Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
A reintroduced bill in Congress called the Adoptee Citizenship Act would close a legal loophole and grant those adoptees citizenship. The bill has received bi-partisan support, introduced in the Senate by Senators Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Susan Collins (R-ME), and introduced in the House of Representatives by Congressman Adam Smith (D-WA) and Congressman Don Bacon … Read more
Adding a citizenship question to the census reduces the participation of people who aren’t U.S. citizens, particularly those from Latin American countries, according to a new research paper that comes as Republicans in Congress are pushing to add such a question to the census form.
In Refusing Death, Nadia Y. Kim tells the stories of Asian and undocumented Latin@ immigrant women, finding that they are influential because of their ability to remap politics, community, and citizenship in the face of the country’s nativist racism and system of class injustice, defined not just by disproportionate environmental pollution but also by neglected schools, surveillance and deportation, and political marginalization.
Many historians and Japanese Americans cite the loss of U.S. citizenship rights as the biggest injustice of the camps, and many believe cooperation and not resistance was the norm. Join Dr. Gary Okihiro as he outlines the nature of the oppression in that historical experience, and the resistance posed to those oppressive acts.
Taking into account considerations of immigration, race, gender, and diaspora, AAARI’s 2019 annual conference asks: What does the meteoric rise of Trumpian racist white nationalism say about the nature of systemic racism in our country today? Why is it now primarily and explicitly rooted in anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim nativist racism, and where do Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) — their diverse ethnic groups — fit (or not fit) in these citizenship orders? How has the higher education research community and the activist community collaborated and how can they continue to strategically collaborate together?
This talk will address how US racism pivots as much on nativist injustices – suffered mostly by Latinx, Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI), and Middle Eastern ethnics – as it does on injustices specific to Black Americans. Prof. Nadia Kim evidences the point by way of research on Latinx and AAPI immigrant activism, as well as an analysis of the rise of Donald Trump. Although sociology has certainly given a nod to nativistic racism, mostly in relation to the Latinx population, its core theories, frameworks, and methodologies have not centered “the citizenship line”; as such, it has not defined sociology the way the color line has. Yet, the racialized insider/outsider axis has long separated “us white Americans” from the brown brother, terrorist, war-time enemy, socioeconomic threat (e.g., academic threat), exotic seductress, anchor-baby maker, and maternity tourist. As this list of representations reveals, gender, class, and the body are also interrelated with race, and all are vital to the remaking of citizenship by the mostly Mexican and Filipin@ immigrant activists whom Prof. Kim studies in Los Angeles. Not only would a citizenship-centered sociology best grasp their efforts and the implications thereof, but, in my view, would have also predicted the arrival of the Trump era, the other focus of her talk.