Seattle, Washington (September 15, 2018)
Photo by Russell C. Leong
ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 6, 2020, an Asian woman was attacked with acid outside her Brooklyn home by an unknown perpetrator, leaving chemical burns on her face, in addition to mental and emotional trauma.1 Although the attacker got away and no clear motive has been established, this likely hate crime occurred during a nationwide backlash against Asians and Asian Americans who have been blamed for the COVID-19 pandemic. Before this incident, nearly a dozen other anti-Asian hate crimes had been reported in New York City. Across the country, more than 1,700 incidents of harassment and violence against Asians—over a thousand of them women—have been reported.2 Given the self-reported nature of these figures, the true number of incidents is likely even higher and will continue to climb, burdening Asian Americans across the country with an extra layer of vulnerability during a time of mass illness and severe economic contractions.
Confronting Anti-Asian Backlash
Equating the virus with humans (and assuming that all Asians are carriers and “responsible” for the pandemic), these attacks occur because Asians are perceived as undesired foreigners, a contagion from the outside that has infiltrated the national body.3 Rather than unmask the historical fiction of this premise, it is more crucial to emphasize that an attack on someone is an attack against their economic livelihood and material being in the world. Acts of racism are conceived within the political economy in which they occur. The racial construction of Asians as “aliens” has served as the means to facilitate both their racial exclusion and economic exploitation.
This dual brunt of xenophobia and “essential labor” persists today. Ironically, given the relatively high number of Asians and immigrants in the medical and food industries, the current anti-Asian attacks target the very people on the frontlines responding to the pandemic.4 Immigrants also belong to industries and sectors most impacted by current layoffs. Lacking eligibility to most assistance programs, they are often the ones who pay the highest price. While the stereotype of Asians as financially successful cogs of the economy continues to loom large, in reality 40% of Asian Americans are considered poor or low-income.5 And of the 12 million undocumented immigrants in America today, 1.7 million of them are Asian.6
These economic conditions are traceable to past and current acts of xenophobic violence. The ongoing economic dispossession of Asian workers shows that the consequences of hate crimes are not only social but material, and aid in the acceleration of poverty. Therefore, we must both condemn individual acts of racism and make broad demands for racial justice that push for social, political, and economic equality. Today’s incidents reflect a history of anti-Asian violence that expose the push-pull tensions between labor demands and racial exclusion.7 Asians who migrated here raised families, endured persistent violence, and found work accessible to (or unrestricted from) them, including self-owned commerce, the high frequency of which indicated the breadth of segregated labor. 8, 9
Today, working-class Asian Americans often face survival in a culture and economy structured against their own interests. Japanese Americans left the internment camps after World War II, only to find hollowed-out shells of their former homes and businesses.10 Vincent Chin met his untimely death in 1982 because two white men blamed Japan for the declining American auto industry.11 And more recently, post-9/11, Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities have faced intense Islamophobia and government surveillance.12 In each of these periods, Asian Americans have stood in for the imagined enemy, and while fabricated, the social, political, and economic consequences against Asian Americans is a daily reality.
A Demographic Profile
Despite popular images of wealthy, successful Asians steering common perceptions and media assumptions, between the “two Asian Americas,” the reality of working families persists.13 The status of middle-and upper-class Asian Americans stem in part from 1965 immigration law overhauls that facilitated the influx of white-collar workers and family reunification. These changes however did not replace or erase the historic presence of an Asian American blue collar and working class.
National statistics may seem to confirm successful stereotypes of Asians, but disaggregated data reveal a more complex socioeconomic story. Asians have the highest median and individual household income among all racial groups, though these numbers break down when considering differences across ethnicities and the higher relative cost of living in urban locales where most Asians live.14 There is a steady growth of poverty among Asians, especially among immigrants. Census figures show that 11.5% of Asians, just under two million, fall below the poverty line.15 A more accurate assessment of poverty uses incomes double the federal poverty line, counting Americans who live paycheck to paycheck and just one emergency away from financial disaster. Forty percent of Asians—eight million people—fall under this criterion.16
Income disparities here show the degree of variance in the labor and services that Asians perform, including the lowest paid jobs. In the past two decades, Asians experienced the fastest growth in poverty and low-income rates at 37%, far above the national rate at 14%.17, 18 Increased poverty for many stands in contrast to the sustained wealth of others, resulting in the polarized reality of Asians bearing the highest intra-racial income inequality: the top 10% of Asian income earners made 10.6 times more than the bottom (the national average is 8.7).19 The disparity by wealth is even more drastic, with the richest possessing 10- and 100-fold the wealth of those at the bottom.20, 21 While many Asians Americans on one side amass wealth through professional occupations, other Asians labor under tenuous low-paying jobs.
Though they face inequality, these workers are the same ones who keep the national economy moving. Immigrant workers make up about 20% of all workers in essential industries, including the medical industry, food supply chain, social services, essential retail and wholesale, transportation, and scientific research and development.22 Several of these industries employ Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and undocumented immigrants alike at disproportionately higher rates.23, 24 At the same time, immigrants in general are over-represented in some of the industries hardest hit by layoffs, the consequences of which can be drastic, including ineligibility for stimulus checks, no unemployment coverage for undocumented immigrants, and lack of health insurance even for those formerly lawfully employed.25
Undocumented Immigrants Facing Precarity
Perhaps the most dire consequence of exclusion—as an ideology and as a political/economic structure—is the status of today’s 12 million undocumented immigrants, of whom Asians make up 14% (one in seven of all Asian immigrants).26 Though only composing an estimated 5% of the workforce, undocumented immigrants make up a higher proportion of workers in agriculture, construction, production, service and transportation, much of the essential work that makes the country’s economy—especially the food supply chain—possible.27
The majority of undocumented immigrants lack access to work authorization, social services and most public benefits, exacerbating the conditions of poverty. Yet, their collective productivity is inextricable from the national economy. Working and living under the haunting threat of deportation, they must, due to their status, conditionally suffer a higher cost of living, because the lower wages they earn from often unguaranteed work must also compensate for the litany of basic rights and services denied to them.28 This suffering reflects the legacy of exclusion laws that create distinctive and discriminatory categories of political, economic, and cultural illegality. As recent as 1986, immigration reform formally barred undocumented immigrants from lawful employment, and in 2002, a Supreme Court decision ruled federal labor protections did not cover them. Employers have since weaponized these laws with impunity to depress the wage floor and dangle workers’ statuses in perpetual precarity.29
Xenophobic acts of violence are perhaps the last straw against marginalized groups, including undocumented Asians and Latinos. While a worker’s work is “essential,” their livelihoods are not. Without a sustained movement for immigrant and racial justice, this legalized segregation will continue to normalize exploitation and fuel the basis for hate crimes.
Strength through Coalition
While Asian Americans are speaking out against the latest anti-Asian attacks, our efforts to resist hate have more impact when we join and support the broader immigrant rights movement, among other racial justice movements, fighting for the dignity of the most vulnerable among us. In lieu of a non-existent social safety net, immigrant rights organizations must advocate and secure basic rights, and place pressure on the mechanisms that perpetuate violence against our communities, such as ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Movimiento Cosecha, a decentralized national movement, recently helped win legislation in New Jersey that makes undocumented immigrants eligible for driver’s licenses. They also launched public campaigns condemning businesses for contracting with ICE.30 Cosecha is an example of how the power and potential of grassroots movements can have in advancing a people-first politics.
Also joining this ensemble of activists are undocumented student organizations calling for greater institutional equity, including groups like the Undocumented Students Initiative at Columbia University (UndoCU), whose actions have included winning a greater array of services necessary for undocumented student health, and building pressure against the university to end a contract with ICE.31 They built their leadership model based on various “Dream Teams” across The City University of New York (CUNY), other New York City schools, and the first and leading undocumented youth-led organization, New York State Youth Leadership Council (NYSYLC). The Council’s decade-plus organizing reached a major victory in 2019 with the passage of the New York State DREAM Act, which allowed undocumented students for the first time to benefit from state tuition assistance.
In the current health crisis, while protests against social distancing and state shutdowns are popping up across the country, immigrant organizers have been demonstrating through car caravans to urge for greater government accountability. According to Dana Marquez, a Cosecha organizer: “These workers are having to decide whether to earn a paycheck or be exposed to the coronavirus. We are asking elected officials to create safe working environments for these essential workers.”32 Undocumented immigrants face a cascade of crises precipitating from the pandemic, including detainments and deportations that endanger isolated individuals and families abroad. Immigrant rights groups like the Puente Human Rights Movement, and No More Deaths, are making sure these issues remain pressing, and a cause to which we all can contribute.33
Issues of substandard protections, government abuse and individual acts of violence overlap, thus challenging us to strengthen our struggles for racial and economic justice through coalition building. Emboldening the future, Asian Americans must join movements to build a world free from racial viruses and economic violence—a prolonged but worthy struggle.
Notes
[1] Randall, “Acid attack on Brooklyn woman in apparent coronavirus hate crime. NY Mayor DeBlasio calls rise in racist attacks on Asians a ‘crisis,’” AsamNews, April 7, 2020, accessed on April 28, 2020, https://asamnews.com/2020/04/07/ny-mayor-vows-to-throw-the-full-force-of-the-law-to-stop-anti-asian-hate-crimes-asian-woman-suffers-second-degree-burns-in-acid-attack/.
[2]“In Six Weeks, STOP AAPI HATE Receives Over 1700 Incident Reports of Verbal Harassment, Shunning and Physical Assaults,” Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, May 13, 2020, accessed on May 24, 2020, http://www.asianpacificpolicyandplanningcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/Press_Release_5_13_20.pdf.
[3] Karen Shimakawa, “National Abjection,” John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats, eds., Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (Brooklyn: Verso, 2014).
[4] Julia Gelatt, “Immigrant Workers: Vital to the U.S. COVID-19 Response,” Disproportionately Vulnerable (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 2020), accessed on May 3, 2020, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/immigrant-workers-us-covid-19-response.
[5] Shailly Gupta Barnes, “Explaining the 140 Million: Breaking Down the Numbers Behind the Moral Budget,” Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, accessed on April 27, 2020, https://kairoscenter.org/explaining-the-140-million/#_ftn7.
[6] Karthick Ramakrishnan and Sono Shah, “One out of every 7 Asian immigrants is undocumented,” AAPI Data, September 8, 2017, accessed April 24, 2020, http://aapidata.com/blog/asian-undoc-1in7/.
[7] Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 7.
[8] Sucheng Chan, “Asian American Economic and Labor History,” David K., Eiichiro Azuma, and Sucheng Chan, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 306, April 1 2016, accessed May 3 2020, https://www-oxfordhandbooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199860463.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199860463-e-11.
[9] Lew-Williams, 247-251. Archives show that between 1885 and 1887 alone, more than 150 anti-Chinese riots and other acts of expulsion took place across the American West.
[10] Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1990), 405.
[11] Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of An American People (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2000), 59.
[12] Moustafa Bayoumi, This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (New York: New York University Press, 2015).
[13] Karan Mahajan, “The Two Asian Americas,” The New Yorker, October 21, 2015, accessed on May 3, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-two-asian-americas.
[14] Karthick Ramakrishnan and Farah Z. Ahmad, State of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Series: A Multifaceted Portrait of a Growing Population (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2014), accessed on April 23, 2020, https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/AAPIReport-comp.pdf, 85-87.
[15] “Community Facts,” AAPI Data, 2017, accessed on April 25, 2020, http://facts.aapidata.com/nationaldata/.
[16] Gupta Barnes.
[17] Ramakrishnan and Ahmad, 89.
[18] Making America Work: Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in the Workforce and Business 2014, (Los Angeles: Asian Americans Advancing Justice Los Angeles, 2014), accessed on April 25, 2020, https://www.advancingjustice-la.org/sites/default/files/MakingAmericaWork2015.pdf, 19.
[19] Rakesh Kochnar and Anthony Cillufo, “Key findings on the rise in income inequality within America’s racial and ethnic groups,” Pew Research Center, July 12, 2018, accessed on April 25, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/12/key-findings-on-the-rise-in-income-inequality-within-americas-racial-and-ethnic-groups/.
[20] Christian E. Weller and Jeffrey Thompson, “Wealth Inequality Among Asian Americans Greater Than Among Whites,” Center for American Progress, December 20, 2016, accessed on April 25, 2020, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2016/12/20/295359/wealth-inequality-among-asian-americans-greater-than-among-whites/.
[21] This argument does not intend to flatten the material inequalities between Asians and other people of color. As a whole, Asians experience the lowest rates of poverty and incarceration, while education rates are high. I contend rather that the conditions of poverty are more often racially specific, with uneven results.
[22] Gelatt.
[23] Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “Unauthorized immigrant workforce is smaller, but with more women,” Pew Research Center, November 27, 2018, accessed on April 28, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2018/11/27/unauthorized-immigrant-workforce-is-smaller-but-with-more-women/.
[24] Making America Work, 16.
[25] Gelatt.
[26] Ramakrishnan and Shah.
[27] Passel and Cohn.
[28] This includes, among other state-specific restrictions, basic labor protections (such as worker’s compensation), health insurance, food and welfare assistance, ineligibility for driver’s licenses which criminalize and restrict access to mobility, and lack of access to federal and state financial aid for college.
[29] Michael J. Wishnie, “Prohibiting the Employment of Unauthorized Immigrants: The Experiment Fails,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum 2007:1 (2007): 195. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act introduced the I-9 Employment Eligibility Verification form required for all lawful employment. Undocumented immigrants who could not provide the essential identification information required in the form became effectively restricted from legally gaining work. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Hoffman Plastics v. NLRB, in favor of the Hoffman Plastics for their decision to withhold back pay for an undocumented employee who was laid off for union organizing. The majority judges determined that because the employee violated the laws of gaining legal employment, he was not covered by the regulations of the National Labor Relations Board. Together, these legal frameworks force undocumented workers to accept dangerous working conditions unwed from any formal protection or job security.
[30] “Campaigns,” Movimiento Cosecha, accessed on May 25, 2020, https://www.lahuelga.com/our-campaigns.
[31] Valeria Escobar, “Columbia signed a contract to provide medical support for border crossers. Faculty and students argue it’s the wrong thing to do,” Columbia Spectator, July 18, 2019, accessed on May 25, 2020, https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2019/07/18/columbia-signed-a-contract-to-provide-medical-support-for-border-crossers-faculty-and-students-argue-its-the-wrong-thing-to-do/.
[32] Marisa Penaloza, “Undocumented Workers Demand Better, Safer Working Conditions During Pandemic,” NPR, May 1, 2020, accessed on May 3, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/01/849128105/undocumented-workers-demand-better-safer->working-conditions-during-pandemic.
[33] Jessica Kutz, “Protesting immigration detention during a pandemic,” High Country News, May 5, 2020, accessed on May 26, 2020, https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.6/covid19-protesting-immigrant-detention-during-a-pandemic.