White supremacist assaults on Asian Americans

Asians now numbering some 20 million people or about 6.5% of America’s population have been in the country for more than a century and a half. There were several distinct waves of migration from various Asian countries to the United States. Workers from China came in to build the trans-continental railway system in the late 1800s. A number of “Chinatowns” were founded to cater to the needs of the Chinese people. Once the railway work was done, the workers did not return to their homeland. This led to the promulgation of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Sikh workers from what was then the province of Punjab in the British Indian colony came in late 19^th and early 20^th century to bring under cultivation large tracts of virgin land in the American northwest. Like the Chinese railway workers before them, the immigrant Sikhs also lost their welcome once the work for which they were brought in was done. Instead of going home, they moved north into Canada where they founded Sikh communities in cities such as Vancouver in British Columbia. The first wave of professionals from South Asia arrived in the US when the country was faced with skill-shortages in a number of areas. Medical workers came from both India and Pakistan while India provided large numbers of people with expertise in information technology. These peoples’ exports were possible since both countries had institutions that could turn out skilled workers in excess of domestic needs.

There remained a fairly strong sentiment in the US against immigrants from Asia. It remained mostly under the surface until the arrival of Donald Trump on the political scene. He made no secret of his disdain for people of colour and also for non-Christians, in particular Muslims. The sentiment became open and pronounced when the US was hit by the coronavirus, a virus first discovered in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Trump called the disease-spreading element the “China virus” and Covid-19, the disease it caused, “kung flu”. The use of these names for the virus and the disease it caused bred a strong anti-Asian bias among the white supremacists in the country and resulted in several acts of violence committed against the members of the community.

On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white man attacked four massage parlours in Atlanta, and shot dead eight people, seven of them women. Of the seven killed, six were of Asian origin. “They’ve been attacked, blamed, scapegoated and harassed. They’ve been verbally assaulted, killed,” President Joe Biden lamented after meeting with leaders of Atlanta’s Asian-American community that he described as heart-wrenching to be part of. “It’s been a year of living in fear for their lives. Because our silence is complicity, we cannot be complicit. We have to speak out. We have to act.” President Biden had by his side Kamala Harris, the nation’s first vice-president of Asian descent — juts through her presence — a powerful symbol of efforts to reject racial animosity and bias. Standing by the president’s side, Harris did not mince her words. “Racism is real in America, and it has always been. Xenophobia is real in America and it has always been. Sexism too.” In a clear reference to former president Donald Trump she said that “for the last year, we’ve had people in positions of incredible power scapegoating Asian Americans. People with the highest pulpit spreading this kind of hate.” The Biden administration, she said, would not “stand by” in the face of racial violence.

Anti-Asian attacks have soared during the past year, part of a pattern President Biden called “wrong” and “un-American” the week before the Atlanta killings in a speech at the White House. In the speech at the site of the murders, he, too, appeared to blame Trump and his supporters without naming them directly, saying “we’ve always known that words have consequences. During his first week in office, President Biden signed an executive order directing his government to work toward stopping “anti-Asian bias, xenophobia, and harassment.” During the Atlanta visit, he urged Congress to pass the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act which he said would “expedite the federal government’s response to the rise of hate crimes exacerbated during the pandemic.” The legislation was sponsored by two congressmen of Asian origin.

Biden’s personal losses — of his wife and a daughter in a car accident and much later that of a grown-up son who died of cancer while serving as attorney general of the state of Delaware — made expression of empathy come naturally to him. A newspaper report commented that “the president’s ability to project empathy towards those who are suffering stands in contrast to Mr Trump, who struggled to convey a sense of somber support at such moments. His grinning thumbs-up photograph at a hospital after a mass-shooting in El Paso generated a backlash of angry commentary about his visit. During a campaign played out against a backdrop of the pandemic, Mr Biden often accused his opponent of having no real empathy for those who were suffering.”

The prevailing xenophobia in the US can be traced back to Trump who spent four years in the White House making no secret of his worry that his country would lose its white identity. He was and remains anti-people of colour and anti-immigration. He once used abusive language to refer to the people who were coming in from predominantly black countries expressing a strong preference for immigrants from white countries such as Norway rather than from Haiti. Amongst the policies his administration adopted was to start work on a wall that would run along the entire border with Mexico, a sharp reduction in the number of refugees the US would be willing to admit and to make the process of issuing “green cards” extremely complicated. His successor, Biden, had no problem suggesting that by having relatively open borders the US would gain rather than lose. Within a few days of taking office the new president issued a number of executive orders that included cancelling the ban on admitting people from some Muslim-majority countries, abandoning the work on the wall, significantly increasing the number of refugees that would be allowed into the country, and ending the ban on the issue of green cards. Trump had used the arrival of Covid-19 as an excuse for severely limiting the entry of non-citizens into the country. An analysis by the Migration Policy Institute estimated that Trump’s ban on issuing green cards would affect 660,000 people. In addition to cancelling the ban, allowing more refugees to enter the country, President Biden proposed a more far-reaching overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws that would provide an eight-year path to citizenship for most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the country. In March, less than two months after assuming office, he drafted a major legislation on immigration reform. If approved, it will legalise millions of immigrants who were living illegally in the country.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 29^th, 2021.

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