All Sides of the Border

There’s no doubt that immigration is one of the main issues in the 2016 US Presidential Election, if not the main issue. The Trump campaign kicked off with the unusual idea of building a wall on the Mexican border,  and the resulting dumpster fire has routinely dehumanized of immigrants and refugees. Immigration is also a divisive political topic throughout Europe, especially the Brexit-ing UK, and as far as Singapore. I won't rehash all the notable anti-immigration rhetoric, but I'll just leave here this gem from Fox News displaying their nuanced understanding of Chinese immigrants.

There’s certainly no lack of pro-immigration champions. We have all sorts of arguments for taking in immigrants: they add value to our economy and actually create jobs, they bring in new ideas and cultures, that America has always been a country of immigrants, that it's the compassionate option. If you want a collection of pro-immigration arguments and stories, go no further than Define American created by Jose Antonio Vargas.  However, I find some of these arguments fundamentally flawed and not unified, inadequately voicing a cohesive basic reason for supporting immigration.

I am not writing a policy piece – in fact I really don’t intend this to be political. I just want to lend an international perspective to reframe a dialogue that frankly nauseates me.

As a child of immigrants to America, I have seen much of the American immigrant experience. As an American who has spent 5 years of adulthood living outside the country, I have also seen much of the American emigration experience, which I call (controversially) the expat experience. This piece explores the staggering differences between those two experiences.

In western countries, assimilation is the go-to word in expected immigrant behavior. Assimilation is about adapting your language, choices and activities to fit those of the people around you – you know, changing everything about you. Immigrant children are expected to go to local schools. Eyebrows can raise up when immigrants gather for group cultural activities, whether it's prayer at a mosque, a Chinese lion dance or a cricket game. There are no shortage of stories of Americans feeling uncomfortable in the presence of people speaking other languages, even starting confrontations. The phrase “go back to your country” has likely been uttered angrily to an immigrant, or maybe just a visible minority, a dozen times since you began reading this.

I wish there was good data on ex-patriates and their language skills, but I am not aware of such data. In lieu, I have my personal anecdotes from travels. I’ve met lots of impressive multilinguals, particularly in Beijing and Tokyo, but I’d argue that in no major city do a majority of expats successfully learn the local language. The percentages get a lot higher outside the major cities, but even in the smallest villages, I’ve met expats piss poor in the local language. 

Hong Kong is a particularly extreme example - as a former British colony, English is an official language and still dominates in higher education and the professional world. Among places in Asia, only in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore do westerners put less effort into learning local languages. In my 4+ years in Hong Kong, I met two people who learned Cantonese from scratch to a proficient level. And I met a lot of people. The overwhelming majority of foreigners possess a core vocabulary of "hello, left, right, thank you, shrimp dumpling." 

In Hong Kong there is no shortage of 15+ year long expat veterans who cannot converse in Cantonese. There is no shortage of people born and raised in Hong Kong to western parents who could not converse in Cantonese – I’ve met easily 100 people in this demographic and not one was fluent. The Kadoories, one of Hong Kong’s oldest and richest families, no longer speak Cantonese. Western children are expected not to go to local schools, even though Hong Kong’s education system is great. Very often they’re multilingual in French or German or Mandarin, able to communicate to anyone but the people around them. A Swedish coworker who had been in Hong Kong for 7 years without speaking Cantonese explained unironically of his resentment for Iraqi refugees in Sweden, who lived in enclaves for years without learning Swedish.

The game is pretty rigged for English speakers all over, even in places without direct colonial legacies. There are English announcements in all the subways of Asia, from Tokyo to Bangkok to Changsha, as if there is some UN decree. Nowhere in America are there even Spanish announcements. I literally spoke English every day I spent in Asia and never once did I worry about making people uncomfortable. Often I’ve been that American engaged in loud uproarious English conversation with friends on the public subway, and not once has anyone dared complain or told me to go back to my country. Expats abroad party hard, even when local cultures that don’t, and easily engage in drugs, even when local laws heavily criminalize them. Many expats work for years on tourist visas - not once have I heard an expat referred derogatorily as an illegal immigrant.

The truth is that becoming an expat is a bestowment of privilege. You are assumed to be an educated professional and granted an amount of freedom to make yourself comfortable. The assumption of a white collar  job isn’t necessarily true – there's this white minibus driver in Hong Kong. And experiences may differ by place and ethnicity - many parts of Asia are deeply racist and sexist - but I think most expats will agree that their social status elevated after moving abroad. The reverse experience is precisely the opposite. A non-westerner moving to a western country knowingly engages in a stripping of privilege, often profiled as a job stealer or an uneducated migrant, regardless of background.

You might think now that I wrote this to excoriate expat behavior. Not at all. I was an expat, and I took full advantage of my privilege in Hong Kong.  In fact I mean to paint the picture of immigrants to the west in a sympathetic light. It’s easy to judge an immigrant for their lack of assimilation, their inexplicable clinging to their old country ways. But until you try, you might have no idea how hard it is to assimilate. How hard it is to learn the local language. How hard it is leave your culture behind, how greatly you desire to keep doing the activities that have always made you happy. I lived as an American in Hong Kong, where I have direct ancestry, for four years and I wasn’t close to assimilating. I wasn’t even on the path to assimilation – I could have lived there for 40 years and I would not have enjoyed drinking hot water like a local, I would not have watched TVB programs like a local, and I would not have stopped calling in sick on Super Bowl Monday. I think there’s nothing wrong with that. Sure, I wish that more expats in Hong Kong could be more engaged in local affairs, but I don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with a society that has diverse groups of people happily doing their own thing.

So if you’re a citizen of a western country and discussing immigration, please consider the following tenets. Understand the degree of difficulty. Embrace the diversity. Check your fucking privilege. Try to accept immigrants not because they add to the economy, or because you live in a country of immigrants – because this doesn’t excuse discrimination against immigrants who don’t add to the economy or excuse countries without a legacy of immigration. Try to accept immigrants because they are humans, and any one coming with good intentions should be welcomed. On a global issue like migration, we cannot narrow our focus to how it affects us in our little part of the world.  We need to be cognizant of the underlying causes that motivate people to make dangerous and difficult journeys to dangerous and difficult lives in a strange country. We need to address an imbalance where an American college graduate can jump into an upper middle class lifestyle teaching his/her native language in Korea while an Ivorian man with a Master’s degree scrapes by driving taxis in New York. At the end of the day, it really shouldn’t matter where you are born. And yet it matters so, so much. Can we try to push this world in a better direction?

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Multiculturalism in the world

Multiculturalism is often viewed as a jumble of customs and thoughts, sometimes contrasting, confusing or conflicting.  It's manifestation in various countries can be modeled as a melting pot, or as a salad bowl.  So too were my thoughts on multiculturalism a jumbled mess.  Openly obsessed with diversity, I have seen and lived the multicultural experience several times and have come out with a boatload of strong opinions and stories. Surprisingly, it was a summer spent working at the United States Bureau of the Census, exploring mathematical models, that helped to organize my thoughts into a comprehensive theory.  I wasn't expecting to encounter very much outside of math while working in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology.  However, I hadn't counted on the Census Bureau being a leading place for social and racial discussion.  As I wind up my internship, I actually find myself coming out having unified advanced statistical theory with my approach to conceptualizing American and global society.  All in all, I really can't imagine getting more out of an internship.

Too much confusion - bring back Confucian!

First off, I want to establish why we should care about multiculturalism.  I've come to believe that culture is the most important defining aspect of who we are.  Even if you'd rather define yourself by what you like or what you do, say as an outdoors enthusiast, or a painter, or a vegetarian, all that is inexorably tied to where you come from and how you grew up. This isn't fatalistic as there's obviously room for individuality, but the culture that surrounds us do more to shape our actions, thoughts, perspectives and even appearances, than we realize. Our culture is crucial to our self-identity; thus people who grow up without one easily identifiable culture (i.e. they moved around a lot) often struggle with figuring out who they are.  Don't underestimate the significance, or flexibility, of self-identity.  So when culture is so vital to who you are, it's important to understand its effects when interacting with someone from a different culture.

Multiculturalism of some form has been well-woven into the fabric of the USA - it's permanent presence here is acknowledged.  Even if it's questioned, dissected or hotly debated, I don't know of anybody campaigning to expunge America of its many cultures. But in Europe, this debate is at the forefront.  An article by Kenan Malik this summer sharply critiques Europe's approach to multiculturalism.  This year British PM David Cameron announced his belief that state multiculturalism has failed in the UK.  And this was all BEFORE the terrorist attack in Norway by Anders Breivik, motivated by anti-multicultural sentiments, particularly against the perceived Islamization of Europe.  While everyone rightfully denounced Breivik and didn't take his manifestos seriously, I thought that this should have been an opportunity for us to reflect on how to combat xenophobic sentiment in Europe. After all, if we have defense analysts all over the world studying Islam and the Jihadist movements it has spawned, shouldn't we have people studying European anti-multiculturalism and the terrorism that it is starting to spawn?  Maybe Breivik is a unique case, a hateful anomaly, but I think there is certainly an underlying concern that influenced him, and it needs to be addressed. The politics of Dutch party leader Geert Wilders, largely founded on anti-Islamism, is further concern.

It seems easy to dismiss these people as intolerant and racist, especially coming from America.  We're citizens of a country founded and continually refueled by immigrants, boasting a list of notable immigrants which includes Alexander Hamilton and Albert Einstein and immigrant children Colin Powell and Barack Obama.  We almost want to cry out to the rest of the world, "It's not so bad!"  But one needs to peer through the single-colored lens of other countries and understand where they're coming from.  The very fundamental existence of most European nations arose from the concept of a nation-state as the political self-determination of people with shared ethnic identity.  The concept of a German or an Italian people has not always existed - it took the establishment of a common identity to unite a group of people, distinguish themselves from others, and eventually lead to the boundaries that we know today.  Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia etc are just some examples of European nations who are fundamentally linked to the traditional nation state concept.  The necessary byproduct of a common identity is a sense of who you are not, the establishment of an other.  This process is not as natural as it might appear.  Today we have Spanish-speakers in Spain, French speakers in France and Polish speakers in Poland. However, we could easily have Leonese speakers in Leon, Occitan speakers in Occitania, and Silesian speakers in Silesia. Point is, the establishment of a nation state is generally a result of political forces, and ex post facto creates a national identity at the expense of regional ones.

Anyways let's look at a small village. Imagine everyone and their ancestors have lived in that village for as long as anyone can remember, and a villager will not only know every other villager, but who their parents were/are.  The village shares an identity, which might not be of consequence when you're focusing on local gossip and news, but when compared against even the next town over, suddenly arises.  A whole village sharing this much in common tends to be more trusting.  The residents are likely very friendly, very sharing, don't lock doors, and rely on the communal accountability to take care of deviants.  The inhabitants will likely all share pride over their village, their customs and their specialties that distinguish them from other villages.

And it's true, when you bring in outsiders, you disrupt this communal utopia.  When people don't know what their neighbors believe in, when new arrivals don't understand or respect the history of their new homes, when people sharing the same space don't get along and don't realize why they can't get along.... well then you see some of the problems we've seen in these last few centuries.  Then you get these villagers who see their town overrun with Chinese restaurants and Turkish gyro stands and sigh, "can't we go back to the old days?"

I think the answer is no.  We can't go back and we shouldn't.  We're more prepared now as a society than ever for multiculturalism but we still have a long way to go.

The thing I've learned this summer is that there is still so much we don't know about race and culture in our world.  I can look up Census data and tell you that 18.5% of blacks never graduated high school, compared to the national average of 14.7% and have a mean household income of $33,632 compared to the nationwide $50,221.  There is a lot of data that I can pull up to show that blacks in America are poorer, less educated, more likely to be incarcerated, more likely to be murdered.  Yet still in 2011, I can't tell you why this is. We can't pinpoint what percentage of black impoverishment is due to racism (institutional or blatant), historical oppression stemming from slavery, African American culture, recent immigration or the-almost-tabooed genetics. We really can't. We don't understand race and society nearly as well as we think we do.

We don't even understand race as much as we think we do.  How many "African-Americans" are descended from American slaves?  How many of them are descended from Caribbean slaves? How many of them have more white ancestors but still identify as black? How many of them have more black ancestors but identify as white? How many of them are descended from African immigrants who have no slavery in their family history? How many look black but identify as Hispanic? How many are have immigrated from Europe, the Middle East or elsewhere and identify with those regions?  How many people identify with multiple of these designations?  Does it even make sense to group all these people together?

Race is already extremely complex and it's only going to become more so.  No longer can we impute someone's language, culture and nationality from their race, or vice versa.  The examples I listed in the previous paragraph are not theoretical cases, they are real growing demographics. In a generation or two, you may see significant amounts of African immigrants coming from China.  Already we're seeing lots of Asians coming from Latin America who may identify as Asian, Hispanic or neither.

So the great theoretical light bulb that clicked on for me in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology was that it's not about the data.  Statisticians who focus too much on the data, full of imperfections and uncertainty, tend to find imaginary correlations and develop models that overfit the data.  The best approach is to develop a fundamentally sound model which can recreate data similar to the data that we observe.  I think the way we understand race in our multicultural society needs to be the same way.  When culture is so important to identity and race fundamentally separate from culture, an approach identifying people by their race is so immensely flawed.  An approach that uses race as a contextualized component of our local culture goes much farther in explaining the way our country has evolved and where it is headed.

I think that accepting multiculturalism may be impossible to teach.  We all learn in schools not to be prejudiced, not to avoid stereotypes, not to use certain words etc. before we know what any of that means. This early accepting education has failed created a country without racism.  No, we need to experience multiculturalism in order to embrace it.  We need to see a world where our political leaders come from all sorts of backgrounds and so much more.  In this country we need to see more Blacks and Hispanics in higher education and operating fancy restaurants, more Asians in the media and in professional sports, more whites in the service industries.  We need to see black people speaking Japanese, Hispanics speaking Swahili, white people eating with chopsticks, Arabs with long beards praying in front of a cross, a Chinese guy with a British accent hosting a water skiing show.  We need to see all permutations of human origin and behavior so that we can see that all of that is possible.  And that is where Europe is currently lagging.  They haven't had the chance to see people of different genetic material become versed in their national cultures for multiple generations.  Until they do, they will not realize how flawed the small-village model they have operating under has become.

Lastly, I think we can accomplish all of this without all out assimilation.  I think culture is just like language, you can be fluent or conversant in multiple cultures.  While many people have argued that immigrants and immigrant children will always have conflicting loyalties and identities, I steadfastly disagree based on my personal experience.  I am 100% American.  I was born and raised in the Boston area and went to college in the nation's capital.  There is nothing significant about the American culture that I have seen around me that I don't get.  Maybe when I was a little kid I'd ask my parents why the other white kids did this or that, but by now I get it.  I love my Boston sports, I identified fully with my place among the DC yuppies and I will take off my hat and sing along to the Star-Spangled banner.  In addition, I get a fair amount of Chinese culture and it has added enormously to my life.  I will fly to Hong Kong in a few days and have a large meal with family members around a lazy Susan, where the youngest will incessantly check the teacups of everyone else and refill their cups, we'll start and end the meal with soup, and I will be in sync every step of the way.  In DC, I hang about Chinatown and learn to buy giant boxes of delicious rice noodles for $4, find haircuts for $8 and learn that there are many Chinese descendants in Vietnam and Malaysia and that they speak Cantonese.  Knowing all this just added an extra dimension to my life, it didn't take away from the American dimension already present.  I'm so grateful and lucky to have this multicultural lifestyle.  I just hope that with global political forces understanding, more and more people will also embrace their multicultural lives. 

Ad-libbing liberal sentiments

I read a really interesting article today about multiculturalism in Europe and the pitfalls of various policies to either incorporate or destroy multiculturalism. I have quite a lot of views on the matter, but I still need to sort them out. In the meantime, I do just want to write about a few other views that I feel very strongly about. This isn't like a manifesto or anything, but I do feel the need to talk about some pressing social issues.

Same Sex Marriage

As a Bostonian living in Washington DC, I've spent nearly the entirety of my life surrounded by liberals, including my gay best friend. The culture that I'm surrounded by is one where displaying homophobia is a cardinal sin and thus homophobes, not homosexuals, are the ones who are alienated and disparaged. Same sex couples don't really surprise anybody in the city anymore, something that might not have been true even 10 years ago. Still though, it's not an easy step coming out and most who do have difficult stories, often dealing with family members.

I guess I can't speak for large parts of this country, but certainly here the LGBTQ community is quite accepted. And yet, once this word "marriage" comes out, much opposition arises, often from religious conservatives. It destroys the sanctity of marriage, ruins the institution of a family. As someone with strong religious conviction about the sanctity of marriage, I nonetheless come to the opposite conclusion and would like to espouse a view that I just don't hear very much. Marriage is supposed to be sacred because it is the ultimate goal of a relationship. Human romantic relationships are supposed to be about connecting two individuals as soundly as possible, emotionally and physically. Idealistically, I believe that relationships are not about having fun or messing around, but finding someone you love more than yourself and will continue to in perpetuity. Now this doesn't mean you have to approach every single relationship as a potential engagement, and everyone has to practice or learn from failed relationships, but I don't believe in a long-term relationship with someone whom you know is not a potential spouse. So taking away the possibility of marriage among same-sex couples means that they have nothing to shoot for. There is no reason to hold out for the right person, or to deny oneself sex until marriage because there is no marriage coming. And so this only encourages more promiscuous behavior and less stability. You can't just say, oh let's have our own marriage even if it's not legal. Societal recognition is important - it provides outside pressure for you to make a marriage work, instead of just running away

from problems. Marriage is a vital, holy sacrament, and to deny it to fellow humans is to deny part of their humanity.

One argument I've heard is that gays and straights all have the same rights. Both a straight person and a gay person can marry someone of the opposite sex, and neither can marry someone of the same sex. I think this argument is stupid - it implies that a gay person should try to marry someone of the opposite sex even if there is no love and attraction there, perhaps for the intentions of raising a traditional family. This demeans the sacrament of marriage even more! Marriage is difficult because it's so hard to find someone whom you will love forever. To find someone like this without any physical attraction? I believe that's impossible. I think a homosexual marrying someone of the opposite sex for the however noble intention of raising a family is as big a sham marriage as someone marrying an old tycoon for their money.

Immigration Reform/DREAM Act

I only became aware of this issue in the spring of my senior year while on the board of the Asian American Student Alliance. Beforehand, I had no idea what the term immigration reform even meant. Then I saw the documentary Papers, about high school students who had been brought to America illegally as a young child or baby, and grown up entirely as Americans. However without documentation, they find themselves in a sticky situation after high school. Applying to college is a huge hurdle with a social-security number usually required on applications. Some schools are understanding now and won't ask if you can't provide one, but you still aren't eligible for any federal student aid. You can't get a passport, can't get a driver's license and are often forced to cheat the system to find legal employment. The trials and tribulations of a super successful illegal immigrant were recently published by Jose Antonio Vargas, the Philippines-born Pultizer prize winner who shocked parts of the world last month. The documentary detailed smart, ambitious and successful high school students who had their American dreams brought to a crashing halt upon graduation in tear-jerking ways. Many face deportation to a country they have never known, without being able to apply for reentry for many years. The DREAM Act offers to give permanent residency (and pave the road to citizenship) to relatively high achieving illegals, high school grads without a criminal record, who were brought here young.

I'm not a policy expert and this isn't a policy proposal. I don't know how to get the DREAM Act to pass and I don't even think it does enough. I just very passionately stand for the principle that we all share this world together and no one should face such a significantly harder path than I faced just because they don't have papers. Like I've said before when talking about Obama's birth certificate, no one can positively know where they're born or have any control over it either. So I really don't see any difference between myself and most people who the DREAM Act would affect, except that I applied to any school I wanted to and have traveled to over 25 countries and never thought twice about it. I know the story of a friend of a friend Juan Gomez, Georgetown MSB '11, whose parents were deported to Colombia when he was in college and he was only barely allowed to stay in school (read here). The problems that he faced dwarf the ones facing his fellow students and friends. And I even know the story of my parents and my auntie's daughter Eva. My parents both came from Hong Kong to study in the United States, and had to stay in school to keep their visa active. They very likely would not have stayed in the US or become citizens had my mom's older sister not married an American, paving the way for my mom to receive a green card. My parents relationship then was rushed into a marriage upon my dad's graduating from design school, else he would have beeb deported to West Africa. Things could very easily have been very different for me. Eva came to the US from Hong Kong at 13 or 14, and excelled in some of the worst public schools in Boston. I don't know if she was a legal immigrant, but when it came time to apply to college, she took the huge risk of going to Canada to legally apply as a foreign student, knowing that if she was denied, she wouldn't be able to return to the US and even finish her senior year of high school. Luckily she got in and eventually graduated from Harvard, but difficulties with getting a green card dogged her for many years and really limited her career.

The opponents of the DREAM Act don't want to give illegal immigrants any incentive to break our laws and abuse our taxpayer services. This is our country and they have their country, and they shouldn't be allowed to just come and mooch of us. What these opponents don't ever seem to think about is that the life of an illegal immigrant is not glamorous. Many get paid under the table and work in terrible conditions with no rights or benefits. They can't complain about being forced to work 16 hours because their bosses would then report them to the authorities. They often don't speak English and spend a lot of their time being scared. And they choose this life. Does that give you any idea of what kind of life they would be living in their native countries? If conditions are so bad and hopeless where you are from that you would risk everything you have to live the average illegal immigrant life, I'm perfectly willing to give you a chance and let you drink from our public water fountains. We're all of the same world here, and the congressmen who are against immigration reform are the ones who don't realize how lucky they are to have been born in one of the world's greatest countries. So our country needs to be less xenophobic and remember that the original illegal immigrants in this continent were Caucasians from England, Spain, France and the Netherlands. I think their descendants should be more sympathetic to their fellow illegal immigrants.

Lastly, just a couple of notes about semantics. I do believe that words have a lot of power and that although the use of a word by society can legitimize it, there are still words that shouldn't be used in a certain context. I have been guilty of saying that something is "retarded" or "gay" meaning stupid, and it has definitely entered mainstream vernacular. It is also wrong. As long as "retarded" refers to the mentally-challenged and "gay" refers to homosexual, we cannot also use it to refer to stupid. I do apologize for using it and I'm really grateful to most gays I know that they usually don't take serious offense to getting slurred, but I'm going to do my best to not use it. On a lighter note, I really don't like the way the words "exotic" and especially "ethnic" are used. You hear terms like exotic clothing and ethnic food thrown around a lot, and I'm like what the hell does that mean. "Exotic" clothing typically refers to something worn by a culture we don't understand. Well to people of that culture, that clothing is simply normal clothing. If people refer to Chinese slippers or robes as exotic in front me, I'm honestly legitimately confused because they're commonplace. If you are white, would it not surprise you to hear khakis and jeans being called exotic? But they certainly can seem that way to certain people. Maybe you can say that something is exotic to you, but let's restrict its usage in public signs to things exotic to all of us, like 3-headed green aliens. Ethnic is even worse. Ethnic food here means food that we don't associate with white people. I've seen it associated with Middle Eastern, South Asian, East Asian, Central American, African and South American cuisines, but never with German, French, Italian or Eastern European cuisines. Well German, French, Italian, those are all ethnicities with very distinctive and well-respected cuisines. Why are those not considered ethnic? Very subtly there is an underlying assumption that white is the standard, and everything else is "ethnic." No. Stop using the word ethnic like that. We live in far too diverse a country to have such a term be so commonly accepted.