by Emil Amok Guillermo
Donald Trump played golf this weekend, but not before using last week’s National Guard shooting tragedy as cover to go xenophobic on immigration.
Without knowing the motive of the shooter, the president’s reaction assumes an already vetted CIA operative who worked side by side with American forces in Afghanistan and was given asylum by the Trump administration, was initially not worthy of admittance to the U.S.
Instead of waiting for all the facts, Trump used the incident to instill fear in communities, saying the U.S. would “permanently halt immigration” from 19 countries, including Laos and Burma.
He can’t make the kind of wholesale changes on immigration he wants without Congress, but this Congress, so far, has only pushed back on all things Epstein, not all things immigration.
If Trump’s xenophobia defines policy, it will be in keeping with the regressive trend in America, hearkening back to 1924, when the U.S. adopted the Johnson-Reed Act, the worst immigration law in American history, which set racist quotas on Asian countries.
In other words, it’s in the U.S. political DNA to have remnants of nativist and eugenicist philosophies determine who gets to be American.
Trump and his ilk shouldn’t use the National Guard shooting as an excuse, and must fight the urge to re-embrace outdated racist ethnic purity notions.
NO COINCIDENCE
Given the imminent demographic shift in the country when minorities are predicted to become the majority nationally by 2035 or 2040, Trump’s reaction is no surprise.
MAGA doesn’t want to see the browning of America.
But in this column, I want to celebrate immigrants, the bulk of our community at large, who literally make up the fabric of American life.
They aren’t the flashy individual success stories: the high-tech AI founders, the doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs. Nor are they the orchestral soloists, singers, and other artistic wunderkind.
The vast majority of us are rank-and-file Asian American vin ordinaire.
The Asian Americans who rarely get noticed.
The ones who take care of their families. Do their jobs.
They keep their nose to the grindstone and work.
That’s the Asian in them.
Their joy is in family, family events. When they take a vacation, it’s generally for infrequent family reunions to ancestral homelands.
They aren’t the headliners. They are the baseline, who obey the laws, pay their taxes, and are part of the 27 million who make up our broader Asian American community.
They may or may not be fully documented.
But they aren’t criminals or gangsters. In the current ICE age, their Asian faces make them susceptible to harassment and deportation. They are the unfortunate pawns in the president’s immigration reality show.
VIRGILIO
I want to salute them all today because they are just like my brother-in-law, Virgilio.
His life changed when my sister went back to my father’s home province in the Philippines in the 1970s. It was the same year I went east to college. My sister went the other way, back to my father’s hometown and met the man of her dreams.
At first, I wasn’t sure. My sister and I were the “born heres,” the Americans. We didn’t need to import a spouse, did we?
In time, I grew to love my brother-in-law for who he was. A good, responsible man who provided for my sister and his family, and did it all with a smile.
He had a good job, and was the kind of person we want in America.
He also liked the Warriors, Giants, and 49ers.
He liked sports and ate fast food. He was American.
Virgilio wasn’t famous, nor rich, but that was never the goal for the average person motivated by the Constitutional sense of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
On the day after we gave thanks, Virgilio died at 81 in San Francisco, when the president essentially slurred all immigrants, even the good ones, as perhaps all being worthy of suspicion. But for what? For being “foreign”? For being non-white?
In the end, Virigilio, nearly 50 years in America, was an example of what successful immigration is, or at least what it should be, and who the opportunity should be bestowed upon.
It’s not the person willing to buy his way into Mar-a-Lago. Or the person with valuable “skills.” It’s a lot more humble than that. It’s a person with such a stake in family and country that they renounce their native land and put America first.
That’s always been the idea. Virgilio knew it perfectly.
Emil Guillermo is a veteran Bay Area journalist, commentator, and stage humorist. He has written his column on race, politics and culture from an AAPI perspective since 1995.
As a board member of PEN OAKLAND, Emil will emcee the 36th annual PEN Oakland Awards, Saturday, Dec. 6th, 2-5pm, at the Black Rep Theater, 3201 Adeline St., Berkeley, CA. Admission is free.
Registration is closed for Common Ground: Building Together conference and gala award banquet in San Francisco on January 24. A shoutout to our planning committee: Jane Chin, Frank Mah, Jeannie Young, Akemi Tamanaha, Nathan Soohoo, Mark Young, Dave Liu, and Yiming Fu.
We are published by the non-profit Asian American Media Inc and supported by our readers along with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, AARP, The Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Foundation, The Asian American Foundation & Koo and Patricia Yuen of the Yuen Foundation.
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