"Driven Out" Chinese Purge

I wrote a blog some months back about a town near where I grew up, called Pekin. The high school's moniker was the Pekin Chinks and nobody seemed to recognize they were using a racial slur as they cheered their teams. One longtime Pekin resident wrote a bitter comment decrying my comments about institutionalized racism. It made me want to find out more about the roots of the term "chink."

I still haven't found any answers, but in a well written and researched book, called "Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans", by Jean Pfaelzer (2007), I found out about vicious cruelties to Chinese residents in Washington and California justified by some of our highest courts. There are dismaying parallels to events today.

In late 1885, the mayor of Tacoma, Washington, led a mob of 300 into Chinatown one night and forced everyone out of their homes and marched them out of town, forcing them to leave their businesses and belongings. The Chinese brought it to court, citing the U.S. government's Burlingame Treaty which made it illegal to deprive Chinese immigrants of the same privileges in respect to residence as others in our country. The mayor's lawyers cited the Dred Scot case of 1857 that allowed slave owners to fetch their slaves who escaped to free territories because slaves did not enjoy the same rights as citizens. The mayor's side won - just like Bush's side won against the prisoners of Guantanamo who thought they'd have the right of habeus corpus and a civil trial as prisoners of the United States. I guess the "supreme" in "Supreme Court" refers only to power and not wisdom or justice.

In San Jose, California, near where I live, the first statewide anti-Chinese convention was held in 1886, attended by anti Chinese clubs and the Anti-Coolie league. In 1880, the California legislature had made it illegal to hire a Chinese person. Ranchers, growers, and canneries were forced into mass firings. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Only the nationality has changed. But in San Jose, the Chinatown neighborhood was burned down six times and rebuilt seven. San Jose passed ordinances limiting Chinese laundries and fireworks. They posted police in doorways of Chinese owned businesses to discourage would-be customers. When two drunk men shot at and assaulted a Chinese man in 1879, they were each fined $10.

"Illegal" Immigration

Yesterday, I attended a forum on immigration put on by the League of Women Voters and the World Affairs Forum, held at Hewlett-Packard, one of the many high tech companies in the Silicon Valley that is deeply interested in immigration policy. Richard Hobbs, the Director of the Office of Human Relations for Santa Clara County told us that 36% of our county's population are foreign born and when you add in their children, it comes to 67% of the population. That's hard to believe from my rather "gated" perspective living in affluent Palo Alto.

In California there are nearly 3 million illegal immigrants among the 10 million foreign born, though the path for "illegals" is now taking 75% to other states with more jobs.

Hobbs made it clear that most immigrants come either because of economic desperation or because they are fleeing a dangerous political situation.

NAFTA and GATT free trade agreements have led to the loss of about 8 million jobs in Mexico across numerous sectors including farming, retail, manufacturing, and artisans. While somehow the US can subsidize its farmers to the tune of $11 billion (annually I think), NAFTA eliminates protective tariffs that used to keep US crops more expensive in Mexico. Add to that our superior productivity and bingo!, we've conquered the Mexican grocery shoppers. While the average cost per hour of a Mexican factory worker is $2.82, the average in China is now 70 cents p/hr. In Monterrey, Mexico, 80,000 factory workers have lost their jobs as corporations have moved to ever cheaper locations. Another speaker at the forum told us about a community in Mexico, famous for its tequila products. They make a good living there and nobody has ever left to illegally cross into the US.

Obviously, if we focused more on helping third world countries raise their standard of livings we wouldn't have the flow of impovershed people coming to the U.S. to clean our homes, trim our grass, and flip our burgers. Some of that translates to FAIR trade rather than FREE trade agreements. Debt forgiveness, an end to agribusiness subsidies, a world minimum wage, and a world MAXIMUM wage were all mentioned by Hobbs on the solutions side of the equation.

Regarding political refugees, there are now 12 million people worldwide who are languishing in refugee camps. This doesn't impact the U.S. as much because most of them are an ocean away from our Statue of Liberty. For example, there are now 1 million Iraqis displaced by the war. So far, the U.S. has decided to allow 7,000 into our country. During the Reagan years when Salvadorans and Nicaraguans would come to escape death squads, we'd send them back if we caught them, because we were supporting the governments that spawned those death squads.

As is often the case, the average age at this kind of event was over 60. At least the room was packed with over 200 gray heads.