Evergreene Digest A Journal of Progress for the Rest of Us

Một cô giáo dạy đàn violin và con trai có thể bị trục xuất về Nga trong vòng 3 tuần tới. Lý do là “quá trình nhập cư không hoàn thiện” như chúng ta hay gọi.

Writers With Drinks has won “Best Literary Night” from the SF Bay Guardian readers’ poll five years in a row and was named “Best Literary Drinking” by the SF Weekly.

Here’s a crucial lesson for the current Thai regime. It’s far easier to gun down peasants armed with bamboo spears, slingshots and Molotov cocktails on the streets of Bangkok than it is to win the hearts and minds of the increasingly restless peasantry that make up the majority of the country.

Live TV : Ustream

Exit Saigon, Enter Little Saigon: The Vietnamese American Diaspora
Posted in Academic, Event, General APA, Lecture, Literary, Vietnamese American by anielkr on April 8, 2010
LIVE webcast available!

The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program celebrates Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May by commemorating the anniversary of Vietnamese mass migration to the United States in Exit Saigon, Enter Little Saigon: The Vietnamese American Diaspora.

Featuring:

Andrew Lam, editor at New America Media, discusses his experiences as a first-generation Vietnamese American and signs copies of his book, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora.

Lan Cao, Professor of Law at the College of William and Mary, ”explores the mysterious terrain of the Vietnamese American experience” in the aftermath of war and signs copies of her book, Monkey Bridge.

Nguyen Dinh Thang, Executive Director of Boat People SOS, joins the panel discussion as an advocate of human rights and social justice for the Vietnamese American community.

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, of University of Maryland’s Asian American Studies Program and founding co-editor of the Asian American Literary Review, will moderate.

Date:
Friday, May 14, 2010
6:30 – 8:00 p.m.

Location:
Rasmuson Theater
National Museum of the American Indian
Fourth Street and Independence Avenue, SW

Metro:
L’Enfant Plaza
(Yellow, Green, Blue, and Orange lines)
Maryland Avenue/Smithsonian Museums exit

This event is free and open to the public.

If you are feeling generous and interested in Vietnamese American artists please rsvp via facebook for this event at my condo complex:

we have a max capacity of 100+(10) so first come first serve.

Andrew

I suppose that’s why they called her the Princess of Teen Pop, making it almost impossible for her to break out of her pop music bubble.

I don’t get the new slogan – We Are All Arizona.
I am seeing that on t-shirts at immigration rallies. But what does it mean? How can a slogan like Boycott Arizona and We Are All Arizona both share t-shirt space in the same rally?

Each week at Duc’s bar, Vietnamese-American poets and writers share their experiences with their Vietnamese counterparts. And with more Viet Kieu coming home to work and invest, that dialogue will continue only to grow and, who knows, might very well spur the new direction of the country.

In the case just decided by the Supreme Court that found, 5-4, no constitutional objection to an 8-foot cross on government property, Justice Anthony Kennedy based his majority opinion largely on the principle that the cross is a symbol with far more than “mere” religious significance.

Whatever one thinks of it, Fox News is hugely influential as the nation’s top-rated cable news network.

So its coverage of Arizona’s new immigration crackdown deserves attention.

Prominent Fox News personalities—Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Shep Smith, Laura Ingraham—all have their particular stances on the subject of immigration. And that has shown over the last few days, when the immigration issue has received more coverage than any week in recent memory, thanks to Arizona’s new legislation.

The network is often characterized as a mouthpiece of the strident right. But the impression one gets watching Fox News is that whether by design or not, the network is not necessarily monolithic on the Arizona legislation and the linked subject of immigration reform on the federal level.

For the last few days, Arizona’s new Senate Bill 1070, which authorizes police to investigate individuals’ immigration status, has dominated newspaper front pages and cable news. Fox News has been no exception.

On Monday, I watched as Shep Smith, a daytime anchor, read off poll numbers from Rasmussen that said that while 70 percent of Arizonans support the new hardline legislation, over 50 percent also believe it will lead to racial profiling of Latinos. Smith shook his head, repeated the numbers apparently showing support for racial profiling and said, “sad.”

Later, anchor Neil Cavuto hosted Michelle Dellacroce of Mothers Against Illegal Aliens, who invoked the hateful term “anchor babies,” (a term nativists use to describe the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants). But Cavuto also grilled Dellacroce on whether the Arizona law would be subjected to scores of legal challenges that would cost the Arizona economy dear, and whether it was worth the trouble. “Let them sue,” she responded.

Then, I watched Glenn Beck offer a complicated argument in favor of legal immigration and against illegal immigration. He was speaking in favor of the Arizona law, and mounted a point-by-point challenge to Al Sharpton’s criticisms of it as racist policy. However, Beck did so making conciliatory statements about immigrants, even undocumented immigrants:
This is not to demonize those who are coming here illegally. I want to make this clear. I have a problem with illegal immigration. But the problem I have — the least problem I have is with the actual illegal immigrant. It’s with our government not enforcing our own laws and the businesses.
Beck was especially hard on the business owners and employers who hire and profit from undocumented immigrants, but are not prosecuted. “They’re not the ones being perp-walked,” Beck said.

Laura Ingraham, guest anchoring on the O’Reilly Factor, was more harsh. Ingraham, in contrast to the show’s usual host Bill O’Reilly, is perhaps the Fox News anchor who is most hard-line on immigration. She likes to derisively refer to any immigration reform plan as an “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants.

In a segment on Arizona, she asked why immigrant protesters aren’t held to the same scrutiny as Tea Party protesters when their demonstrations and actions get unruly.

Finally, yesterday, Shep Smith was even more vocal about his criticisms of the Arizona law, calling it a “breathing while Latino law” and comparing it to a “driving while black law.” He also featured Florida Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Marco Rubio, who said he has concerns with the Arizona law.

And also yesterday, Sarah Palin got in her two cents on Sean Hannity’s program, coming out in favor of the Arizona law, disputing that it was written in a manner that would allow racial profiling.

The law however, states that any “reasonable suspicion” is enough for a law officer to investigate the immigration status of an individual. Here’s the text of the law:

FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE, WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON.

But then Palin also seemed to be piping up in favor of a more rational, orderly and open immigration system that would make it easier for immigrants to work in the United States, and thus remove incentives that drive many to enter the country illegally. Or was she? It was hard to tease apart her argument:
I think that President Obama is playing to his base on this one. And I think that’s quite unfortunate because this isn’t fair to the legal immigrants. It’s not fair to illegal immigrants either, who do want to — many of them want to come here and find that pathway to citizenship. They [are] wanting to seek the right way to get over here.
I’ve written in the past on how Palin (and this is true of O’Reilly too) has made conciliatory noises and given small signals she would favor some form of comprehensive immigration reform that would make it easier for immigrants to enter the country legally.

Though Arizona’s crackdown may have fired up anti-immigrant extremists, it also seems to have pushed the stable of Fox News opinion makers to be more public and thorough about their ideas on immigration. And in the end this transparency will be a good thing, as the public begins to parse who stands where, and the issue begins to be grappled with in earnest on a national level.

I wonder if anyone else has had the chance to watch Fox immigration coverage and can offer their own opinions of it.

Below is Shep Smith making his “breathing while Latino” comments.

NAM editor, Andrew Lam, returned to Vietnam with the Newshour, to follow the lives of several Vietnamese Americans.

Andrew is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora and the memoir: “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres,” to be published in September 2010.

related articles:

A Conversation with Andrew Lam on Vietnam and its future

Thirty Five Years After The War, Betrayal is Vietnam’s Story

One Vietnamese Refugee’s Experience on an ‘Unforgiving Sea’

Escaping a Cambodian Brothel: One Woman’s Story

Why I’m Working as a Saigon Massage Girl

Oh, come on. Like Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer wasn’t gonna sign SB 1070. Of course she was going to sign it. Her re-election depended on it.

The proposed “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” a bill that makes it a misdemeanor to fail to carry proper immigration documents and requires police to determine a person’s immigration status, could come with heftier price tag than people may realize.

“Future historians will have the pleasure of chronicling how through his deft essays Andrew Lam bridged, fused, and reconciled Asia, Vietnam, Vietnamese America, contemporary California, American culture as a whole, and the English language into one interactive symbiosis, his and all of ours, for now and for decades to come.”

While a new report accurately concludes that legalization would not have a negative impact on native workers’ wages and employment, the report takes a myopic approach to legalization’s impact on wages and mobility of the newly legalized.

Who will be the second man on the Republican side of the aisle to help Sen. Lindsey Graham carry forward immigration reform?

That is the question that has been on many policy minds since Sen. Graham, along with Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat, announced a bipartisan blueprint for immigration reform.

In meetings with immigrant advocacy groups, the White House has repeatedly signaled that it believes additional Republican support (other than Graham’s) is needed for the proposal to gain momentum this year.

Earlier this month on “Meet the Press” Schumer asked Graham to work hard to persuade a second Republican to take a vocal stance in favor of immigration reform.

But so far no other Republicans have done so.

The buzz in Washington, D.C. was that another Republican would have to step forward to nudge along the proposal so that it would eventually have a chance of picking up significant GOP support. That’s how this whole notion of a “2nd Republican” came to dominate immigration policy talk.

But it’s a notion that immigrant advocates in the nation’s capital totally disagree with.

In a conference call with reporters this week, Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, took the notion on quite explicitly.

“I reject the notion we need a second Republican to start … the process,” Noorani said.

He went on to add that he was “confident” that an immigration reform package such as Schumer and Graham’s could pick up anywhere from two to six Republican endorsements once it is further along in the legislative process.

Noorani was echoed by Crystal Williams, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association.

“There is no magic to a second Republican,” she said.

Earlier in the week, Jeanne Butterfeld, legislative director for the Reform Immigration for America campaign, also sought to play down the idea that the missing “second Republican” doomed the plan.

Butterfeld, on a call with ethnic media reporters organized by New America Media, said there was a “chicken-and-egg” dynamic at work, but that moderate Republicans like Maine’s Olympia Snowe had to be counted as potential “yes” votes on an eventual immigration package.

Graham and Schumer’s immigration reform proposal includes a path to legalization for many of the nation’s 11 million or more undocumented immigrants. However it also contains aspects that are more problematic for immigrant rights and other activists such as a proposal for a nation worker’s I.D. card to guard the labor market from undocumented immigrant workers.

If immigrant advocates expected Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona to step up and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Graham on immigration, they received a rude awakening. Kyl, despite having been a co-sponsor of the 2007 immigration reform proposal that came close to passing in the Senate, wasn’t having it this time around.

Instead, he threatened to filibuster immigration reform legislation.

America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy group in Washington, D.C. sent out a press release saying that Kyl’s position amounted to a “drop dead” directed at immigration reform.

“What is remarkable is that a senator from a border state where illegal immigration is one of the top issues would proudly proclaim that stopping a bipartisan initiative supported by the president is more important than solving one of his state’s key problems,” said Frank Sharry, who heads America’s Voice.

Backers of immigration reform are essentially betting that once the Graham-Schumer bipartisan plan is fleshed out, introduced, and begins winding its way through committee, it could gain bipartisan support.

But so far, as Kyl’s early positioning shows, it has proven a tough sell during a poor economy and in the midst of the post-health care political rancor in Washington, D.C.

Start: 04/24/2010 – 9:30pm
DVAN is organizing the second San Francisco Vietnamese American Poetry Festival as part of the SF International Poetry Festival (in collaboration with the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library).

Date: April 24,
Time: 7 – 9 PM

Location: Fort Mason Conference Center, Bldg D, Fleet Room
Reception: 9 – 11 PM in Bldg C, Room 165

Our program includes Anh Vu Buchanan, Kim-An Lieberman, Lan Tran, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Andrew Lam and Dao Strom. Viet Nguyen will serve as emcee. See the flyer here.

Festival Sponsors: The SF International Poetry Festival, The Center for SEA Studies at UCB, The Asian American Studies Department and The Vietnamese American Studies Center at SFSU, and the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (APICC).

Reception Sponsor: Restaurant “Le Cheval”

Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s arrest of 12 McDonalds workers on March 26 has reverberated throughout the immigrant community here.

What if you had to listen to the details of your brother’s murder, over and over again? That’s what Joselo Lucero is going through, as he sits in the Long Island courtroom where 19-year-old Jeffrey Conroy is standing trial for the murder of Joselo’s brother, Marcelo.

Photos by Marcelo Ballvé