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0:00 [Music] foreign [Music] hello and welcome back i'm sewell chan the editorial page editor for the los angeles times this is our july 4th episode and we're going to be talking today about what it means to be an american this country declared its independence 245 years ago in a document that proclaimed all men are created equal but at the time in 1776 nearly 20 percent of the population was
0:47 enslaved of course the united states has come a long way since then but much work remains history tells us that this nation of immigrants has also been a nation of xenophobia the current waves of racism and anti-immigrant hate are nothing new for america we've been here before but america is also now undergoing a major transformation latino asian and other immigrant populations are growing the 2010 to 2020 decade was the first in u.s history in which the white population declined in number non-hispanic whites are on track to be a minority of the population as early as 2045. it all brings us back to this question who is an american joining me for this important
1:32 conversation is gene guerrero an investigative journalist and author she has been a regular contributor to the los angeles times and will join our staff as an opinion columnist in july we also have erica lee a distinguished historian professor and author whose team gathers first-person stories by immigrants in america let's have a look my name is erica lee i'm a regents professor of history and asian american studies at the university of minnesota and i also direct the immigration history research center i'm an immigration historian and i'm also an asian american historian i've written four books this last book is called america for americans a history of xenophobia in the
2:20 united states and i was not planning on writing a history of xenophobia but i was so struck by what i was seeing happening and what the rhetoric was and the outpouring of support for donald trump's vision of america that i i really felt to be a responsible historian a responsible teacher that i needed to come up with a better way of explaining why and how we have hated and feared immigrants not just in 2015 and 2016 but really throughout our american history and what that said about us it was imperative really
3:09 to dispel some of the myths that so many of us have been educated on and that really dominate some of our political rhetoric and our understandings of ourselves as a nation of immigrants i wanted to figure out a way that challenge some of these narratives challenge some of these one-sided stories about immigration and i thought that drawing on our historical traditions of oral history might be one of the ways to do that and so together with my staff and other colleagues and really informed by my students we created a digital storytelling project called immigrant stories
3:55 we have 375 stories now from across the country some internationally representing 55 plus different ethnic groups our digital storytelling website is free and publicly accessible some of these immigrant stories are about american economic opportunity some are about helping the next generation some are about the country that welcomes the stranger and others are about the american dream and we're just thrilled with the response um over the years and thrilled every time someone creates a story shares a new
4:41 aspect of this ever-changing american experience that we're all enriched by [Music] erica lee joins me now erica i'd like to follow up on what we just saw and heard the oral histories and stories that your team have gathered run the gamut from feeling like an outsider to making a living in america to pride of becoming a citizen how does this project speak to the moment we're in thank you so much for that wonderful question and thank you for inviting me to speak about these really important issues not just on independence day but really every day you know you you pointed to the
5:27 diversity of immigrant stories uh in terms of the relationship to what it means to be an american what it means to strive for the american dream we wanted to give the power of storytelling to immigrants and refugees and their children so that they could choose the story that they wanted to tell and sometimes it's a story about loss there are stories in our collection that do explicitly say i wish i had never come here and then there are the stories that may be more familiar to us the story of the american dream how people came with nothing worked hard and were able to
6:13 build a home and send their send their children off to college and it's that diversity of the immigrant experience that i think speaks to what the american experience is not all of us have made it not all of us are able to access or achieve the american dream and i think that that is an important lesson to keep in mind um as we consider this transition point that we're facing as a country as we're transitioning from a period where immigration has been deliberately made a threat to the united states where now we're having more political
6:58 conversations about reform about um changing that narrative and changing our policies erica you started working on your latest book america for americans the night donald trump was elected president in november 2016 why i knew that i was going to go into the classroom the very next day um and and talk with my students most of whom are first-generation immigrants and refugees and i honestly did not know what to tell them i knew that they would have a lot of questions and i walked in and i said what do you want to talk about today do you want to
7:44 continue with the standard lesson that we had planned on the syllabus should we throw it out should we uh should we just sit here and um and and discuss what what happened what questions do you have and i think so many of us were in in shock uh were were frustrated were scared um but really didn't know how to talk about it yet so i i passed around index cards and i i said i invited them to just you know write down anything a thought a reaction um knowing that some were pleased with the election results and and some were not and and that formed the foundation not only for the conversation
8:30 that we had in class that day but also allowed me to uh to understand how how my students you know represented a microcosm of the country where we all just had so many questions about what did this mean um how did this happen where would we go from here what lessons can history provide for charting a way forward and i i felt that the existing books on my shelves in my office really didn't do a good job and that i i needed to to do a better job not just for my own students but for what i believe to be a large portion of the american public who um
9:18 who were also concerned about what this meant for for immigration in our so-called nation of immigrants i'd like to bring gene guerrero into the conversation gene you have covered immigration and the border and written a book on former white house advisor stephen miller the architect of president trump's immigration policies what is it like today in this moment to be an immigrant in america well today i mean immigrants in america face more anxiety um more fear than i think they have in a very long time you know i was wrapping up my my book hate monger in august of 2019 when we saw this
10:03 vicious horrific attack in walmart in el paso where 23 people were killed by someone a white terrorist who believed that there was a hispanic invasion echoing a lot of the rhetoric that had been popularized under the trump administration that you know equated an increase in asylum seeking families with um you know an invasion of this country that required a violent response and and so i think that today you know immigrants are facing fear as as erica was saying about being able to walk down the street about whether their parents are are are going to be able to return home from work whether it's you know because they might get picked up in an ice raid or because they might be
10:49 targeted by a racially motivated terrorist attack and of course we're now seeing that asian americans and pacific islanders have faced a rising tide of rhetoric or abuse and even violence reports of hate crimes have risen considerably could you as a historian of asian americans help put this moment in context absolutely um i finished this book in 2019 and then i started writing the epilogue during the pandemic because i thought that the story might be over uh in 2020 but it soon became clear that with the pandemic that
11:36 our xenophobic tradition took another evolution and that we were drawing upon a long-standing narrative that foreigners bring disease that foreigners spread disease and that during times of crisis immigration restriction is a logical uh response and i remember reading the news reports of anti-asian anti-chinese sentiment and then narratives around the origins of the coronavirus in january and february of 2020 so even before the virus officially came to the united
12:22 states and seeing these these um these messages long-standing messages about chinese people in particular bringing disease rooted in our history and reanimated again in 2020 and it worried me it kept me up at night thinking that if the virus spread to the united states what would that mean for us as asian americans but i i still could not have imagined i still could not have imagined the six thousand six hundred reported hate incidents in one year representing a forty three hundred percent increase from reported hate incidents to the fbi in 2018
13:08 these vicious attacks on the most vulnerable of our population to the point where asian americans feel uncomfortable walking to go get groceries riding the subway walking in their own neighborhoods it is both an echo of the past a very violent past that has targeted asian americans throughout our history but it's also been turbocharged during the pandemic unnecessarily of course and part of the ongoing um ongoing realities of discrimination that so many americans face in our country gene as you say anti-immigrant politics have recurred throughout american history
13:54 in california for instance voters in 1994 passed proposition 187 which banned undocumented immigrants from receiving public benefits including a public education although most of the new law was later struck down by the courts today california is now generally considered to be welcoming toward immigrants gene is that shift unique to california or is it a trend that could be spreading to other parts of this country well it's definitely a trend that i believe is spreading to other parts of the country and we saw sort of the beginnings of it in in california in the 1990s with this proposition that you mentioned prop 187 that created an intense sense of urgency in california among immigrant communities that turned the state deep blue and i think
14:42 that that same transformation that we're seeing in california is starting to happen in other places specific sanctuary policies being passed in a variety of different cities but but that transformation is is creating a similar backlash as we see demographic shift as we see the empowerment uh the political empowerment and mobilization of communities of color there's likewise this very um intense white backlash against that now gene certainly um much of the anti-immigrant sentiment and racial violence and intimidation in recent years have derived from stoked-up grievances and uh the fear of an increasingly diverse america but are there any legitimate concerns
15:27 about economic or cultural uh or other changes uh that that do need to be seriously discussed and that don't stem from a place of racial agreement that's an interesting question i mean i think that most of the time when you see um you know an attack on multiculturalism it is very destructive because it paints it as an existential threat to who we are as a nation but the thing is you know it just it all depends on what you how you define american and and the fact is some people define that more inclusively than others and that's not that's just not a bad thing i think it's it's it's destructive when when it's when it's the opposite when you're trying to exclude
16:14 people from from being american because they don't fit in with you know the historic you know this this vision of american being tied to anglo-saxon traditions and the main argument is usually economic this idea that immigrants are stealing um taking jobs from americans or that they're draining welfare which is simply has been shown not to be true a recent study by uc davis and the center for american progress found that legalizing the close to 11 million undocumented people in the united states today would create about 1.7 trillion dollars it would add that to our economy it would create hundreds of thousands of new jobs so i think what needs to happen is is we need to provide pathways to legalization
16:59 for the people who are here currently undocumented so that they can integrate into the workforce and they will actually be less likely to compete with low-skilled you know american workers if they if they're allowed to be legalized and and are allowed to come out of the shadows turning back to erica erica you recently wrote an opinion essay for the los angeles times i'd like to read an excerpt from it chinese people and those assumed to be chinese or asian were blamed for the coronavirus most notably by trump thousands of asian americans have reported being yelled at spit upon harassed and physically attacked some have been killed in march 2020 the trump administration began treating
17:45 immigration as a public health threat closed u.s borders and drastically restricted immigration the country became gripped by a second epidemic one of fear xenophobia and racism erica historically fears of disease and poor hygiene poor sanitation have been used to target immigrant communities tell us about that history it's a long history school it it really goes back to um to every single immigrant group that has already that had already been identified as a threat either because they were too foreign or because there were too many or concerned that they were taking away jobs etc so we see even in
18:31 the 18 18th century that germans are being blamed for bringing yellow fever we know that irish immigrants jewish immigrants italian immigrants were blamed for bringing and spreading diseases like cholera and typhoid and that chinese immigrants were blamed for bringing bubonic plague that these groups were then disproportionately targeted and impacted by both public health policies public health policies that were implemented in the name of protecting the greater american public health as well as immigration policies that used the fear of disease and contagion to restrict immigration and that's what
19:18 we've seen with the trump administration it's not just uh it wasn't just drawing upon this long history as a precedent to to to then use uh public health as a justification for immigration restriction it was also used as the primary response to the pandemic blame immigrants build the build keep building the the border wall restrict immigration the number of of pandemic era immigration orders were so numerous that immigration dropped by 92 percent in the second half of fiscal year 2020. they constitute the most sweeping immigration restrictions
20:05 ever put in place in american history so this isn't just a um this happens it ha you know this happens because of we're in a public health crisis the trump administration deliberately used immigration restriction as a way to deflect uh public attention to the catastrophic response of the pandemic but it it really became the primary response um the chinese virus the the walls and the um and the border closures um it's it's something that as jean mentioned you know did not go away simply with the change of administration will likely last beyond
20:52 the pandemic whenever that is whenever that is over and really speaks to the need to keep on paying attention and to challenging um not only these undercurrents of xenophobia and racism but but the pandemic era policies that were supposed to be temporary but seem to be longer lasting than many of us expected erica tensions between the u.s and chinese governments have risen in recent years some analysts say we may be entering a new cold war how might the rivalry between these superpowers affect asian americans it already has
21:38 and again there's a history to this uh we know that whenever the united states has been engaged in a war the immigrant group in the united states or those perceived to be connected to that foreign country have suffered the of course the most immediate example the most relevant example is what happened to japanese americans during world war ii after decades of anti-japanese sentiment that tied japanese immigrants and their american-born children to the evil japanese empire pointing out that they were loyal simply because of their ancestry loyal to the japanese empire rather than to the united states this helped to fuel and justify the mass
22:26 relocation and removal and incarceration of japanese americans during world war ii 120 000 um two-thirds of whom were american citizens so immigrants and their u.s born children have always been vulnerable to these international tensions asian americans particularly so because of the ways in which we have continuously been tied to um to a notion of foreignness always considered forever foreign rather than um as american citizens so with the china virus with the wuhan virus rhetoric and with president trump's blame china
23:12 approach to the pandemic he basically gave many americans a license to hate a license to inflict violence upon um asian americans chinese appearing people and people um people considered or perceived to be foreign um there's there's just no doubt about it that this was a um an unnecessary and uh reaction and and just a tragic uh tragic era of violence i have a final question for both of you president biden recently said quote america is the most unique idea
23:59 in history end quote but he added we've never lived up to it but we've never walked away from it before erica and jean will that idea survive what does it mean this fourth of july to be an american erica do you want to start well um to be an american really depends on who you ask right who has the power who has the power to define what american means who has the power to then legislate what that definition uh what kinds of powers come with that definition and so there are so many so many people throughout history and
24:45 and including in our contemporary times who have wielded the most narrow and exclusive definition of american um against others and today we see it as as being a a symbol of white nationalism and white supremacy that the the the anglo-saxon protestant uh american is somehow the truest and the best american that we need to go back to a time when there was less racial diversity and less religious diversity but again if you ask our newest americans or ask our newest arrivals
25:31 who may not yet be official american citizens but have given up so much for the chance to simply be in the united states um with the hope of of perhaps becoming a citizen then i think we we get at a different definition one that does speak to what president biden and president obama had always referred to as the promise of america i think it's important to acknowledge that that promise has not always been accessible to everybody and still is not accessible to everybody but that ideal and the values do remain an important part of of a much broader and welcoming and inclusive
26:20 definition and ideal of america that we can and and should um look forward to and to support gene yes as far as whether the idea can survive i mean i think it's important to remember the republican party can and is capable of embracing this more inclusive definition of what it means to be an american unfortunately it has it is it has been hijacked by its extremist you know white nationalist fringe and unfortunately all of these voter suppression efforts across the country you know the anti-immigrant agenda all of these things uh are real cause for concern as far as whether people are going to be able to use their voices and have them be heard um and that's why i think it's so important that the democrats continue to
27:07 pursue you know through whatever means they have available to them to ensure that communities of color are able to vote are able to become citizens and and are able to be american the way that they deserve to be because as far as the definition of american like you know what is an american i think anyone who is in this country and has a dream of having this be their home and you know wants to have a family here wants to contribute to our society they deserve a chance to to be be that and to have that i want to thank gene guerrero and erica lee for joining us for this thoughtful discussion and we hope you'll come back again if
27:54 you'd like to see more episodes of second opinion go to latimes.com second opinion thanks for watching we'll see you next time you
