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Last month, Cecillia Wang, the head of the ACLU, asked the Supreme Court to preserve birthright citizenship, a pillar of the 14th Amendment. Born in Oregon to Taiwanese immigrants, Wang is herself a beneficiary of the doctrine she defended during the historic oral argument—as am I. Following the argument, interest in her background exploded.
So did the backlash. The host of the right-wing podcast The Savage Nation, for example, told his listeners that Wang is “very smart, very evil, and very devious.” He then widened his lens, claiming that families that come from “hellhole” countries like China and India do not “integrate” as European American immigrants did. Instead, he said, they have converted our “melting pot” into a “chamber pot.” The transcript of the podcast went viral. President Donald Trump reposted it in full.
The assertion that Asian Americans and other nonwhite immigrants don’t “assimilate”—a freighted term, to be sure—is both easy and hard to refute. Easy because it is demonstrably false: The English language acquisition rate among immigrants, for example, was relatively high even at the turn of the 20th century. Today it’s even higher, at 91 percent.
Hard, however, because the claim is a red herring. While “assimilation” and “integration” arguments present themselves as a neutral, civic concern about internal cohesion, they’re anything but. The podcast suggests that Asian Americans as a whole cannot integrate. Yet it simultaneously professes anxiety about an Asian American who has decidedly not stood apart from American institutions and culture: After graduating from Yale Law School, Wang clerked for two Supreme Court justices. Then she took a landmark case to our nation’s highest court. For that, the podcast dubbed her a “snake” intent on stealing the country away from “us.”
The assimilability argument has deep historical roots. In the 1854 case , the California Supreme Court reviewed the trial of a white man accused of murdering a Chinese victim. The prosecution had called three Chinese witnesses. The court ruled that they could not testify because they belonged to “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, … differing in language, opinions, color, and physical conformation” and marked with “impassable difference.” The murderer walked free.
Similarly, the U.S. Supreme Court historically used Asian Americans’ supposedly implacable foreignness to justify greater, institutionally enforced apartness. Consider the 1923 case , which prevented an Indian national from naturalizing because “the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from” white Americans; the 1927 case , which excluded a Chinese American student from her local, white high school, based on segregationist principles; and, most infamously, the 1944 case , which permitted the incarceration of Japanese Americans on the suspicion that some might retain loyalty to Japan.
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These decisions came down in the first half of the 20th century. But as the Savage Nation transcript indicates, they reflect an enduring attitude.
It may well be true that stitching multicultural communities together requires us to be more curious, inclusive neighbors. But the “assimilation” camp’s actual issue is not an unwillingness to participate. Rather, immigrants and their children, like Wang, seem to pose the biggest threat when they participate too much. At bottom, the point has always been disenfranchisement.
Our legal institutions and the broader culture refract their policy values back at each other. The specter of the unassimilable Asian American was embodied most infamously in Fu Manchu, a fictional doctor-slash-supervillain who endured in Marvel comics, on television, and in theaters across much of the 20th century. Fu lived in American communities but sought to use mind control and esoteric sciences to bring down the Western empire. In him is embodied the fear that a foreigner might ingratiate himself too much—mastering Western tools only to deploy them against blue-blooded Americans. Again, the parallels to Michael Savage’s podcast are obvious.
Overinclusive national-security initiatives have often fed on the same fear of the unassimilable. The incarceration of Japanese Americans and nationals is our country’s ugliest result, but other punitive dragnets have followed. McCarthyists indiscriminately portrayed Chinese immigrants as Communist subversives and sought to deport as many as possible. After 9/11, the government punished ordinary Muslim Americans who refused its overtures to spy, at great personal cost, for it. Today similar patterns have emerged as economic and military competition with China intensifies.
This Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we should honor the Asian Americans who are robustly participating in our body politic: not only attorneys defending the rule of law, but also teachers, librarians, social workers, local government employees, and those who engage in domestic labor, among others. Their work caring for others in the name of enacting a more just vision of our country, whether on the national stage or in their everyday lives, is profoundly, fundamentally American.
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