes a very firm assimilationist stance.

As an opposition politician, Ms. Sabuni proposed banning the veil for girls under the age of 15. She proposed that schoolgirls undergo compulsory medical examinations to check for evidence of genital mutilation. She denounced what she called the “honor culture” of some immigrant groups, proposed outlawing arranged marriages and called for an end to state financing of religious schools.

Even as furious immigrant and minority groups demand that she be removed from her post, Ms. Sabuni, 37, insists that she is not as extreme as people make her out to be. Given that Sweden is governed by a coalition in which parliamentary votes cannot always be counted on, it is unlikely, anyway, that most of her ideas could plausibly translate into actual law. Nonetheless, she stands by her basic premise: that immigrants must try harder to fit in to their adopted country.

Some immigrants' rights groups in Sweden have accused her of betrayal.

I find these stories of polarizing European immigrant issues to be fascinating, especially in how they compare and contrast to our current debate over immigration. Europe is going to enter a time of massive cultural conflict. The core of this conflict is that they have a very low birth rate and to keep up their population, they'll need to keep letting in more immigrants. In the 21st century, they'll be going through the birth pangs of a hybrid nation, much like the U.S. and many Latin American countries experienced more than a century ago. Today we think of a "Swede" as a tall, blond tenuously Protestant white person. In 40 years that will probably change.

Despite all the problems we're currently experiencing with a revival of nativism, the United States is actually a great model of immigration for Europe. Some people uphold Canada instead, but I think Canada really has it too easy... their system, by concentrating on visas for the most highly skilled and educated immigrants, leads to a minimum of assimilation issues. We have a lot more problems, and more solutions as well.

What do immigrants and their children have in America that they don't have in Europe? They have a greater right to call themselves an American. The child of immigrant parents can speak their ancestral language, practice a different religion, be from any race, fly their ancestral flag along with the American one.... and still be 100% American. Especially if they're Mexican, stupid people are going to challenge them on this, but they still have that right and can insist that it be respected.

At one of my ESL graduations, I saw a guy wearing a green T-shirt with just three big words on it in Portuguese: SOCCER. JESUS. BRAZIL. He was proudly advertising the cultural values that were closest to his heart. He and his children will probably become 100% Americans. Those cultural values will be added to the values we already share as a nation.

Europeans of recent immigrant origin don't have as much middle ground to stand on. They tend to be forced towards one extreme or the other; complete assimilation to all the cultural values of the new country, or withdrawing and establishing ethnic enclaves.

I'm not saying America is better than Europe. We have a huge load of racial baggage. I believe a lot of aspects of the European economy are things that we should look into practicing over here. But in this immigration respect I do believe we're better. One of the main reasons is the civil rights struggle from the 1950s onward. Black civil rights protesters demanded that they be considered 100% American. They were not the right color that "real Americans" were, they worshipped in different churches, they were not treated as full American citizens but they demanded that right. Combined with Native American demands and then many other ethnic groups joining in, there is a strong idea today that there is no "default American" by birth: immigrant or non-immigrant. It's not an idea that everyone believes in yet, but it's still very powerful.

Every nation in Europe is a hybrid nation if you go back far enough. Looking at language creation and evolution and dispersal, Europe is a messy finger painting, not a neat patchwork quilt. I think they're going to make it out alright.

Mundo Hispánico article on fostering Latin American immigrant children in Gwinnett County

I went to my favorite Mexican restaurant today for a quick lunch of tortilla soup. The waiter was a little bit cheeky and called me "chinita" but I don't take offense at that term, since it's very common and usually harmless. I picked up a copy of the free weekly Mundo Hispánico, which covers local and world news for the Hispanic community in Atlanta and Georgia. The more serious local articles (as opposed to sports and celebrity gossip) mostly focused on legal issues such as the proposed highly unconstitutional anti-immigrant-tenant law in Cherokee County.

There was also a fascinating article on fostering children of Latin American origin. Georgia has seen a huge influx of immigrants, mostly Mexican (and specifically from the more indigenous, rural south of Mexico) and Central American, although there's now a growing population of Brazilians to the northwest of Atlanta. They are very new arrivals. They are an extremely diverse bunch, but a large subgroup is undocumented. Many are settling in the counties surrounding urban Atlanta, such as Rockdale and Gwinnett. They will be totally changing the face of Atlanta when the next, fully English-speaking generation integrates more into our schools and job markets. For now, due to lack of English skills and unfamiliarity with the U.S., they are extremely vulnerable to criminals and corrupt officials such as fake notarios. I have frequently wondered whether their children are overrepresented or underrepresented in the foster care system.

The article doesn't address that issue, but it does underline the growing need for Hispanic foster families. I've translated it below. Pardon the clunkiness. I didn't have time to do a good job, so I just fed it through a translation engine then went back over it and corrected the worst errors. There is no direct word for "foster" so I'm just providing very literal translations of foster-related words such as "albergar" and "temporal". The original article is here at the Mundo Hispánico website.


Cultural differences, the great challenge of American families who lodge Latin children

In search of Hispanic homes that offer love

The amount of minors of Latin American origin in the care of the state increased in Georgia in the last few years

By Maria Patricia Castro
01/04/2007

The number of Hispanic minors under custody of the state, in the county of Gwinnett, increased in the last few years. But the lack of Hispanic families who offer to lodge them forces most of these little ones to reside in American homes, in which the language and the traditions are very different.

“In the first six months of 2006 we received 469 new children, 30 percent of whom were Hispanic”, assured Lisa C. Lariscy, Director of the Department of Family and Children Services of Gwinnett county. “This increase of Hispanic children in our programs is a phenomenon that happens in many counties of Georgia”, she added.

Courtesy of Michelle Covel The Covel family will be complete once they consolidate the adoption of Flavia and Candelaria.

At the moment, some 600 minors are under temporary state protection in Gwinnett: “of these, 70 or 80 are of Latin American origin, but we only have two Hispanic families in our program to lodge”, affirmed Lariscy.

Americans lodge Hispanics

In spite of having two of their own children, Americans Michelle and Dan Covel decided to become “temporary parents” of Flavia and Candelaria, originally of Guatemala.

“We wanted to help children who needed it”, assured Covel.

She, as much as her husband, grew up without the affection of one of their parents. “My parents were divorced and my husband's father abandoned him, so we decided to give these children the love that we did not receive”, she said.

Almost five years ago the couple turned their house into a temporary home for minors under custody of the state and received the little ones.

Flavia was 13 years old at that time, and was violated sexually at age 12. Candelaria is the product of that abuse.

Since then, the Covel marriage has been dedicated to take care of the girls as if they were theirs.

“The little one is very young to understand that Flavia is her mother. So far, their relationship is that of sisters, but when she grows a little more, she'll know”, said the American woman.

Covel affirms that being a temporary parent is very rewarding. Nevertheless, it's difficult to help Flavia, who undergoes strong crises for her age, in addition to the fact that cultural differences are a barrier to communication.

“When I cut Candelaria's hair for the first time, Flavia got really angry. I broke with a cultural tradition”, she recounted. “I believe that having had more contact with other Hispanic families, I would have understood her better”.

Covel would like to establish relations with other Hispanics because she considers that it would help her in the upbringing of his two daughters, since for her it's very important that “they don't lose their culture”, she assured.

“I would love for them to be able to speak more Spanish, for someone to give me some recipes to cook for them and to understand the traditions of their country, to understand more than what I can learn in books”, she added.

The pair is on the verge of adopting the two minors. “We're looking forward to confirming some details, but soon now they'll officially be our daughters”, she affirmed with pride.

“We always try to place the little ones in families with whom they have more things in common”, Lariscy assured for her part; who indicated, for that, it would be ideal to have more Hispanic families to temporarily lodge Hispanic children.

Some Japanese are insufferable ethnobigots

Here's another long, meandering post sparked by a short conversation. There's no adoption content at all.

As background, I've mentioned this before, but I don't speak Japanese. I took a private lesson during a stay in Japan when I was a teenager, but didn't get too far past that. I just didn't have the motivation. I felt bad for being monolingual. I had a fleeting affair with the German language but it beat me into submission before I could get past the neuter gender. Then Spanish warmly welcomed me. After I started seriously studying Spanish, I gave up the guilt.

Linguists note that the Chinese are supercharged language keepers compared to the Japanese. The Chinese diaspora has touched almost every continent. Somehow they manage, very frequently, to keep their language to the second and even third generation. I have many examples to contrast with the Chinese. Living in Florida, I knew tons of kids whose parents came from Cuba or other Spanish-speaking countries, and all of them complained about speaking miserable Spanish. Mexican-Americans in border states hang on to fluency longer, but not by much. I have a good friend who's Palestinian-American, and he too spoke what he called "kitchen Arabic". He now speaks standard Arabic fluently, but it cost him many years of really hard work.

Japan had a diaspora concentrated in the 19th to early 20th century in which immigrants ended up in places like Brazil, Hawaii and Peru. The second generation everywhere had low rates of language retention. What this all means is that by not speaking Japanese, I'm actually being more authentically Japanese-American!

I work with a Japanese-American woman. I'll call her K. Both her parents emigrated from Japan and run a restaurant together here in Atlanta. A time came up when I needed some Japanese translation. Rude people occasionally tsk-tsk me for not speaking "my own" language, so I'm so sensitive I would never ask another Japanese-American if they spoke Japanese. Instead, I asked K, "So you don't speak Japanese, do you?" She said, "No, I don't. I just understand a few words and sentences." We commiserated a little bit about those supercharged Chinese, and that was all.

Just tonight I had another conversation with K. She's now working part-time because she's starting a college degree. As an elective, she's taking Japanese. But she's just been dropped from the class. The teacher told her that as a "heritage speaker" she doesn’t belong there.

Now, this might make sense if there was a class for Japanese heritage speakers. Maybe it exists in Hawaii, but sure as hell not in Atlanta! As an occasional language teacher, I understand the need for these classes. For Spanish it's especially crucial. An English speaker foreign to Spanish comprehends the big cognate words before they understand the small, everyday ones; for a heritage speaker, the small ones are often already packed in the mental toolcase, but the confidence to put the big cognates together is lacking. There's a serious lack of Spanish classes for heritage speakers. Reversing the stand of those Monolingualism or Death! English-only activists, I'm much more concerned about the state of Spanish-language education in our country. Anyway, given how lacking these heritage classes are in Spanish, of course there's none for Japanese here.

K was given another choice, which was to take the next level up in Japanese. She was completely unprepared for that level, and her writing skills in particular would be far behind. She couldn't do it; she would have been lost. She told me indignantly that there were several people in the class who had lived in Japan, which she has never done, and that they obviouslyspoke Japanese better than she did. They weren't Japanese-American, and they were allowed to stay.

I had the sneaking suspicion of racism. Then I had an even sneakier suspicion.

"Is the teacher Japanese?"

"Yes! I think she's prejudiced against Japanese-Americans!"

We commiserated. I believed her, and said she should think about writing a letter of protest, but how likely is it that someone at the university would believe her and act on it?

Some people reading this may have trouble understanding why a teacher would do something like that. I can’t call it racism so I'll use the word "ethnobigotry" instead. The idea is that Japaneseness is next to godliness. You have to be ever vigilant to maintain your Japaneseness and that of your children. If you "fall" from a state of being Japanese, you might turn into a pitiable thing lower than if you were never Japanese to begin with. Obviously not all Japanese think this way, but it's not an uncommon idea.

Any person of immigrant heritage will have some degree of conflict when interacting with related people whose families didn't leave. I think it's unrealistic for anyone, be they Irish-American or Cuban-American or whatever, to return to their ancestral country and expect to be welcomed with open arms as if they'd never left. But we're not talking about K demanding to be treated like a Japanese person. She just wanted a chance to learn Japanese like any other regular student of any other race or cultural background, and the teacher is screwing her over.

I found an interesting essay on a related subject. It covers prejudice not against Japanese-Americans but against Japanese-Brazilians. It's called "Media Images, Immigrant Reality: Ethnic Prejudice and Tradition in Japanese Media Representations of Japanese-Brazilian Return Migrants" by Takeyuki “Gaku” Tsuda and is available here in PDF or here in Googlefied HTML.

Among the many expressions of disparagement directed toward the first generation nikkeijin (the original Japanese emigrants), the following statement by an older Tokyo resident was quite representative:

The Japanese do not perceive the nikkeijin well. They are seen as people who were from Japanese rural villages and were poor. They were the type of low level people who couldn't survive in Japan, so they had to discard Japan and go abroad. They are seen as nihonjin shikkaku (not worthy of being Japanese)--people who didn't have much ability.

A middle-aged housewife in Oizumi-town in Gunma-prefecture was even more explicit:

The nikkeijin are low level people. They were Japanese social dropouts who were poor and uneducated. These were people who had nothing in Japan, so said to themselves, 'regardless of how horrible things are overseas, they can't be worse than my life in Japan.' Therefore, they abandoned their own country and fled abroad.

Now, K's parents aren't from this original wave of emigration, and my father isn't really an emigrant at all. Nevertheless, I feel a kinship with these nikkeijin. They were a bunch of losers, rebels, dreamers, rejects, weirdos... people who weren't afraid to leave it all behind. They stopped worrying so much about the purity of their blood and language, and got to work and started creating their own hybrid cultures.

Deport Virgil Goode back to his native country of Outer Stupidia

This news article I just read has made me so angry, if I don't post about it before I go to bed, I'll stew.

Congressman Criticizes Election of Muslim

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 — In a letter sent to hundreds of voters this month, Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., Republican of Virginia, warned that the recent election of the first Muslim to Congress posed a serious threat to the nation’s traditional values.

Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., left, said Keith Ellison’s decision to use a Koran in a private swearing in for the House of Representatives was a mistake.

Mr. Goode was referring to Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat and criminal defense lawyer who converted to Islam as a college student and was elected to the House in November. Mr. Ellison’s plan to use the Koran during his private swearing-in ceremony in January had outraged some Virginia voters, prompting Mr. Goode to issue a written response to them, a spokesman for Mr. Goode said.

In his letter, which was dated Dec. 5, Mr. Goode said that Americans needed to “wake up” or else there would “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

“I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped,” said Mr. Goode, who vowed to use the Bible when taking his own oath of office.

....

Mr. Ellison dismissed Mr. Goode’s comments, saying they seemed ill informed about his personal origins as well as about Constitutional protections of religious freedom. “I’m not an immigrant,” added Mr. Ellison, who traces his American ancestors back to 1742. “I’m an African-American.”

When I was a young girl, one of the most hurtful things I had to experience was reading notes other kids put on my locker that said "go back to China".

Back then I was slightly envious of African-Americans because unlike Asians, they're not automatically assumed to be foreigners. I've also come to believe they face more covert racism and institutionalized racism than Asians do, so it's not that they really have it any easier. But still, doesn't their history entitle them to some sort of extra knee-jerk assumption of belonging?

I guess not. Virgil Goode basically put a note on Keith Ellison's locker that said "Go back to Africa". The Koran non-issue was only a trigger for some old-fashioned racist nativism.

I'm taking it personally and will remember his name and contribute to whoever runs against him in the next election.

Stateless Children / Anchor Babies

This post is a carryover from my previous post on adoption in Japan. The Japanese social services webpage admits that stateless children are a special problem. They recognize a responsibility to these children, but express some doubt as to how to best serve the interests of the child.

Unlike Japan (and most other countries in the world), American citizenship is conferred by birth alone. It's guaranteed by the Constitution. Our laws and social services are far from perfect, but I'm proud of this principle. It's also called "jus soli" or "right of the soil".

From Wikipedia:

Jus soli is common in countries in the Americas that wanted to develop and increase their own citizenry. It is still applicable in a few nations outside the Americas as well. Some countries that observe jus soli:

* Argentina
* Brazil
* Canada (There are some limitations concerning the children of foreign diplomats)
* Colombia
* Jamaica
* Mexico
* Pakistan
* United States (There are some limitations concerning the children of foreign diplomats. See Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution)
* Uruguay

It really irritates me when anti-immigrant pundits start railing against "anchor babies" and "birth tourism". Anchor-baby-hating anchor baby and all-around evil bitchtroll Michelle Malkin is constantly harping on this issue. If we change the law so that children born in the United States to non-citizens don't get citizenship, then what do we do with these children if they end up in the care of the state? Drop them off in a forest and hope a wolf pack adopts them? Turn them into sausages?

A Moronic "Asian" Racial Smokescreen

When I lived in Miami, I developed a halfway cynical attitude about racial solidarity. Miami is so diverse yet segregated, and it's easy to find cases where no one likes each other: Cubans vs. Mexicans and Guatemalans vs. "Anglos" vs. Haitians vs. long-time African-American residents and so on. On the other hand, just because there are quarrels and insults between groups doesn't mean people can't put them aside and work together for common goals.

On of those common goals is shunning and isolating white supremacists. These grotesque creatures swarm around the edges of the anti-immigration movement and are also found, only lightly disguised, at its very center. To try and disguise themselves further they recruit greedy minorities as racial smokescreens. The Southern Poverty Law Center had a great article on one particular group:

Smokescreen: Activists say a black anti-immigration movement is gathering steam. But it seems to be largely the creation of white people.
by Brentin Mock

The article is very reasonable and measured. It includes the consideration that some of the black people involved in the groups truly believe that Hispanic immigration is a dangerous force that threatens their economic status. But most black people are still very uncomfortable about anti-Hispanic racism; it could be turned back against them quite easily. There's a great sarcastic phrase I've heard a lot recently, "brown is the new black". The SPLC article clearly shows that the real power and money behind the black anti-immigration group CBA (Choose Black America) comes from white people with links to white supremacist organizations.

(As an aside, I strongly believe in these two statements: 1) our immigration system needs to be reformed 2) illegal immigration needs to be reduced. I also believe both goals can be accomplished without using insane, racist measures that won't work anyway, like building a stupid wall between America and Mexico and treating all Hispanics darker than a certain shade as if they were illegal by default.)

The black smokescreen described in the SPLC article was fairly well orchestrated and well concealed, although the reporter, being an expert in these organizations, could see behind the cover. This morning I read about a different Asian smokescreen just as nasty but also incredibly inept.

I initially read this at a blog called Migra Matters but here's the first part of the original local newspaper article:

Immigration group may not be what they seem
By Michele R. Marcucci, STAFF WRITER
Article Launched:12/04/2006 04:01:40 PM PST

Hovering above a busy Berkeley intersection is a billboard that reads No Racist Amnesty. It was placed by a group called Vietnamese for Fair Immigration, whose leaders say they feel illegal immigrants -- and particularly Latino immigrants -- are to blame for the long waits their family members face to come here from Vietnam.

But the group may not be entirely what it seems.

The Lompoc-based group, which has endorsed political candidates, written letters to the editors of newspapers and has aired its views on Web sites, was co-founded by a white, Southern California cyclemaker who is also a member of one of the state's most prominent immigration control organizations.

In fact, the group's self-proclaimed Vietnamese-American spokesman, who wrote at least one of the letters and has espoused the group's views on several Web sites, is the group's Caucasian co-founder using a Vietnamese surname, his wife said.

The spokesman, who called himself Tim Binh, initially denied that he was the cyclemaker from Lompoc, Tim Brummer. But after a reporter told him his wife identified him as Brummer, he said it was her idea.

And he feels he used the name legitimately, adding that he may make Tim Binh his legal name.

"I speak Vietnamese. I eat Vietnamese food. I live with Vietnamese. In my mind, I'm half Vietnamese. Just like my wife thinks she's half-American," Brummer said.
...

Tim Binh... ha ha ha aha hah what a freaking loser. That's my first reaction. That, and "liar, liar, pants on fire". There are unscrupulous Asians out there who would be perfectly willing to provide a smokescreen, they're just too expensive, so the cut-rate white guy had to step in.

Here's his wife's brilliant observation on immigration:

"They can just cross the border. We cannot swim across the ocean," Hoang said when asked if she thinks the immigration system favors Latinos.

She should be attacking the Pacific Ocean instead of Mexicans.