Ancheta, Angelo N.

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Santa Clara University School of Law

Santa Clara LawSanta Clara Law Digital CommonsFaculty Publications Faculty Scholarship1-1-1994Our Immigrant Heritage: A Struggle for JusticeAngelo N. AnchetaSanta Clara University School of Law, aancheta@scu.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/facpubsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Santa Clara Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted forinclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Santa Clara Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contactsculawlibrarian@gmail.com.Recommended Citation2 UCLA Asian Pac. Am. L.J. 101SPEECHESOUR IMMIGRANT HERITAGE: A STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICEAngelo N. Ancheta*Good afternoon. And thank you for inviting me to speak to you on this veryimportant occasion.I would like to begin with a story. It is not a remarkable story. Nor is it aparticularly exciting story. But it is an important story, a story shared by many of ushere today.Sixty-five years ago, a young man named Anselmo left his home in the Philip-pines to come to the United States and find his fortune. Like many young men ofhis day, he came to this country to attend college-to become a designer, an artist,perhaps even an architect.But with the untimely death of his father soon afterward, Anselmo was leftheartbroken. He had lived and studied to realize his father's dreams of a better life,and when his father's dreams died, so did many of Anselmo's.He dropped out of school and began working to support himself. If the lawswere written as they are today, he would have become, in our popular phrasing, an"illegal alien."Like other young men of that era, Anselmo found his way into the tough, low-wage jobs open to Filipinos and other immigrants of color: the restaurants of Wash-ington State, the canneries and packing houses of Alaska, the fisheries of Maine, thefarms of central California. He struggled, like the rest of the country, through theGreat Depression, and he survived.He encountered, of course, the overt racism of the time: the segregated hous-ing, the restricted access to stores and restaurants, the threats of violence, the anti-miscegenation laws that denied one of the most basic of human freedoms-theability to fall in love with and marry whomever you pleased. Even his personalidentity was sacrificed when his supposedly unpronounceable name was changed tooblige a bureaucrat's paperwork.And yet despite this very hard life, he came to love his adopted country. Hedefended it as a navyman during World War II. He worked for its government as apostal clerk for over thirty years. He married, bought a home, and raised a family,placing a premium on the democratic values that America, at least in theory, hasespoused throughout its history.* Executive Director, Asian Law Caucus, Inc., San Francisco, California. A.B. 1983, J.D. 1986, Uni-versity of California, Los Angeles. This speech was delivered on February 19, 1994, at the 13th Annual Dayof Remembrance in Los Angeles. Sponsored by the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations, Day ofRemembrance commemorates the internment of Japanese Americans into concentration camps during WorldWar II.At the time this speech was delivered, Mr. Ancheta was the Executive Director of the Coalition forHumane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRIA). The author wishes to give special thanks to the staffof CHIRLA and to the leaders of the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations for their inspiring work.HeinOnline  -- 2 UCLA Asian Pac. Am. L.J. 101 1994The story of Anselmo is not an extraordinary story, but it is a special story, atleast for me, because the story of Anselmo is the story of my father. And it is a storythat repeats itself countless numbers of times all across this state and all across thisnation of ours.But in today's world, it is also a story haunted by the specter of racism andmean-spiritedness that have come to define the current debate on immigration.And it is a story that I believe has to be told, because if the potential policies oftomorrow were the policies of yesterday, it is a story that would have been radicallydifferent, changing my life and my father's life, as well as the lives of just abouteveryone here today.Governor Pete Wilson, for example, has called for a constitutional amendmentto deny birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants. In do-ing so, he would gut the Fourteenth Amendment, a hallmark of our constitutiondesigned to end slavery and the opprelsion of all people of color. He would alsobypass the Supreme Court's mandates and deny public school education to undocu-mented children: And, he would deny medical care-including prenatal care topregnant women-to all undocumented immigrants. If this were the law sixty-fiveyears ago, my father's life-my life-could not have been the same. Once my fa-ther had dropped out of school, he would have become undocumented and deport-able. He might never have found a job, have made it past the Great Depression andWorld War II, and I might never have been born.Assuming I managed to make it into the world, I probably would have beenborn stateless, without a nationality or allegiance. I would not have been able toattend kindergarten, let alone attend UCLA to earn a college degree and a law de-gree. And if I and any member of my family had become seriously ill, we would nodoubt have borne the scars of that illness for the rest of our shortened lives.Of course, what the Pete Wilsons and the Pat Buchanans and the DanaRohrabachers of today are advocating is nothing new. We know that the history ofthis nation has always been a history of exclusion, and our immigration laws havealways been designed to keep people out, not to let them in.The history of American immigration is very much an anti-Asian history: theChinese Exclusion Act, the Gentlemen's Agreement between the United States andJapan, the creation of the triangular Asiatic Barred Zone, the Tydings-McDuffie Actlimiting Filipino immigration to 50 immigrants per year, the barriers to naturaliza-tion for Asian residents that lasted into the 1950s.Cycles of intolerance, economic decline, racism. These have been the constantsin the century-plus debate on immigration. And once again, we are at a low-point,where hysteria, nativism, and politics have combined to produce an environmentwhere all people who appear foreign-born-citizen and immigrant alike-havesomething to fear, whether it is job discrimination, hate violence, or limited accessto government aid.The parallels with the past are striking: We encourage the importation of for-eign labor during economic booms. The wave of Japanese immigrants to the fieldsof Hawaii at the turn of the century is just one example.We give immigrants the jobs that no one else will perform-working in thefields, sewing our clothes, serving us in restaurants, cleaning up after us. We payimmigrants the lowest wages. We tolerate them at first, even bringing immigrantsinto our homes to tend our gardens, to care for our children, our sick, and ourelderly.(Vol. 2:101ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN LAW JOURNALHeinOnline  -- 2 UCLA Asian Pac. Am. L.J. 102 1994And just as predictable are the popular responses during economic downturns.Immigrants are inassimilable. They take away our jobs. They use up all our re-sources. Indeed, they threaten our very existence, our culture, our "American" wayof life.Whether it has been the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos during the late 19thand early 20th century, the Oakies entering California during the Depression era, orthe Latinos and Asians and Arab Americans of today, the response has always beenthe same: Immigrants are outsiders. Immigrants are politically powerless. Immi-grants are scapegoats.Of course, political manipulation is part of the cycle as well. Public officialsknow that immigrant scapegoating works. Look at Pete Wilson's jump in the popu-larity polls.Even that most cyclical of California phenomena-the earthquake-has rum-bled onto the political landscape, with the federal government's recent decision todeny earthquake relief to the undocumented. We should know better. When Con-gressman Dana Rohrabacher from Orange County stands next to a FEMA line andmoans about the fact that he doesn't hear any English being spoken, we know wherehis values lie. Denying disaster relief to immigrants is an 8.1 on the race-baitingscale. It's cheap politics and nothing more.The dominant rhetoric has also taken on a divide and conquer approach. Legalimmigration makes our nation strong; illegal immigration tears at the very fabric ofsociety. It's a false dichotomy. What's illegal today can easily become legal to-morrow, and vice versa.And certainly legal immigrants are not immune from the scapegoating. Con-gress just passed a law limiting the availability of benefits for legal immigrants whoare aged, blind, or disabled. And if the Republican Welfare reform package becomeslaw, only U.S. citizens would be eligible for federal entitlements, and that bar wouldlock out all of the non-naturalized Issei who are here with us today.And on a day when we mark the passing of over 50 years since the Internment,we can also see ominous ties between that tragic period in our nation's history andthe America of 1994. Racism and wartime hysteria led to the internment, and theparallels are popping up in today's rhetoric on immigration.Terrorists from the Middle East. Boat people from Haiti and China. Floods ofpeople overflowing across the southern border. What is our response? Interdictships in international waters. Build blockades between the U.S. and Mexico. Addand arm more border patrol. Use high tech electronics and sensing devices. Bringon the National Guard and the military to back up the Border Patrol, say our so-called liberal friends Barbara Boxer and Kathleen Brown.If we've now declared a war on immigration, we can expect the same sorts ofdeprivations and civil liberties violations that we saw over fifty years ago.Looks like we've come full circle.Unfortunately, the policies that are coming forth from both sides of the polit-ical aisle are policies founded more on myth than fact, and on rhetoric rather thanreality.Myth # 1: We are told that immigrants take away jobs. Immigrants do comehere to work, but what jobs do they fill? How many of us are willing to work in thefields picking fruit, or in the garment sweatshops, or in the kitchens of our favoriterestaurants?19941 OUR IMMIGRANT HERITAGEHeinOnline  -- 2 UCLA Asian Pac. Am. L.J. 103 1994And what about the flip-side of the low-end labor market-the immigrantsthat own businesses, pay taxes, and create more jobs? We never seem to hear aboutthem in the current debate.We're even told that immigrants take away the jobs once held by poor AfricanAmericans. But that's just a red herring that only skirts the real problem: unemploy-ment and economic deprivation in our nation's inner cities.Myth #2: Immigrants are a burden on government. Immigrants cost the gov-ernment and the taxpayers money. Sure. But we don't always remember that immi-grants are part of the tax base as well. Even undocumented immigrants who get paidunder the table pay sales taxes and indirect property taxes when they pay for rent.We are told that immigrant children are a burden on our educational system.Of course immigrant children are a burden. Just about everyone under the age of 18who doesn't work costs the taxpayers money. But we seem to have forgotten thateducation has to be something special: we spend money now to build a better andmore skilled workforce for the future.Health care is just as fundamental. Why wait for people to seek emergencyhealth care when education and preventive care will cost far less in the long run?Why place everyone at risk-communicable diseases don't ask for papers-whensome of us are sick and need treatment.And we certainly can't trust all the huge numbers being thrown around tojustify these cuts. The Huddle Study, which Governor Wilson and others love toquote, is seriously flawed. How can you trust a study that says that all immigrantsnationwide pay zero in social security taxes? That immigrants entering Californiaafter 1992 pay no taxes at all? Or that uses population projections that assume thatafter 1992, no immigrants will ever leave the country or even die?Myth #3: Our borders are out of control. Anyone going down to the SanDiego area knows that it is a joke down there. But setting up blockades and addingmore bodies is only a band-aid solution. Businesses in California want immigrantlabor and immigrant consumers, and as long as there are low-wage jobs to be had inthe United States, no wall will be able to keep people away. We have to movebeyond the current debate and look at long-term solutions to the problem.So what needs to be done? First, we have to cut through all the empty rhetoricthat has colored the debate. We ourselves have to go beyond the easy name-calling.Saying that it's all racist is simplistic and only restates the obvious.We know that immigrants are not the cause of the recession, and that politi-cians have to grapple with the changes in both the nature of our economy and thecomposition of our workforce. We have to change the debate and change the basicvocabulary of the discussion:Out-of-status immigrants aren't illegal-no human being is illegal-they'reundocumented. Education is not a cost, it's an investment in our future. Health careis not a privilege, it's a fundamental right. Earthquake aid is not a political football;it's a basic necessity.And immigrants are not "they" and "them"; immigrants are "we" and "us."We live in an interdependent world. Migration is a global phenomenon.We cannot talk about curtailing the importation of immigrant labor while atthe same time we dose our eyes to the exportation of capital by transnational corpo-rations across the globe.[Vol. 2:101ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN LAW JOURNALHeinOnline  -- 2 UCLA Asian Pac. Am. L.J. 104 1994We cannot attempt to seal the border when economic inequality and the lackof development and lack of U.S. aid to sending countries will always cause people tomigrate to seek higher paying jobs.We cannot divorce our immigration policies from our foreign and military pol-icies, when we either support or quietly acknowledge regimes that violate humanrights and increase the number of people fleeing persecution-whether it is Viet-nam, Haiti, China, or Bosnia.We cannot remove "magnets" to immigration if we keep looking at the wrongmagnets. Immigrants don't come here to have babies or go on welfare. Immigrantscome here for jobs. And we have to think long and hard about how we want tocombine our labor policies and our immigration policies to do what's in the bestinterest of workers, employers, and the economy as a whole.We cannot insist on employment verification-which is inherently discrimina-tory regardless of whether you use a social security card or a tamper-resistant I.D.card-without cracking down on employers who exploit immigrant workers by pay-ing less than the minimum wage and maintaining sweatshop conditions.We cannot insist that a law enforcement agency try to seal our borders while atthe same time it wanders around the streets of cities like Pomona and arbitrarilystops anyone who looks like an immigrant.We have to hold our elected officials accountable for their actions. We have toremind President Clinton that he broke a campaign promise when he continued tostop Haitians on the open seas, and that he showed no resolve when he not onlyfailed to remove the blanket exclusion of HIV-positive individuals, but let Congressenact even harsher homophobic legislation.We have to remind candidates for office like Kathleen Brown that you can't bewarm and fuzzy about making California a great multicultural state while at thesame time you compete with the Governor for who sounds tougher on militarizingthe southern border.We have to show the politicians and the media that immigrants are not simplynameless faces floating at sea or running across riverbeds or climbing wire fences.They are people. And just like my father and my mother and all of the immigrantsliving here today, they come to this country to make a better life for themselves.Finally, we have to link up the different communities-both immigrant andnon-immigrant-in new ways to change the politics of this debate. This is not a"Mexican" problem. Nor even a "Chinese" or "Haitian" problem. It's much biggerand more fundamental.I think we can learn a lot from the redress movement itself. No one gaveredress much of a chance back in the 1970s. The internment was just too far in thepast. Well, the critics were wrong, and by recalling that painful history and pullingpeople together, a political movement was built.Just as the internment history must be preserved, so too must our immigranthistory. As the Yonsei and Gosei come of age and gain power, they have to knowtheir history and the histories of other communities whose pasts are rooted in theimmigrant experience.The future of our country is at stake. And we have to choose between becom-ing a nation that locks its doors or becoming a nation that draws strength from itsdiversity and grows by trying to make all its members feel welcome. That is whatAmerica is all about.19941 OUR IMMIGRANT HERITAGEHeinOnline  -- 2 UCLA Asian Pac. Am. L.J. 105 1994Let me close today by quoting the hopeful words of the poet Maya Angelou,spoken a little over a year.ago at our nation's capital. I have chosen these wordsbecause as we move forward to address the challenges of the future, we need to findoptimism and strength in the beauty of words spoken in the not-too-distant past:Across the wall of the worldA River sings a beautiful song. It says,Come. Rest here by my side.There is a true yearning to respond toThe singing River and the wise Rock.So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the JewThe African, the Native American, the Sioux,The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik,The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.They hear. They all hearThe speaking of the Tree.They hear the first and last of every TreeSpeak to humankind today.Come to me,Here beside the River.Plant yourself beside the River.Each of you, descendant of some passed-On traveler, has been paid for.Here, root yourselves beside me.I am that Tree planted by the River,Which will not be moved.I, the Rock, I, the River, I, the TreeI am yours-your passages have been paid.Lift up your faces, you have a piercing needFor this bright morning dawning for you.History, despite its wrenching pain,Cannot be unlived, but if facedWith courage, need not be lived again.Lift up your eyesUpon this day breaking for youGive birth againTo the dream.1Once again, I thank you for inviting me to share these moments with you, andI look forward to our working together to keep the dream alive.1. MAYA ANGEOU, ON THE PULSE OF MORNING (1993) (read by the poet at the inauguration ofPresident William Jefferson Clinton on January 20, 1993).(Vol. 2:101ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN LAW JOURNALHeinOnline  -- 2 UCLA Asian Pac. Am. L.J. 106 1994

Our Immigrant Heritage: A Struggle for Justice

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Our Immigrant Heritage: A Struggle for Justice

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