A Thin Border Between Security and Prejudice

Nisei Week was drawing to a close Saturday when I visited the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo.

Little Tokyo seemed to be the perfect place to see the dangers of the political campaigns against illegal immigration being waged by Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and many other politicians.

Wilson has proposed a tough package. He has called for refusing citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants; ending the requirement that the state provide emergency health care to illegal immigrants; denying public education to their children; issuing tamper-proof identity cards to legal immigrants and using negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement as a lever to force Mexico to control its borders.

Feinstein wants to impose a $1 or $2 toll on those entering the United States to finance expansion of the Border Patrol, prevent abuse of the Medi-Cal system and increase penalties for smugglers. Boxer wants to station National Guard troops on the border.

I agree that illegal immigration is bad. The United States’ immigration laws are about as generous as you’ll find in the world and newcomers should follow the rules when they come here. But I’ve read enough California history to know how attacks on immigrants, backed by new laws, seem to ignite the fires of racism, hurting both legal and illegal immigrants.

The current targets are illegal immigrants from Mexico, Central America and China. The Japanese, however, had their day, suffering the worst treatment accorded to any immigrant group here. As Robert F. Heizer and Alan F. Almquist wrote in their book “The Other Californians”: “It was not pure accident, we suggest, that resident Japanese were evacuated to concentration camps in 1942, but rather it was that the old prejudices were so easily aroused. . . .”

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The World War II evacuation was a powerful theme in many of the exhibits in the museum. A woman at a computer was pulling out records of internees, obtained from the federal government. An older man asked for his records, and remembered the number assigned him in camp 51 years ago.

Several dozen men, women and young people listened intently as Lon Kurashige, a fellow at UC Santa Barbara, lectured on the history of Nisei Week. It was a real lesson on the dangers of racism.

The Nisei, the second generation, started Nisei Week during the Depression. One aim was to provide jobs. Laws restricting the rights of Japanese immigrants to own land had limited their economic opportunities, forcing Japanese-Americans to build an economy within their community. Nisei college graduates could not find work outside.

Another goal of Nisei Week was to convince white California that the Japanese-Americans were loyal. As war with Japan drew closer, the festival featured an increasing number of patriotic symbols.

It did no good. Too many Californians, and other Americans, Kurashige said, felt Japanese were “disgusting, back-stabbing and disloyal.”

Afterward, I asked Kurashige what he thought about the criticism of illegal immigrants by Wilson, Feinstein, Boxer and the others. “My gut reaction was fear,” he said. “I was struck by the continuity of history, too.”

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History raises the question of whether Wilson, Feinstein and the others will fire up prejudice against all immigrants--legal and illegal--in a state that has seen much racism.

This is also something that seems to trouble Mayor Richard Riordan. He told me: “Almost everywhere you go in the city, the illegal immigrants have become the scapegoats, right or wrong. It is hard to find a politician who does not come out against illegal immigrants.”

Riordan, like fellow Republican Wilson, believes that the federal government must reimburse California for the heavy costs it incurs from its large illegal immigrant population. Los Angeles County reports that illegal immigrants cost the county $947 million annually for health care and other services.

But a study by University of Maryland scholar Julian L. Simon found that the immigrant family contributes $2,500 more in taxes than in obtains in services. The trouble is that the taxes, for the most part, go to Washington, and the services are provided by local government.

But Riordan disagrees with Wilson on denying the children of illegal immigrants education, and restricting their families’ health care. “Illegal immigrants are human beings and if they are one of God’s children, you cannot deny education to them,” the mayor said. “It is a God-given right.” The same, he said, for health care.

As the mayor of one of America’s major immigrant destinations, he appears to understand that overly tough laws and undisciplined rhetoric can lead California down a dangerous road.