Asian American Targets

On a crowded rush-hour train from San Francisco to Oakland, Lori Lee, a 33-year-old Chinese American, was gripped by a sudden allergy attack. After her sneezing subsided, Lee noticed that two Caucasian passengers had abruptly moved away from her seat to the other side of the car. "I realized later that they must have thought I had SARS," she says.

Widespread anxiety over the new respiratory disease is only one of the sources of growing fear rippling through many Asian American communities that they will once again face a backlash of suspicion and hostility as the perennial "outsiders" or non-Americans.

Some 50 of the nation's leading Asian American civil rights groups, including the Hmong National Development, the National Federation of Filipino American Associations and the Korean American Coalition, gathered in Washington recently to discuss these challenges and what they could do to reduce the sense of vulnerability confronting their communities.

Issues ranged from SARS to new anti-terror legislation, a spy scandal involving a Chinese American and diminished funding for immigrant groups.

"People began to talk and exchange stories, and many fear that it's going to get a lot worse for Asian Americans," said David Lee, director of the Chinese American Voter Education Committee in San Francisco.

Activists say SARS paranoia is leading to acts of racial profiling against Asian Americans. They cite reports of employers asking Asian workers who have come back sick after traveling abroad to stay home. Asians who cough or sneeze on airline flights or public transport have been objects of suspicion or verbal abuse from fellow passengers, and many Asian-owned restaurants and businesses have been crippled by SARS fears.

Asians largely escaped the detentions and deportations that plagued many Arab and Muslim communities in America after Sept. 11, 2001. Now, Korean Americans are concerned that government scrutiny will expand to include them if the U.S. relationship with North Korea continues to deteriorate, according to Karen Narasaki, director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium (NAPALC) in Washington, D.C.

Typically, Narasaki says, "what happens overseas affects Asians here."

Narasaki and others at the conference are bracing themselves for a widely circulated draft of proposed new anti-terror legislation, dubbed Patriot Act II by civil libertarians. The Justice Department is seeking to speed up the deportation process for immigrants suspected of terrorist activity, further restricting their rights to legal recourse. Also included in proposals are measures that could strip the citizenship of naturalized citizens suspected of terrorist ties.

Asian Americans are also feeling the heat after Chinese American Katrina Leung was recently charged with passing U.S. secrets to the Chinese government. For many, the Leung case evokes painful memories of Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos scientist who was charged with mishandling nuclear secrets and later exonerated.

During the Lee case, some Americans questioned the loyalties of Asian Americans. "In today's climate everyone is already nervous and afraid about who is the enemy. Do they look Middle Eastern? South Asian? Or North Korean?" says Helen Zia, who co-wrote the Wen Ho Lee biography, "My Country Versus Me."

Just when agencies that advocate for Asian immigrants are facing their greatest legal challenges, they must go forward with shrinking resources. Foundations grants are being slashed and more federal funds diverted to the war on terror. "Funding for our groups have always been a problem, but never more so than now," says Ka Ying Yang, executive director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) in Washington, D.C.

SEARAC is protesting an agreement last year between the United States and Cambodia to return to Cambodia roughly 2,000 Cambodian immigrants who were convicted of crimes in the United States. Some had been held in INS detention for petty felonies. Many had fled Cambodia as refugees, or had come as young children to the United States, where they resided legally.