6/29/07 San Francisco Chronicle: How high court ruling will affect schools in S.F.,
by Jill Tucker 
    The president of San Francisco's school board, once a leading advocate for using a student's race to make school assignments, said he is likely to abandon that stand in the wake of Thursday's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that all but banned race as a factor. 
    The change of heart by board President Mark Sanchez suggests a once well-established board majority supporting the use of race to integrate schools could crumble. 
    "I don't think that we're going to be able to use race in a way that would have a major impact in how we place students," Sanchez said Thursday afternoon. "It's getting to the point where you have to thread the needle, and if we're not going to be able to guarantee diversity in the classroom, I'm just saying, why go down that road?" 
    In a 5-4 decision, the court severely restricted the use of race to integrate schools. Yet Justice Anthony Kennedy, who cast the swing vote in siding with the majority in a separate opinion, indicated he was open to "race conscious measures" to address segregation, though in very limited ways. 
    In Berkeley , the only other local district whose school assignment system might be touched by Thursday's decision, officials said they believe they are within the legal confines of the decision despite their use of race as a factor. 
    In San Francisco , the board appeared somewhat split on what to do in response to the ruling. Some members said San Francisco could be the next Constitutional test case. Others appeared to agree with Sanchez and said using race to integrate schools and classrooms likely would fail to address segregation while draining district coffers to cover legal fees. 
    Board Vice President Norman Yee said the decision had him leaning against using race. 
    "Why am I doing this battle, for what?" Yee said. "I would rather see our energy put into other things." 
    School district general counsel David Campos said it will take time for the legal community to interpret the decision, particularly Kennedy's pivotal opinion. 
    Kennedy noted that both Seattle and Louisville, Ky., the districts involved in the Supreme Court decision, hadn't tried other options to integrate schools before using race to assign students. 
    San Francisco has, Campos said, but the other options haven't worked, and many schools have resegregated. 

6/29/07 Wall Street Journal: More Schools Likely to Spur Diversity via Income,"
by Robert Tomsho
    When Jim Phillips moved into the Wake County Public School district in Raleigh , N.C. , he presumed his daughter would attend the elementary school he could see from his front door. Instead, she was assigned to a school three miles away because of the district's campaign to diversify every school's student body based on family income.
    "If you live within sight of a school, you should be able to walk to that school," says Mr. Phillips, a landscape architect, who has spent seven years battling the district over such assignments.
    Nationwide, about 40 school districts with an estimated 2.5 million students use "socioeconomic status," or SES, to help determine where students go to school. Their ranks are expected to grow in the wake of yesterday's Supreme Court decision further restricting the use of race-based school-assignment plans. 
    By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court struck down voluntary school desegregation efforts in Louisville , Ky. , and Seattle . The vote "will encourage districts now using race to shift to income," says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a New York-based think tank. 
    Income-based plans began spreading in the 1990s as race-based policies came under growing pressure in the federal courts. Most seek to limit the percentage of low-income students in any one school by dispersing them beyond their neighborhood schools and assigning higher-income students to schools with a lower-income profile. The programs generally identify low-income students as those qualifying for the federal free- and reduced-price lunch program.
    A wide body of research indicates that lower-income students generally don't perform as well academically as their middle-income classmates but that their achievement improves when they are assigned to middle-class schools, which tend to have more resources, experienced teachers and parental involvement.
    Minority students tend to make up a large part of the lower-income group that the plans are designed to benefit, so SES plans often have a desegregation effect. But the income-based strategies appear to be less vulnerable to court challenges. The Bush administration has endorsed them, and federal courts have so far subjected classifications by income to far less scrutiny than those involving race.
    Conservative legal groups that have challenged race-based plans say they are unlikely to take on the income-driven strategies unless they can prove a school district is intentionally using socioeconomic status as a proxy for race. Absent such motives, "I think as a legal matter they would be on solid ground," says Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative legal foundation that has been active in fighting affirmative-action admissions preferences for minorities in higher education.
    Many liberals who have backed traditional desegregation plans support income-based assignment because of its potential to boost student achievement. "Standing by themselves, I think they have value," says Theodore Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. "But they are no guarantee that we are going to address the problem of race head on."
    Researchers also caution that receiving free or reduced-prices lunches -- the usual poverty indicator -- isn't always an accurate measure because many older students who qualify don't sign up to avoid embarrassment.
    Meanwhile, a recent study that compared income and racial data for large school districts found that assigning students based on income results in significant racial integration only if there is little income overlap between white and minority families.
    School districts using socioeconomic status include Baltimore , San Francisco and Clark County , Nev. Wake County tried to avoid court-ordered busing by opening magnet schools to attract white students back into urban areas and busing black students to suburban schools. With such plans facing increased litigation, Wake switched to its income-based plan in 2000.
    Under it, no more than 40% of the students in any one building are supposed to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. To meet that goal, the district rejiggers attendance boundaries every year and buses students -- most of them from low-income families -- to schools outside their neighborhoods.
    Wake officials say the strategy has helped to raise achievement among lower-income and minority students. In 2005, more than 80% of African-American grade-school students were reading at or above grade level, up from 57% in 1998.
    But the effort has faced significant challenges, including annual reassignment battles with parents, particularly those from middle-class areas. "Reassignment strikes terror into every parent's heart every year," says Jeanie Bohl, a mother of three.
    Such turmoil has been exacerbated by growth so rapid that the district effectively gains two full classrooms of students each school day. The growth has been most pronounced in affluent, mostly white areas.
    That has forced the district to bus low-income students longer distances and made it more difficult to stay within the 40% target for students receiving free and reduced-price lunches. Indeed, last year about 38 schools were above the target, and at virtually all of them, white students were in the minority.
    To cope with the growth, the district has begun converting more schools to year-round calendars, staggering schedules and vacation times. Wake Cares, a group of mostly middle-income parents, has gone to court to challenge such conversions in their neighborhoods. In May, a state judge in Raleigh ruled the district can't assign any students to such schools without their parents' consent.
    Fearing that the lack of flexibility could spell trouble for Wake's diversity effort, African-American leaders have launched a campaign to persuade low-income and minority parents to consent to such assignments. "We don't want to have a segregated school system again," says Marshall Harvey, of the Raleigh-Wake Citizens Association, a mostly black group.

6/29/07 AsianWeek.com: Asian American Corporate Women Taking Care of Business,
by Rikki N. Massand
    Last Tuesday, Asian Women in Business held a panel discussion, entitled "Born to Lead: Corporate Women Trailblazers," at New York City s Time Warner Center . Over 150 Asian businesswomen, and a few men, heard stories about race and gender relations at work, dealing with male-dominated industries, climbing the corporate ladder, and the balance between work and family from four of the nations foremost businesswomen and CNN correspondent Alina Cho, who also moderated the event. 
    "Were highlighting Asian women in business who have broken through what could otherwise be seen as a glass ceiling how they went about doing it, what kind of obstacles they faced, how they overcame those, and what pushed them through," Cho said. 
    The four distinguished panelists were Yvonne Chan, a partner at the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Punita Kumar Sinha, senior managing director of private equity and investment management firm The Blackstone Group; Seong Ohm, senior vice president of Sams Club/Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.; and Michelle Kim, chief counsel of programming for Time Warner Cable. Each woman spoke about their experiences, from being a young student to working their way into upper-level executive positions. 
    Chan was born in New Zealand to Chinese parents and graduated from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand , where she also worked as a law clerk in the High Court and Court of Appeals. She left home to go to China in 1983 on a two-year scholarship, "essentially because I am Chinese, and I was the only one out of six children who felt strongly that I wanted to be in China and study the language and go back to my roots," Chan said. 
    After two years, she got a position with her current law firm in Hong Kong, and she stayed there for three years before going on to Harvard for her masters and then working in New York . Chan said that being able to handle the climate of a big business law firm nullified the fact that she was female. "At the end of the day, being a woman wasn't the issue. I think you have to enjoy your job with a passion, and being in a New York law firm with the hours that we keep and the unpredictable life that we have, one really has to love it so much that you're prepared to make certain sacrifices for it," she said. 
    Kumar-Sinha attended the almost all-male Indian Institute of Technology but handled gender bias well. "Those years prepared me for my professional life because it toughened me up. It was good that I had to face comments from younger boys. After five years of that, life seemed pretty normal in a male-oriented culture," she said as the audience laughed. 
    Kumar-Sinha added she has handled the Indian market at Blackstone since 1994, and was given the task only because of her race. With India 's economic growth this decade, she acknowledged the benefit of working within her background. "If you want to move quickly, you have to go with your strengths. As much as I tried to do other markets, I would never have become the portfolio manager of a large fund had it not been in an area of strength," she said. 
    Ohm of Walmart/Sam's Club commented on the value of teamwork and communication between her and co-workers, friends and also her husband, in determining which path to follow during her career. 
    "If I didnt network and stay connected with all the people I previously worked with, I wouldve been lost," she said. "The way I ended up with Wal-Mart wasn't by applying; I made a call to congratulate one of my buyers that I had known for 15 years, who eventually became the senior VP of Wal-Mart. He said, Send me a resume; Id love for you to talk to Wal-Mart," she said. 
    Later she joked about relocating to Bentonville , Ark. , and how her husband supported the move after she had supported a move to New York earlier in his career. "I cant be married to my job; I have to be married to my husband. We had a lot of discussions about whose career was more important at the time, so we moved to New York City ." Ohm said. 
    Kyung Lee said the event appealed to her because of the opportunity to network and bring the community together. "Its good to honor the cultural background of women or men. We all need to come together to support this. I'm working with Deloitte; we have a very special program called the Women Initiative, and this is the same thing. Its a similar kind of spirit, but it's extending beyond corporate boundaries now we can network with people all around," she said.

6/28/07 Seattle Post Intelligencer: High court rejects Seattle race-based school assignment,
    The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected diversity plans that take account of students' race for assignments in Seattle 's public schools.
    The decision in two cases, including one involving schools in Louisville, Ky., could imperil similar plans in hundreds of districts nationwide, and it leaves public school systems with a limited arsenal to maintain racial diversity.
    The court split, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts announcing the court's judgment. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent that was joined by the court's other three liberals.
    Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a concurring opinion in which he said race may be a component of school district plans designed to achieve diversity.
    But he agreed with Roberts that the plans in Louisville and Seattle went too far. He said, however, that to the extent that Roberts' opinion could be interpreted as foreclosing the use of race in any circumstance, "I disagree with that reasoning."
    The two school systems in Thursday's decisions employ slightly different methods of taking students' race into account when determining which school they would attend.
    Federal appeals courts had upheld both plans after some parents sued. The Bush administration took the parents' side, arguing that racial diversity is a noble goal but can be sought only through race-neutral means.
    The racial tiebreaker that the Supreme Court struck down Thursday hasn't been in use in Seattle Public Schools for more than five years.
    The tiebreaker was part of a School Board decision in 1997 to allow the district's 46,000 students to attend a school of their choice. The assignment plan they adopted that year aimed to end the district's widely unpopular mandatory busing program and return to a neighborhood schools assignment plan, so students could attend school closer to home.
    School officials considered a student's race as one of several tiebreakers at popular schools; their race was a factor if the student's attendance would help bring the high school closer to the district-wide average of about 40 percent white students. The tiebreaker helped some minority students get into predominately white high schools, and vice versa. 
    A student with a sibling at a school got first priority; a student's race was the second tiebreaker, followed by the distance a student lived from the school.
    The district has defended the racial tiebreaker, arguing it is necessary to create more diverse schools in a city where many neighborhoods are still segregated.
    But a group of parents sued in 2000, claiming that race restrictions improperly penalized white students and prevented them from being able to attend their neighborhood high school. 
    Their lawsuit accused the district of violating the Constitution, the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and voter-approved Initiative 200, a state law prohibiting preferential treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender. 
    The case challenged only the use of the racial tiebreaker for high-school assignments, but the district in 2002 suspended the use of the tiebreaker for all schools while the lawsuit worked its way through the courts. 
    Since then, the district has used the other tiebreakers, such as whether the student lived nearby or had any siblings attending the school, to determine assignments. 
    Enrollment records show the racial makeup at some Seattle high schools has changed since the district suspended the use of the racial tiebreaker. A few examples:
    At Ballard High School , white students made up slightly more than 58 percent of the student population in 2000; that rose to more than 62 percent in 2006. 
    At Cleveland High School, the percentage of black students increased from 35 percent in 2000 to just over 59 percent last fall; during the same time period, the percentage of Asian students dropped from nearly 43 percent to just under 23 percent.
    At Franklin High School , white students made up about 23 percent of the population in 2000 and declined to just over 9 percent by 2006. Over the same time period, the percentage of Asian students at the school rose from about 39 percent to more than 48 percent. 
    Though they have defended the racial tiebreaker in court, Seattle district officials have declined to say whether the city's public schools would reinstitute the tiebreaker if the Supreme Court rules in the district's favor. 
    Louisville 's schools spent 25 years under a court order to eliminate the effects of state-sponsored segregation. After a federal judge freed the Jefferson County, Ky., school board, which encompasses Louisville , from his supervision, the board decided to keep much of the court-ordered plan in place to prevent schools from re-segregating.

6/28/07 Washington Post: Court Limits Use of Race to Achieve Diversity in Schools,
by Robert Barnes
    A splintered Supreme Court today threw out school desegregation plans from Seattle and Louisville , but without a majority holding that race can never be considered as school districts try to ensure racially diverse populations.
    Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. authored the most important opinion of his two terms leading the court.
    He held that both plans, which categorize students on the basis of race and use that in making school assignments, violate the constitution's promise of equal protection, even if the goal is integration of the schools.
    "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," Roberts wrote.
    He was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. 
    But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who agreed with the four in striking down the desegregation plans, would not go as far as Roberts in ruling out racial considerations.
    "Parts of the opinion by the Chief Justice imply an all-too-unyielding insistence that race cannot be a factor in instances when, in my view, it may be taken into account," Kennedy wrote. "The plurality opinion is too dismissive of the legitimate interest government has in ensuring all people have equal opportunity regardless of their race."
    The court's four liberals delivered a scathing dissent -- twice as long as Roberts's opinion. It said the plurality's decision was, in the words of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who read his opposition from the bench, a "cruel distortion" of the court's landmark decision more than 50 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education, which demanded an end to segregated schools.
    "This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret," Breyer said.
    Roberts, too, had used the decision in Brown as a basis for today's opinion.
    "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin," Roberts wrote. "The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again -- even for very different reasons."
    Where Brown was brought by black students who were denied entrance to white schools, the cases at issue today were brought by white parents whose children were denied their first choice of schools. More than 50 organizations weighed in with supporting briefs, mostly on the side of the school boards.
    The Supreme Court last considered the issue in 2003, in two suits challenging admission policies at the University of Michigan . The court ruled that there was a compelling state interest in promoting diversity in higher education, but said remedies involving race had to be "narrowly tailored."
    It ruled that undergraduate admission policies that simply gave applicants an automatic "plus factor'' because of their race would not be allowed ( Gratz v. Bollinger). But in a 5-4 ruling, with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in the majority, it upheld admission policies at the law school in which race was part of an individualized review of each applicant (Grutter v. Bollinger). O'Connor has since retired. Alito replaced her in January 2006.  
    In the cases decided today -- Parents Involved in Community Schools Inc. v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County ( Ky. ) Board of Education-- both systems offered parents and students a choice of schools, partly to achieve a level of integration that would not otherwise be possible because of racially segregated housing patterns.
    Both set goals for white and minority representation at schools and, along with other factors, made decisions about school assignments based on a student's race. The previous time Seattle used the system -- it has stopped because of the litigation -- about 100 minority students and 200 white students did not get their first choice.
    The Louisville-Jefferson County plan was implemented after the school system emerged from a 25-year desegregation plan overseen by the federal courts. The goal was to maintain the racial integration it had achieved.
    It is unclear how many school systems across the country use race as a determining factor, or a "tiebreaker," in school assignments or how many use racial and ethnic breakdowns to help fashion school boundaries that foster integrated schools. Some have already altered their plans because of lower-court decisions.
    In the Washington area, for instance, Montgomery County has not considered race in assigning students to schools since 2000, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit declared that the Maryland school system's race-based student transfer policy was unconstitutional.
    In Northern Virginia, Arlington County school officials no longer give extra credit to minorities when deciding admission to the popular Arlington Traditional Elementary School .

6/28/07 Houston Chronicle: Sentence leads to outburst in court; African American Teenager condemned to death in rape, robbery, slaying,
by Paige Hewitt
    A whirlwind of emotions took over a Harris County courtroom Wednesday after a young man condemned to death hurled his chair in anger, triggering police to subdue him and relatives to beg for mercy.
    Two of 19-year-old Dexter Johnson's relatives collapsed in the hall and were taken away on stretchers. The young mother of Johnson's toddler daughter lay on the floor moaning and almost breathless.
    Later, the presiding judge consoled some in the audience, including the parents of the woman Johnson was convicted of robbing, raping and killing, who watched the courtroom drama unfold.
    "Are you OK?" a calm state District Judge Denise Collins asked the parents of 23-year-old Maria Aparece. She gently hugged Christina Aparece and shook the hand of Protasio Aparece Jr.
    Moments earlier, the courtroom had watched Johnson's reaction to his punishment.
    He had sat stonefaced throughout the day, the third in the punishment phase of his trial, staring at the top of the defense table. After the decision was read, Johnson gazed up and pressed his lips together. His eyes filled with tears. Then he looked toward his family and lifted his hand as if to wave to them.
    Then he hurled the chair.
    In an instant, a few officers tackled him, while others scrambled to restore order.
    His relatives wailed, and a male voice begged, "Don't kill him." Some relatives buckled over and were sobbing as they left after the outburst. An ambulance was called for the two who collapsed.
    Moments later, Johnson's mother paced the hallway and spoke emotionally of how her son had been "misjudged."
    "My son is no murderer," Renee Johnson said. "He didn't have it in his blood. There was no evidence. .. God is gonna fix this."
    Seated inside a then-locked courtroom, a crying Protasio Aparece Jr. told a reporter, "Can you imagine how violent he was the night he killed my daughter."
    He also said the most difficult part of the case was sitting through trial, learning exactly how his daughter had been brutalized.
    Emotion has surfaced throughout the case. At a pretrial hearing last year, one of Aparece's uncles lunged at Johnson.
    When the jury found him guilty earlier this month, Johnson covered his face with his hands as the foreman read the verdict. He stormed out of the courtoom after jurors adjourned to the jury room.
    Johnson, who at one point during the punishment phase of his trial refused to come to court, was among five accused of carjacking Aparece and her boyfriend, Huy Ngo, on June 18, 2006. The pair were chatting in her Toyota in front of Ngo's home when Johnson and two others threatened them with a shotgun and a pistol, according to testimony.
    Johnson; his friend Keithron Fields, 18; and a third man who is not charged in the case, drove the couple around Houston while taking Aparece's cash and credit cards and trying to get her ATM access number, according to trial testimony. Timothy Randle, 20, and Ashley Ervin, 18, were following the stolen vehicle in Ervin's car.
    Prosecutors said Johnson raped Aparece in the backseat of her car after parking near a patch of thick woods.
    Her boyfriend was forced to listen to the assault while on his knees as the other four taunted him.
    Johnson and Fields then marched a naked Aparece and a shirtless Ngo 60 feet into the woods and shot both in the head.
    The two bodies were in the woods for five days before investigators pieced together what happened. Randle led them to the bodies.
    The five are suspected in a crime spree that authorities said also claimed the lives of Brady Davis and Jose Lopez in separate shootings. Fields, Randle and Ervin continue to face capital murder charges in the incident.



6/26/07 ABC News Law & Justice Unit: "Supreme Court: Decision Stands for Anna Mae He; High Court Won't Intervene in Bitter Custody Battle Over 8-Year-Old Girl,"
by Teri Whitcraft
    The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to review a bitter custody battle over 8-year-old Anna Mae He, whose biological parents have been fighting for years to get her back from the family that has raised her since she was an infant. 
    The high court denied an application by Jerry and Louise Baker to stop a Tennessee Supreme Court mandate ordering that Anna Mae He be reunited with her natural parents, Jack and Casey He. 
    The court also denied the Bakers' petition to review the case and reverse the Tennessee court's decision. 
    The Hes put Anna Mae in what they said was temporary foster care with the Bakers when she was nearly a month old. They have been fighting to reunify with their daughter for seven years. 
    The Bakers have argued that the Hes agreed to let Anna Mae live with them until she was 18 years old. The Bakers had an early victory when, in 2004, a state court granted them parental rights over Anna Mae, a decision that was upheld in the lower courts. Then, in January, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed that decision, ordering that Anna Mae be returned to Jack and Casey He. 
    Joy and Devastation 
    The two families, expectedly, had sharply differing reactions to the Court's decision in the controversial custody battle Monday. 
    "This is the most wonderful and amazing news for my whole family," said Jack He. " I want to sing the song 'Amazing Grace' to everybody!" 
    On the other side of the story, Jerry and Louise Baker, who have waged a desperate fight to keep the 8-year-old, were reportedly devastated by the news. 
    According to their attorney, Larry Parrish, Jerry Baker said, "We can get through this." 
    'A Bomb Dropped' 
    "Once again, the U.S. Supreme Court has slammed the door of justice in the face of an innocent child who has nowhere else to turn," said Debbie Grabarkiewicz of the child advocacy organization Hear My Voice, which has supported the Bakers in their fight to keep Anna Mae. "We had hoped, that after eight years, this court would finally take a look at the injustice that has been done to this child." 
    The Bakers' attorney said that even though the Bakers were prepared for the decision and knew that the Supreme Court would most likely deny their petition, they were still disappointed. 
    "This is such a major thing, that even if you expect it, it's like expecting to have a bomb dropped on your head," Parrish told ABC News' Law & Justice Unit. "You look up, see it coming, and hope it won't go off. But it did." 
    "The recent decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court speak for themselves," said Jack He. "While the recent actions taken by the Bakers also speak for themselves. Out of respect for the juvenile court gag order, I will not at this time be making any further comment." 
    Pastor LaSimba Gray of New Sardis Baptist Church, who is president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in Memphis and has been supporting Jack and Casey He in their fight to get Anna Mae back, said he hoped today's ruling would mark the end of Anna Mae's legal saga. 
    "I'm delighted. I'm hopeful this will expedite the process of returning Anna Mae to her rightful parents. Hopefully, this will be the last judicial appeal that the Bakers will have in this process to delay the return of Anna Mae to her parents," he said. 
    "The court ruled that Anna Mae should be returned to them in an expeditious manner, but it's been six months and we're going into the seventh month. While we did not expect them to return Anna Mae to her parents overnight, we certainly didn't expect it to take seven months." 
    Bakers Refuse to Give Up 
    Despite the Supreme Court decision, the Bakers continue to fight. 
    In federal court papers filed June 12, 2007, the Bakers made another plea to overturn the Tennessee Supreme Court ruling that orders Anna Mae He returned to her biological parents. The Bakers argue for a "writ of habeas corpus," that is, an order challenging the state's custody of Anna Mae. 
    The Bakers said the Tennessee Supreme Court and others involved were "amputating [Anna Mae's] legs" and that the court's rulings "are indefensible violations of rights secured to [Anna Mae] by the United States Constitution." 
    They called the Hes "strangers" who "have become monsters in her world," while they say they are her parents in "every single respect." Denouncing the court's rulings, the Bakers said, "No civilized person ever would have conceived the child custody exception as an instrument to leave this nation's children exposed to unbridled & violation of the most fundamental and most basic and most elementary rights conferred by the United States Constitution. If we have stooped to such a level, we should re-examine if we remain a civilized society." 
    Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper Jr. argued in papers filed June 18 that the Tennessee Supreme Court properly found that the Hes never abandoned their daughter Anna Mae and that the district court lacked jurisdiction to hear the case. 
    He also criticized Parrish for including "a number of extreme and horrifying hypotheticals" in his filing. "The Hes have full and intact parental rights. The Bakers should not be permitted to usurp those rights," Cooper wrote. 
    Parrish filed a motion Monday, replying to the attorney general's response to his petition for habeas corpus in U.S. District Court. In it, Parrish argued that Anna Mae will suffer "substantial harm" if the motion is denied, the federal court has jurisdiction to hear the case, and "habeas corpus" applies here. (Habeas corpus is typically used to challenge criminal detention and is not typically used in custody situations.) 
    By taking Anna Mae from the Bakers, the state is treating the child as "nothing more than a sack of potatoes to be moved about as gently or roughly as the state, without concern for [Anna Mae's] personhood, chooses," the filing said. 
    The fact that Anna Mae suffers harm and trauma because of old mistakes by Tennessee courts "is no solace" to the girl, Parrish wrote in his response. "Harm is harm is harm and trauma is trauma is trauma," he wrote. This final plea may be the Bakers' last hope. 
    "If the Federal District Court chooses to address the merits to decide whether Anna's constitutional rights were violated, I am extremely optimistic," said Parrish. "My concern is that the Federal District Court will find a technicality to avoid deciding whether [Anna Mae's] constitutional rights were violated." 
    If the federal court doesn't intervene, Anna Mae is expected to be permanently reunited with her biological family and two younger siblings sometime in late July. 
    With reporting contributed by Lauren Pearle. 

6/25/07 CNN: Court finds missing pants not worth $54M Administrative law judge sought damages for fraudulent advertising after a dry cleaner allegedly gave him the wrong pair of pants,
    Washington (CNN) -- A judge in the District of Columbia has dismissed a case against a dry cleaner that claimed $54 million in damages for a pair of missing pants. 
    The case was brought by Roy L. Pearson, himself a judge. He originally sought $67 million from the Chung family, owners of Custom Cleaners. He calculated the amount by estimating years of law violations, adding almost $2 million in common law claims for fraud. 
    The Chungs denied Pearson's allegations and insisted that the pants they tried to give him were those he had brought in. 
    The saga began in May 2005, when Pearson took several pairs of pants to Custom Cleaners for alteration as he prepared to start his new job as an administrative law judge. He alleged that he'd brought in a pair of trousers from a blue and maroon suit, but when he came to collect them the Chungs tried to give him a pair of charcoal gray pants that he said were not his. 
    During a two-day trial earlier this month, Pearson said that when he took the pants to Custom Cleaners, his financial situation was ruinous - he had just been ordered to pay $12,000 in attorney's fees to his ex-wife and his credit cards were at their limit. 
    Pearson, representing himself during the trial, claimed millions of dollars in attorney fees and millions more in punitive damages for what he called fraudulent advertising under the law. 
    He also claimed that a sign in the store's window that promised "Satisfaction Guaranteed" was an unconditional warranty that required the defendants to honor any claim by any customer without limitation. 
    The Chungs' attorney argued that no reasonable person would interpret the signs to mean an unconditional promise of satisfaction. District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Judith Bartnoff agreed. 
    In a 23-page conclusion, Bartnoff ruled that Custom Cleaners had not violated the city's Consumer Protection Act. She wrote: "A reasonable consumer would not interpret 'Satisfaction Guaranteed' to mean that a merchant is required to satisfy a customer's unreasonable demands or accede to demands that the merchant has reasonable grounds to dispute." 
    Pearson had "not met his burden of proving that the pants the defendants attempted to return to him were not the pants he brought in for alteration" she said. 
    Bartnoff awarded court costs to the defendants. The Chungs - who have spent tens of thousands of dollars on the case - are attempting to have their attorney's fees paid by Pearson. 
    Their attorney, Chris Manning, said his clients "are relieved that we are past this stage. Judge Bartnoff has spoken loudly in suggesting that, while consumers should be protected, abusive lawsuits like this will not be tolerated. Judge Bartnoff has chosen common sense and reasonableness over irrationality and unbridled venom." 
    He added: "Hopefully Mr. Pearson doesn't take this any further on appeal, but we expect him to." 
    During the two-day trial, Soo Chung said that "economically, emotionally and healthwise as well, it has been extremely hard for us." She started the business with her husband after they moved to the United States from South Korea in 1992.  

6/25/07 Sacramento Bee: Thousands of Hmong protest at courthouse,
by Stephen Magagnini
    More than 2,000 Hmong from as far away as France launched a passionate protest at Sacramento's Federal Courthouse on Monday, demanding the United States liberate several thousand Hmong they believe have been trapped in the Lao jungles since the communist takeover in 1976.
    Demonstrators also called for the liberation of Gen. Vang Pao, one of 11 suspects in court Monday for a status hearing on the U.S. government's case against them for plotting a violent overthrow of Laos . They were joined by Vietnamese Americans waving the yellow South Vietnamese flag that flew before the communist victory, along with Iu Mien and Cambodian refugees who have a shared history of fighting Communism.
    Touxoua LyFoung, an activist from France, said many of the 15,000 Hmong who live in France have demonstrated near Paris for the release of the suspects and the liberation of the remnants of Vang Pao's CIA-funded jungle army of freedom fighters that fought the Lao and Vietnamese communists from 1961 to 1975. 
    "All the Hmong are one and speak with one voice, and one day VP will be free," said LyFoung, who is the son of one of the most famous Hmong freedom fighters, the late Touby LyFoung, who fought against the Japanese in 1940 and joined the Royal Lao Government to the fight the Communist Pathet Lao in the late 1950s



6/21/07 Washington Post: Political Hiring in Justice Division Probed,
by Carol D. Leonnig
    Karen Stevens, Tovah Calderon and Teresa Kwong had a lot in common. They had good performance ratings as career lawyers in the Justice Department's civil rights division. And they were minority women transferred out of their jobs two years ago -- over the objections of their immediate supervisors -- by Bradley Schlozman, then the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights.
    Schlozman ordered supervisors to tell the women that they had performance problems or that the office was overstaffed. But one lawyer, Conor Dugan, told colleagues that the recent Bush appointee had confided that his real motive was to "make room for some good Americans" in that high-impact office, according to four lawyers who said they heard the account from Dugan.
    Bradley Schlozman is accused of favoring political conservatives in hiring decisions when he was acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's civil rights division. He has since left the division. (By Alex Wong -- Getty Images) 
    In another politically tinged conversation recounted by former colleagues, Schlozman asked a supervisor if a career lawyer who had voted for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a onetime political rival of President Bush, could still be trusted.
    Schlozman has acknowledged in sworn congressional testimony that he had boasted of hiring Republicans and conservatives, but he denied taking improper actions against the division's career officials. That account was challenged by six officials in the division who said in interviews that they either overhead him making brazen political remarks about career employees or witnessed him making personnel decisions with apparent political motivation.
    Schlozman's efforts to hire political conservatives for career jobs throughout the division are now being examined as part of a wide-ranging investigation of the Bush administration's alleged politicization of the Justice Department. The department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility confirmed last month that their inquiry, begun in March, will look at hiring, firing and legal-case decisions in the division.
    Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee plan today to shine a renewed spotlight on decision-making in the division by questioning Schlozman's replacement, Wan Kim, about hiring practices and about its support for state voter-identification programs that could inhibit minority voting.
    Democrats also plan to ask about the dwindling diversity of the staff in a division whose core mission includes fighting racial discrimination. The Bush administration, largely under Schlozman, hired seven members as replacements or additions to the 14-lawyer appellate section where Stevens, Calderon and Kwong worked. They included six whites, one Asian and no African Americans.
    Schlozman's attorney, William Jordan, said his client did not want to comment on individual personnel decisions. Jordan said that Schlozman does not recall commenting on lawyers' voting records but at times encouraged cases to be reassigned to lawyers Schlozman considered to be very talented. Dugan declined to comment.
    Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd also declined to respond to the allegations but did say that the appellate section's recent track record "speaks for itself." He cited statistics showing that when the section filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the past six years, it had an 87 percent success rate, compared with 61 percent success in the previous six years.
    Schlozman arrived at the Justice Department in 2001 as counsel to then-Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson. A Kansas native and 1996 George Washington University law school graduate, Schlozman had clerked for two federal judges and worked alongside William Bradford Reynolds for two years in the Washington law firm Howrey Simon.
    Reynolds, whom Schlozman has cited as a mentor, was a controversial assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Reagan administration. His confirmation for a higher department post was blocked by lawmakers in both parties who accused him of pursuing a radical interpretation of the nation's civil rights laws.
    Schlozman's and Reynolds's career paths would end up having much in common.
    In May 2003, Schlozman was appointed as a deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, and he quickly became enmeshed in hiring decisions previously made by section chiefs. He subsequently became the principal deputy, and in 2005 he was appointed acting assistant attorney general.
    Appellate lawyers said that before Schlozman arrived, the small staff enjoyed a collegial work environment generally free of partisanship. Its lawyers concentrated on framing constitutional arguments for pending judicial decisions on hot-button issues such as voting rights, racial discrimination and religious freedom.
    Schlozman made little effort to hide his personal interest in the political leanings of the staff, according to five lawyers who spoke on the condition of anonymity because -- like most of those interviewed for this article -- they still work at the department. He and his aides frequently asked appellate supervisors whether career lawyers handling politically sensitive cases were "on our team," the lawyers said.
    Schlozman raised the question of partisan politics bluntly in the fall of 2004, they said, when asking appellate supervisors about the "loyalty" of division lawyer Angela Miller, who had once clerked for David. B. Sentelle, a conservative federal appeals judge. He told Miller's bosses that he learned that she voted for McCain in the 2004 Republican primary and asked, "Can we still trust her?"
    He also warned section chief Diana Flynn that he would be keeping an eye on the legal work of another career lawyer who "didn't even vote for Bush," according to colleagues who said they heard Flynn describe the exchange. Miller told several of the colleagues that she considered Schlozman's remarks a form of intimidation, and started looking for another job, the lawyers said.
    Schlozman and several deputies also took an unusual interest in the assignment of office responsibility for appellate cases and, according to the lawyers and one of the supervisors, repeatedly ordered Flynn to take cases away from career lawyers with expertise and hand them to recent hires whose rsums listed membership in conservative groups, including the Federalist Society.
    Colleagues were especially surprised when Sarah Harrington, who graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School and was one of the most highly regarded lawyers in the section, had four cases -- including one concerning religious freedom -- taken away at Schlozman's instruction.
    In February 2005, Calderon, Stevens and Harrington were all passed over in favor of a recent Schlozman hire when they applied for a new supervisory job that Schlozman created.
    In March, Calderon's cases were reassigned and she was given only deportation cases, as were some of her colleagues, several lawyers said. That spring, Schlozman told a resistant Flynn to transfer Stevens to the disability rights section. According to sources in the office, Schlozman instructed Flynn to tell Stevens that the transfer was related to performance and was her idea.
    In June, Flynn told Stevens, who was then seven months pregnant, that she had to leave. According to sources familiar with both women's accounts, Flynn alerted Stevens that "the front office didn't want the transfer attributed to them" but that it was not Flynn's idea. Flynn declined to comment for this article.
    That same month, Calderon began a six-month detail on the staff of Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of Senate Judiciary Committee and a persistent critic of the Bush administration's judicial policies. Friends said she confided that she did not want to give up her Justice job but said she found being barred from appellate work frustrating.
    In November, just before she was to return, sources said, the division's human resources office notified her that she had been permanently transferred out of the appellate section -- effective one month earlier. When she asked why, colleagues said, she was told that the office was so busy that it had to replace her when she was on detail.
    In December, as Kwong prepared to return to the office after the birth of her first child, Flynn told her that she had been transferred to a much-lower-profile complaint-resolution section.
    "When he said he didn't engage in political hiring, most of us thought that was just laughable," said one lawyer in the section, referring to Schlozman's June 5 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Everything Schlozman did was political. And he said so."
    Today, Schlozman is gone from civil rights, but Calderon and Stevens are back in the appellate section, and Kwong will return next month, according to public records.
    Stevens, who hired a lawyer and filed an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint after the transfer, reached a confidential settlement with the department after Schlozman left the division and returned to her old job in the fall of 2006. Justice officials agreed that Calderon and Kwong should return as well.
    Schlozman was appointed interim U.S. attorney in Missouri in March 2006. But Congress subsequently started looking into why he was hired without any prosecution experience, and why he brought voter-fraud charges against a liberal voting organization five days before the election in a heated congressional race. Schlozman was reassigned this past March to a job in the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys.
    Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

6/20/07 Washington Post: Raw Fisher by Marc Fisher: D.C.'s Black-Korean Dynamic: A Simmering Tension,
    What do the $54 million pants man, Roy Pearson, and the new D.C. schools superintendent, Michelle Rhee, have in common?
    Their moments in the news in recent days have lifted the lid off a cauldron of black-Korean tensions. This relationship has a volatile history in Washington , running back to 1986, when Rev. Willie Wilson of Union Temple Baptist Church famously led a boycott of an Asian-American grocer in Southeast who had supposedly disrespected a black customer. The episode culminated in Wilson saying, after being asked if his demands were inflaming racial tensions, that if he and his followers hadn't forgiven the Asian shopkeeper, "we would have cut his head off and rolled it down the street."
    Interestingly, until the start of last week's trial, the mail on the Pants Man was focused almost entirely on issues of abusing the legal system, the eternal battle over tort reform, and how the District could possibly have such a fellow serving as an administrative law judge. But once the trial started--and most importantly, once the first news photos of Pearson started appearing online, on TV and in the paper--the tenor of reader reaction changed dramatically. I still heard plenty of outrage about how Pearson was tormenting the owners of the dry cleaners and wasting the court's resources, but now that it was widely known that Pearson is black, a good chunk of the mail shifted to matters of ethnic rivalry. 
    Similarly, the surprise announcement that Rhee, a Korean-American woman, would become the first non-black chief of the D.C. school system in nearly half a century immediately engendered all manner of comment about supposed antipathy toward blacks by Koreans--all this from people who know nothing of Rhee's background, approach or personality. 
    I'll spare you the comments that consist solely of racist vitriol, but I think there's value in looking at the texture of the incidents and complaints that readers report about encounters with Korean merchants.
    I doubt that these incidents are much different from those that could be catalogued about any dry cleaner, no matter the owner's ethnicity, but here's one of the more thoughtful comments I've received from readers who believe the pants case is more about black-Korean tensions than anything else: 
    "The main thing here is the strained relationship between Korean businesses and Blacks with regard to customer service or lack thereof," wrote Keith Jones, a legal assistant at a major Washington company. He told of an Asian-owned grocery in his D.C. neighborhood where he says the owner routinely sells coffee creamer that has passed its sell-by date, as well as a dry cleaner that he says charges exorbitant rates.
    "It is clear that the Korean merchants have a lot of businesses in urban America and that they are unified," Jones writes. "Blacks in these urban settings, for the most part, rely solely on Korean establishments in their neighborhoods. This is due to access and ultimately, their socio-economic status. I am certainly not saying that this justifies the Pearson case, especially not the amount. From the examples I gave from my own experience, however, one can only imagine what a Black person experiences daily dealing with the Koreans."
    And here's an account from Rosemary Reed Miller, the longtime owner of Toast & Strawberries, which was one of the city's best-regarded boutiques, talking about her experience with a Korean dry cleaner: 
    "I had brought in a pair of pants which had a small spot. They cleaned that area, but left a larger spot on another area of the pant. When I pointed that out (unfortunately, I didn't see the spot until after I had paid), they told me that the large spot was on the pant when I brought the pants in. They wouldn't give me my money back, and implied that it would be another fee to get out the second spot. I decided to walk.
    "When you're in business--and I had a small shop, Toast and Strawberries for over 20 years--I know you can't be perfect with everyone, but this I thought was unreasonable. I've lived long enough to share [Pearson's] pain. I am African American, but didn't sue. However, I feel as though I should have sued that cleaner even though my silk pants had a modest price tag. I've fought for the civil rights of all people all of my life. People need their rights to be addressed, and the people who 'wrong' them should be educated not to do something like that again to another person.
    "I appreciate his suing on my behalf. Obviously $60+ million is 'over the top.' And I understand that Korean-Americans have made efforts to be 'nicer' to their Afro-American clientele, but I think these cases are examples of their needing to be more sensitive. If they had listened with more understanding in the beginning, and paid him for his 'lost' pants, I would hope that Mr. Pearson wouldn't have had such a strong sense of outrage."
    Why do the kinds of poor customer service that might otherwise result in a grumble or a decision to shop elsewhere morph into ethnic tension in the black-Korean dynamic? This has been the subject of considerable study since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, in which some Korean grocers took up arms against black rioters, and the years that followed, when some rappers took after Korean merchants in their lyrics? (Warning: That link goes to a song with R-rated language.)
    In part, this divide is a continuation of black-Jewish tensions that developed when many shops in American ghetto neighborhoods were run by immigrant Jews. But there's an additional element that many of the academics end up focusing on: It's a culture clash between two groups with very different behavioral mores.
    Contrast a Korean social manner in which merchants may put change down on a counter rather than touch a customer's hand, or an infelicitous command of English that can make a shopkeeper seem distant and even disrespectful, against an African-American culture in which strangers are expected to make eye contact and acknowledge one another in a respectful exchange.
    Here's a black writer's perspective on this, and here's a Korean writer's view of a similar situation. 
    Did Roy Pearson sue the Chung family, owners of Custom Cleaners, because they are Korean immigrants? There's no evidence of that. Will the rank and file of the D.C. school system refuse to give Michelle Rhee a chance to succeed because she is Korean-American?
    Certainly most people are better than that. But in both cases, the noise around the black-Korean tension is loud enough to make hard situations much harder, and that's worth keeping a close eye on.

6/15/07 Dateline: The Vietnamese-American Community Recovers After Katrina,
by Stone Phillips, Dateline anchor
    I like inspirational stories.  We in the media dont do enough of them.  So when I heard about the Vietnamese-Americans of New Orleans and how their remarkable recovery after Katrina lifted an entire community, I was intrigued.  
    The tip came from a friend of mine named Thuy Vu. Thuy and her husband Phuc are former boat people who now operate a radio station in Houston .  In the aftermath of Katrina, their station became an open  channel for communication and a beacon of hope, broadcasting in both Vietnamese and English to help connect storm evacuees with families willing to open their doors, shelter and feed those in need.  
    Thuy and Phucs own stories are amazingfrom their harrowing escapes from Vietnam to the hard-earned success they have achieved in this country.  They are fellow journalists and very good at what they do.  So when Thuy told me they were taking a van full of friends to New Orleans to celebrate the lunar New Year and invited me to go along, I hitched a ride.  
    By the way, as you watch the report, Thuy is the woman sitting next to me in the van at the top of the piece. Phuc, who navigated treacherous waters and regimes in his journey to America , is the guy at the wheel asking, Which exit?  He was kidding, of course.  Phuc doesnt miss many turns.    
    Before leaving New York , I took one of NBCs classes on how to operate a digital video camera.   My plan was to take a camera with me and, if the story panned out, shoot some not ready for prime time video to show my bosses back at headquarters.  They werent sold on the story, and I wasnt sure myself, but we all agreed I should check it out.  And bringing back some videotape might help us all decide.  Now, Im no Rich White, Fred Schuh, Bob Goldsborough or Mark Falstad, to name a few of the great cameramen Im fortunate enough to work with.  But multi-tasking is becoming standard operating procedure these days, and I was looking forward to trying my hand with the DV cam.  Ultimately, a wise Dateline senior, concerned about my videotaping skills, assigned an associate producer named Tommy Nguyen to go with me.  Tommy will be the first to tell you hes no expert with a DV cam either, but hes light years ahead of me.  In any case, our video was more for in-house review than for broadcast.  Or was it?
    Turns out, the spontaneous, point-and-shoot video Tommy and I brought back, as shaky as it sometimes was, seemed to capture the story pretty wella story of resourcefulness, resilience and recovery with a lesson for communities everywhere about the power of pulling together.  
    As a Vietnamese-American, Tommy came away feeling proud of his heritage.  And I came away deeply impressed.  No matter what our cultural background, we Americans have always taken pride in our ingenuity and initiative in times of crisis.  The faith-based, grassroots recovery of these Vietnamese-Americans amidst all the damage inflicted by Katrina is a can-do, feel good story that all Americans can applaud.   
    Stone Phillips' report airs Dateline Sunday, June 17, 7 p.m.

6/19/07 press release: Honda statement on hate crimes against Asians,
    Washington , DC Congressman Mike Honda (D-CA) issued the following statement on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attack of Vincent Chin:
    "Madame Speaker, as Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, I rise today in remembrance of Vincent Chin on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his attack.
    "On June 19, 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was brutally and fatally attacked by two white men who had recently been laid-off by an American automaker. Blaming their lost jobs on the rise of Japanese car companies, Chin's attackers, mistaking him for Japanese, sought retribution.
    "Other than residing in Detroit , Michigan , Vincent Chin had no connection to the automobile industry. Vincent Chin, soon to have been married and celebrating his bachelor party, wasn't seeking trouble the night of his attack. Chin was attacked and killed simply for being of Asian descent. To add further insult, Chin's murderers charged with, and pleaded guilty to, a mere manslaughter charge. For murdering a man, each received a sentence of only three years probation and a $3,000 fine - a mere slap on the wrist. Neither killer ever served any jail time.
    "The attack on Vincent Chin, his untimely passing, and the insulting lack of justice and punishment for his murders galvanized a community that had not previously come together so broadly. For the first time, there emerged a self-defined Asian American and Pacific Islander racial identification that went beyond the progressive college-educated youth and into the working-class segments of the community. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino; waiters, lawyers, and grandmothers came together with a heightened awareness of the shared experience of racism and discrimination faced by Asian American and Pacific Islanders, regardless of ethnic and socioeconomic background. Twenty-five years after his fatal attack, Vincent Chin remains a contemporary martyr and rallying point for the Asian American and Pacific Islander Movement.
    "While today is indeed a day to remember and honor the life and death of Vincent Chin, it is also a reminder that hate crimes are not a memory in a regrettable past. Unfortunately, the past twenty-five years remain littered with physical and verbal assaults and murders based in hate. Listed here are a few such acts:
    Thien Minh Ly was shot and killed in Tustin , California on January 29, 1996.
    Kanu Patel and Mukesh Patek were shot and killed in Camp Springs , Maryland on October 15, 1998.
    Joseph Ileto was shot and killed in Chatsworth , California on August 10, 1999.
    Balbir Singh Sohdi was shot and killed in Mesa , Arizona on September 15, 2001.
    Waqar Hasan and Vasudev Patel were shot and killed near Dallas , Texas on September 15, 2001.
    Iqbal Singh was stabbed in Santa Clara , California on July 30, 2006
    Robert Stanford, Song Sun Lee and Kam Yan Li were shot and killed in San Francisco on October 21, 2006.
    Marie Martinez was beaten on an MTA bus in New York City on March 16, 2007.
    "Madame Speaker, this small sampling from across this nation shows us that hate crimes remains an issue to be heard and combated by all Members of Congress and all Americans. I applaud my colleagues in the House of Representatives for recently passing the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007, H.R. 1592; recognizing the pervasive and contemporary nature of hate crimes in this nation. The death of Vincent Chin and the injuries and death suffered by the countless others victims of hate crimes serve as a heavy reminder for this nation to combat hate and continue in its quest for freedom and justice for all Americans."

6/19/07 The Daily Texan ( U. of Texas at Austin ): 25 years later: In memory of Vincent Chin,
By Sehjong Hamjong 
    Today is a solemn day for many across the United States , as it is the 25th anniversary of the hate-crime murder of Vincent Chin. His murder signifies the beginning of the contemporary Asian Pacific American, or APA, civil rights movement. 
    In 1982, 27-year-old Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American draftsman and engineer, got into a confrontation with two white men, Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz, at a strip club in Detroit, Mich. where Chin was having his bachelor party. During the early 1980s, the U.S. auto industry in Detroit faced tough competition from Japanese automakers, and many workers were laid off as a result. Mistaking him to be Japanese, Ebens yelled at Chin, "It's because of you little motherfuckers that we're out of work," according to a 2002 article from www.tolerance.org.
    The verbal confrontation escalated into a physical scuffle between Ebens, Nitz and Chin, taking the fight from throwing punches to grabbing chairs and culminating in the three being kicked out of the club. In the parking lot, Nitz took a Louisville Slugger baseball bat out of his car, and Chin told the two men, "I'll fight you guys more if you want, but put the baseball bat down." When Nitz refused, Chin and his friends left.
    Ebens and Nitz drove around the neighborhood for 30 minutes and finally found Chin at a local McDonalds. Nitz restrained Chin while Ebens swung the baseball bat, crushing in Chin's skull. An off-duty police officer who witnessed the murder said Ebens "swung the bat as if a baseball player was swinging for a homerun. Full contact. Full swing."
    Chin slipped into a coma and died on June 23, 1982 - 5 days before his wedding.
    About a year later, Judge Charles Kaufman of Wayne County found Ebens and Nitz guilty of manslaughter. He fined them $3,000 and sentenced them to three years of probation. Neither the prosecution nor Chin's mother were present, and no witnesses were called in to testify. 
    The outrage that ensued from the lax verdict and the handling of the case sparked Asians and Asian-Americans across the U.S. to raise awareness of the issue, garnering attention from civil rights groups, such as the NAACP, and national news and talk show programs. This effort eventually led the FBI to conduct an investigation, and the U.S. Department of Justice eventually filed charges against Ebens and Nitz.
    Ebens was sentenced to a 25-years in prison, while Nitz was cleared of all wrongdoing. But eventually, Ebens was cleared of all charges through an appeal and another trial. Neither Ebens nor Nitz served any prison time. A civil court ordered Ebens to pay Chin's family $1.5 million, but Ebens refused and is still on the run from the law.
    Chin's case is not confined. Last April in Alabama , an 18-year-old Korean student was assaulted by four white males near his dorm on the Auburn University campus. Police suspected the crime to be motivated by racial bias and backlash, since it occurred three days after the Virginia Tech tragedy, and informed the FBI, which is conducting an investigation.
    The media and mainstream press tend to overlook hate crimes targeting Asians and Asian-Americans. Crimes against Asians and Asian-Americans are not always reported properly by police as hate crimes, which causes these crimes to be underreported. Legislative and law-enforcement officials need to become aware that these crimes are not isolated incidents, but part of a larger trend and climate in the U.S. related to anti-Asian sentiment and racial bias.
    The FBI's most recent Uniform Crime Report, released in 2005, lists 8,804 victims of hate crimes, and 55.7 percent of those were related to racial bias. Of this percentage, 4.9 percent of the victims were listed as Asian/Pacific Islander, and this number doesn't include cases that didn't get reported as a hate crime. 
    There is a stereotype that Asians and Asian-Americans are perpetual foreigners, and some don't distinguish between an individual from his or her ethnicity. Twenty-five years after Chin's death, we must look back as a nation to see if we've progressed. 
    Hamjong is an Asian American studies senior.

6/14/07 World Sikh News: Political maverick Ravi Singh is Rising Star in Campaign and Election Industry,
by Daljit Sra    
   Washington , D.C. : ElectionMall.com's CEO Ravi Singh, an Asian American Sikh, was honored this year with a Rising Star award, one of the most prestigious honors to be given in politics. Every year Campaigns & Elections Magazine identifies individuals who have already made a significant contribution in the area of political consulting and/or advocacy before the age of 35. "We expect great things from the 2007 Rising Stars," said Morgan E. Felchner, editor of Campaigns & Elections.
    "Through their achievements, they are proving that success truly has no limits."
    Born in Aurora , Illinois to immigrant parents from India , Singh did not follow his father's desired path to medical or law school, but chose instead to pursue a career in politics. He fondly remembers telling his father he would be a rising star someday despite losing his election to the Illinois State House in 1997. When told that he must remove his turban to win, he refused and has always maintained that his turban could not be separated from who he is - an Asian American Sikh. While working for the Illinois legislature, he was pigeon-holed and relegated to delivering mail between offices while politicians distanced themselves from his foreign appearance forgetting his American citizenship and identity.
    Singh drew from his strong family values and a love for community and created one of the top campaign and election technology companies operating today, ElectionMall.com. He was hailed as "Campaign Guru" and "Power Broker" by USA Today Magazine and his firm ElectionMall.com was profiled in Business Week Magazine as one of the top political movers and shaker's companies to watch. This year, Singh has been recognized by his peers and the industry he loves as a leader and visionary.
    Singh's nonpartisan Internet-based firm currently assists several 2008 presidential candidates. He was the first Asian American Sikh with a turban to run for office in the state of Illinois .
    "This honor means a great deal as it is recognition from my colleagues," said Singh. "It proves that anything is possible in America . Identity should not be a hindrance to anyone, even after the events of September, 11th. Technology and politics are my passions and I look forward to what lies ahead."

[webmaster: Thank God Texas has the death penalty!]
6/13/07 Houston Chronicle: 19-year-old African American convicted in rape-murder of Vietnamese American couple: Judge delays sentencing phase of Dexter Johnson's capital trial until Monday,
by Brian Rogers
    The jurors who convicted Dexter Johnson of capital murder in two hours will have a long weekend before they begin hearing testimony in the punishment phase, a judge ruled Wednesday.
    The 19-year-old faces the death penalty after being convicted in last summer's carjacking, robbery, rape and murder of Maria Aparece, 23.
    As the foreman read the verdict, Johnson covered his face with his hands.
    As soon as they adjourned to the jury room, Johnson stormed out of the courtroom through a side door leading to his holding cell.
    After a brief conference with the attorneys in the case on the scheduling of experts, state District Judge Denise Collins asked the six men and six women of the jury to return Monday for a week of testimony.
    'Horrible, awful things'
    During her closing, prosecutor Lisa Andrews said Johnson had "fun" in the slaying of Aparece and her boyfriend. 
    "He's cold, he's calculating, he's a killer," She said. "He wasn't just getting money, he was doing horrible, awful things."
    Johnson was one of five people, the evidence showed, who carjacked Aparece and her boyfriend, Huy Ngo, on June 18, 2005, as the couple talked in her blue Toyota Matrix outside Ngo's home near midnight.
    Johnson, his close friend Keithron Fields,18, and an uncharged juvenile threatened Aparece and Ngo with a shotgun and a pistol, threw the couple in the backseat and drove them around Houston demanding money, credit cards and     ATM access numbers, Andrews said.
    The three found the parked car as they rode with Timothy Randle, 20, and Ashley Ervin, 18, in Ervin's car.
    The five are suspected in a crime spree authorities said also claimed the lives of Brady Davis and Jose Lopez in separate shootings.
    Prosecutors said Johnson raped Aparece in the backseat of her car after parking near a patch of thick woods. Ngo was forced to listen to the assault on his knees as the other four taunted him.
    Screams, then shots
    Johnson and Fields then marched Aparece and Ngo 60 feet into the woods and shot both in the head. 
    Andrews said Johnson shot Ngo in the side of the head, execution-style. Aparece then screamed, "No!" and covered her face. Johnson then shot her in the top of the head, Andrews said.
    Johnson's defense team maintained that Fields and someone else walked the couple into the woods and shot them.
    Attorneys Jim Leitner and Anthony Osso worked through the trial to show that witnesses "got their stories straight" blaming Johnson after he was arrested.
    Fields, Randle and Ervin continue to face capital murder charges in the incident.

6/13/07 Los Angeles Times: Large majority supports path to citizenship A poll finds 63% of all respondents, and 65% of Republicans, back the controversial measure,
by Janet Hook
    Washington A strong majority of Americans including nearly two-thirds of Republicans favor allowing illegal immigrants to become citizens if they pay fines, learn English and meet other requirements, a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.
    That is a striking show of support for a primary element of an immigration overhaul bill that has stalled in the Senate amid conservative opposition.
    Only 23% of adults surveyed opposed allowing undocumented immigrants to gain legal status. That finding bolsters the view, shared by President Bush, that the bill's opponents represent a vocal minority whereas most people are more welcoming toward illegal immigrants.
    "They are willing to take jobs that our people aren't interested in, and I think this helps the economy,"
    Joseph Simpkins, a retired dry cleaner in New Jersey who participated in the survey, said in a follow-up interview. "As long as they pay taxes, I see nothing wrong with having them become citizens."
    The immigration bill, a top priority for the White House, is languishing at a time when Bush's approval rating has hit a new low: The poll found 34% approved of the job the president is doing, the lowest level registered by the Los Angeles Times poll throughout his time in office.
    Those and other poll findings indicate a pessimistic electorate, distrustful of political and corporate leaders and unhappy with the status quo at home and abroad.
    More than two-thirds of those surveyed believe the country is seriously on the wrong track, nearly matching the highest level of pessimism since 1992.
    The immigration debate has heated up in recent weeks, with the Senate taking up and last week putting off the overhaul legislation. The bill aims to establish a pathway to citizenship for most of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. It also would create a guest worker program and institute a point system for evaluating new immigrants that would put less weight on family ties and more on applicants' skills and education.
    Underscoring the urgency of the debate, 86% of people surveyed said illegal immigration was an important problem.
    Although the pathway to citizenship is one of the most controversial provisions of the Senate bill, 63% of those polled backed the idea as did 58% of those who identified themselves as conservatives and 65% of Republicans.
    The survey question specified that, under the proposal, citizenship would be available only to those who registered their presence in the U.S. , had no criminal record, paid a fine, got fingerprinted and learned English, among other requirements.
    Those conditions helped ease concerns among some Republicans, including Michael Prandini of Fresno , who heads a homebuilders association. He said a path to citizenship without these conditions would be "unfair to the people who have gotten citizenship through the correct channels."
    The guest worker program and visa point system did not draw as much support, largely because those elements of the legislation were not as well known. Forty-three percent said they did not know enough about the point system to have an opinion; 25% did not know enough about the guest worker program to weigh in.
    The survey was conducted Thursday through Sunday; 1,183 adults were surveyed by telephone. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
(INFOBOX BELOW)
Views on immigration
Do you support or oppose the following proposals:
    Q: Allow undocumented immigrants who have been living and working in the United States for a number of years, and who do not have a criminal record, to start on a path to citizenship by registering that they are in the country, paying a fine, getting fingerprinted and learning English, among other requirements.  All Democrats Independents Republicans Support 63% 66% 66% 65% Oppose 23 19 20 27 Don't know 14 15 14 8
    Q: Create a guest worker program that would give a temporary visa to noncitizens who want to work legally in the United States .  All Democrats Independents Republicans Support 49% 51% 52% 47% Oppose 26 26 24 30 Don't know 25 23 24 23
    Q: Establish a point system for new immigrants that gives more weight to professional qualifications and command of English than to those having family already in the United States .  All Democrats Independents Republicans Support 34% 30% 33% 43% Oppose 23 30 24 16 Don't know 43 40 43 41
Answers may not total 100% where some answer categories are not shown.
For more results and poll analysis, visit: http://www.latimes.com/timespoll
    Methodology:  The Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll contacted 1,183 adults nationwide by telephone June 7-10. Telephone numbers were chosen randomly from a list of all exchanges in the nation, allowing listed and unlisted numbers to be contacted. Multiple attempts were made to contact each number. Adults were weighted slightly to conform with their respective census proportions by sex, ethnicity, age, education and national region.
    The margin of sampling error for all adults is plus or minus 3 percentage points. For certain subgroups, the error margin may be somewhat higher. Poll results may also be affected by factors such as question wording and the order in which questions are presented.
    Source: L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll

6/12/07 www.ny1.com: New York Hosts First-Ever Asian American Theater Festival,
by Clover Lalehzar  
    For most of the month of June, New York City hosts the first-ever National Asian American Theater Festival or NAATF. NY1s Clover Lalehzar filed the following report. 
    A star-studded crowd turned out in support of the National Asian American Theater Festivals inaugural event. David Henry Hwang, one of the most accomplished Asian Americans working in the theatre today, MCd the event. Hwang won a Tony in 1998 for his M Butterfly and continues as a book writer on Broadway with up dated productions of flower drum song and most recently Walt Disney's Tarzan. 
    I've been fortunate enough to be a playwright for a while, and I remember when it was just an extraordinarily big deal to have one or two Asian American plays at the Public, says Hwang. And tonight, we're celebrating not only a legacy of Asian American plays at the Public 20, 25 years after that, but the ability to organize an entire festival around all the work that's being done in the country. 
    The festival will feature 25 Asian American arts companies, as well as soloists, who will take up temporary residence at a number of theatre companies around the city troupes who had advocated for such an event, like Pan Asian rep, the east west players, and the Ma-Yi theatre. 
    We felt that it was important to kind of take stock of where we are and what this movement has actually become, both as an expression of a community and as an aesthetic practice, says Ma-Yi artistic director Ralph Pena. 
    Perhaps one of the most important aspects of the festival is that the cover much more territory than just the predictable questions of racial identity. 
    Asian American theatre does not necessarily mean stories about immigrants, or stories about some land far away. Its actually a lot of the Asian Americans I know consider themselves more American than Asian, says NAATF actor Manu Narayan. 
    Its the push and pull of assimilation among other things that will continue to provide subject matter for Asian American artists whose voices continue to be a part of the theatre's overall narrative. 
    Some of it will literally filter into the mainstream in terms of being produced at larger venues, and some of it will simply change the climate the aesthetic climate, the socio-political climate in terms of what people feel overall, says Hwang. 
    The festival runs through June 24th at multiple theaters in New York . For more information, you can log onto www.NAATF.org.

6/11/07 Wall Street Journal: A Tireless Hunt for Energy: Scientist Nancy Ho Helped Lead the Way In Ethanol Research,
by Christopher John Farley
    When Nancy Ho was growing up near Nanjing, China, with her sister, some of her neighbors didn't think education was as important for girls as it was for boys. But things were different in her household. "My parents not only were very supportive for their children's education, but also were very serious about our education," she says.
    Dr. Ho, 71 years old, has put her schooling to good use. Shortly before the communist takeover of China in 1949, her family moved to Taiwan , where she enrolled in college. She later relocated to the U.S. and earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Purdue University . She now heads the Molecular Genetics Group at Purdue's Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering, where her research has focused on innovative ways to produce ethanol.
    Once obscure, her area of expertise is now on the national agenda in the U.S. Leading Democratic and Republican Party presidential candidates and U.S. President George W. Bush have backed increased use of ethanol. Dr. Ho's research will likely play a role in any future increase.
    Ethanol is typically produced from corn. Dr. Ho thought there had to be a better way to generate it, without relying on edible crops. She and her team at Purdue, which is in Indiana , developed a kind of yeast that can convert waste plant material, such as wood chips or straw, into what is known as cellulosic ethanol, which is identical to ethanol, except for its source.
    It took more than a decade for Dr. Ho's work to produce results. In 1980 she began to lead a team at Purdue seeking to genetically engineer a common type of yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae to produce ethanol. Several other groups around the world were pursuing similar projects. It had been thought theoretically possible that Saccharomyces cerevisiae could be made to ferment xylose (a sugar found in wood, straw and other kinds of plant material) into ethanol by cloning two genes into the yeast from another strain of yeast -- and thus changing its properties.
    By the late 1980s, however, none of the groups, including Dr. Ho's, had succeeded. Many scientists eventually concluded it was impossible.
    Other researchers suggested trying another microorganism, like bacteria, but Dr. Ho was determined to stick with yeast. "It's the same kind of yeast that's been used in baking bread and making wine for thousands of years," she says. "I thought it was important to use something that had been proven to be safe."
    Dr. Ho held out hope. In 1993, she and her team were finally successful. She believed that yeast could be made to ferment xylose by cloning into it a third gene. The resulting genetically engineered yeast was able to ferment xylose as well as glucose into ethanol -- allowing it to produce high yields of ethanol from nonfood items like straw. Dr. Ho and her colleagues hold a patent relating to the innovation.
    Brent Erickson, executive vice president at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group, says a number of researchers are working on developing microorganisms that can ferment ethanol and that Dr. Ho's research was a "big breakthrough" for the field. "The ability to make ethanol not just from corn, but also from cellulosic agricultural residues...is critical to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of petroleum," says Mr. Erickson.
    The work Dr. Ho helped pioneer is having an impact beyond the lab. In 2004, Iogen Corp., a closely held Canadian biotechnology firm, announced that it had licensed technology developed by Dr. Ho's team to help produce cellulosic ethanol for commercial use. The company currently uses the technology to generate cellulosic ethanol at its demonstration facility in Canada using straw residue from farms.
    Colleagues say Dr. Ho has high standards and sharp focus. "I usually critically review my approaches and make sure that I have not overlooked anything," she says. "Even during the process of carrying out the approaches based on my ideas, I continue to question myself."
    She also drew on her experiences growing up. "I give my parents a lot of credit," Dr. Ho says. "They never showed any signs they were displeased they had only girls. I think this gave me a freedom in my thinking -- of not saying 'I can not do this, I can not do that.' That's the freedom I feel in my mind."
    Early this year, Dr. Ho was invited to sit in the First Lady's box during the U.S. president's annual State of the Union Address. "Dr. Ho is clearly a visionary researcher," said a White House spokeswoman, explaining Dr. Ho's inclusion.
    Today, Dr. Ho says one of her biggest hurdles is making cellulosic ethanol widely available. Her team is working on developing strains of yeast that they hope will make ethanol with greater speed and bigger yields.
    This year, Purdue was awarded a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to help fund her work. "I believe most scientific problems could be solved if we press harder," says Dr. Ho.

6/10/07 Los Angeles Times: Hilltop grave may become a shrine,
By Cecilia Rasmussen
    Atop an oak-shrouded hill near the Central California Mother Lode town of Coloma , a lonely grave holds the first Japanese woman known to have died on American soil.
    The 136-year-old granite headstone, inscribed in English and Japanese, reads: "In Memory of Okei, Died 1871. Aged 19 years. (A Japanese Girl)." It has been retired for safekeeping; a replica will take its place. 
    Okei Ito is buried at the site of the former Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony, the nation's first Japanese settlement, founded on June 7, 1869.
    "To the Japanese, this farmland is our Plymouth Rock," said Fred Kochi, a fourth-generation Japanese American living in Sunnyvale and a spokesman for several public and private groups hoping to purchase the site and restore the buildings.
    "Okei-san personifies the immigrant spirit. She is a popular folk hero here and in Japan ," where a replica of her tombstone stands in the city of Aizuwakamatsu , her birthplace. A Japanese melody laments her early death, Kochi said in an interview.
    The story of the Japanese in California begins with Dutchman John Henry Schnell, a weapons trader and merchant who married a Japanese woman named Jou, possibly a member of Katamori Matsudaira's clan, a samurai family of northern Japan . Schnell trained warriors to use firearms and fought with Matsudaira on the losing side in the Boshin War, which ended in 1868.
    In a hurry to get out of the country and with Matsudaira's financial backing, Schnell organized about two dozen colonists from Aizuwakamatsu to leave on three ships over a period of a year. They intended to hunt for gold and to set up a farm to produce tea and silk in California . 
    This area "may have been selected for this colonization because of its scenic and topographical similarity to the Japanese homeland," the late Sacramento historian and lawyer Henry Taketa wrote in the March 1992 journal the California Historian. 
    Schnell led the first group, which landed in San Francisco in May 1869. Within days, the Schnells' daughter, Frances, was born. According to Taketa, she is believed to be the first person of Japanese ancestry born in the United States . 
    On June 7, 1869, Schnell and the colonists arrived in the El Dorado Hills. They had traveled by boat to Sacramento , then by wagon about 40 miles northeast to Gold Hill, between the Gold Rush towns of Placerville and Coloma. There, Schnell purchased 160 acres, a farmhouse and a barn for $5,000.
    It takes a dedicated person to scour the 1870 federal census, which is not alphabetized and is handwritten in script ranging from patrician to chicken scratch.
    Taketa, who compiled 40 years of research on the settlement, found 55 Japanese people listed in the U.S. Thirty-three lived in California , including 22 in Gold Hill: 14 men, six housewives and two young girls.
    The Schnells' daughters Frances and her younger sister, Mary, born in April 1870 were not included; the census listed them as white.
    A few months after Mary's birth, Okei Ito, better known as "Okei-san," arrived to work as a nursemaid for the Schnells. She was 17 years old. 
    According to family legend, she frequently climbed the hillside to "watch the setting sun and gaze in the direction of her homeland," Kochi said. "My grandfather always told me the story of Okei-san." His grandfather learned about her from his mother, Hino Iseki, who immigrated to the Sacramento area in 1893.     
    Okei-san reportedly stood atop the hill each evening and sang a popular children's song, "Yuyake Koyake" ("Sunset"), as tears streamed down her face. 
    "She was lonely and homesick," Kochi said.
    The colonists had brought silk cocoons, mulberry trees, other trees, seeds, grape seedlings and bamboo roots. They prospered the first year, participating in the San Francisco Horticultural Fair with displays of tea, paper plants and plant oils. 
    But soon, gold-mining claim jumpers dammed a creek on the ranch. The resulting water shortage damaged the crops. 
    Desperate to save his project, Schnell pawned an ancient Japanese dagger and silk banner believed to have been given to him by his wife's presumed kinsman, Matsudaira, before Schnell left Japan to Francis Veerkamp, a German-born water and land baron whose property adjoined the colony. 
    "Schnell literally mortgaged his wife's family jewels," said Phil Veerkamp, 63, of Diamond Springs, the great-grandson of Francis Veerkamp. 
    In early 1871, Schnell returned to Japan with his family to seek more money and laborers. The colonists scattered.
    Okei-san started working as a nanny for Veerkamp, who paid back taxes on the Japanese colony and turned it into a fruit farm. 
    "My family treated Okei-san like a daughter," Phil Veerkamp said in a recent interview. His family also hired another colonist and field hand, Matsunosuke Sakurai, "who rose to a management position and marketed the fruit." 
    Okei-san died from a fever, perhaps malaria, at 19.
    "Sakurai arranged for and purchased [Okei-san's] headstone," Phil Veerkamp said. Sakurai stayed with the Veerkamp family until his death in 1901. 
    Schnell was never heard from again. 
    "News arrived here that he had been killed in Japan ," historian Paolo Sioli wrote in the 1883 book "History of El Dorado County."
    The valuable artifacts Schnell pawned a 15th century woman's Tanto dagger and a gold-threaded silk banner, both with the family crest used by the Tokugawa and Matsudaira families remained in the Veerkamp family for more than a century. In 2001, the Veerkamps donated them to the California State Archives. 
    Over the decades, rumors persisted in Japanese communities around the Gold Country that a Japanese girl was buried on Gold Hill. In 1924, a group of Japanese Americans went to the Veerkamp Ranch to interview descendants and document the past. 
    Francis Veerkamp's son Henry, then 75, told the group about the colony and Okei-san, who had been a year younger than he. He pointed out the boundaries of the colony and her grave.
    Over the years, local Japanese American groups have worked to preserve the site, making an annual trek from Sacramento to pull weeds and clean the grave site.
    In 1969, at a centennial event marking the Japanese colonists' arrival in the United States , then-Gov. Ronald Reagan and a Japanese diplomat dedicated a commemorative marker to the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony, California Historical Landmark No. 815. 
    In 2003, a local nature conservation group, the American River Conservancy, and chapters of the Japanese American Citizens' League launched a $4.6-million fundraising campaign to buy the 303-acre Gold Hill Ranch from the Veerkamps. 
    The groups hope to preserve the remnants of the colony a farmhouse, barn, keyaki tree and Okei-san's grave.
    Long-range plans call for a history center and a wildlife habitat dedicated to the first Japanese immigrants and their contributions to agriculture. 
    The Veerkamps are ready to sell to the preservationists and have given them until the end of the year to raise the money.  The family, too, has an investment in history. 
    "We want the property preserved and want to know that the story of Okei-san and the Wakamatsu colony will continue to be told," Phil Veerkamp said. 

6/8/07 Wall Street Journal, page A16: Editorial: Immigration Heritage,
    The Senate keeps grinding away on the immigration bill, making it worse this week by further restricting the guest worker provision. Majority Leader Harry Reid also seems to be walking away from the effort, calling it "the President's bill," which suggests he's preparing to blame Republicans for any defeat.
    But no matter what happens this year, the immigration debate isn't going away. And among the unfortunate myths that have gathered media attention is that immigrants are a net cost to U.S. taxpayers -- that is, that they use more government benefits than they contribute in taxes.
    This notion is being sold in particular by the Heritage Foundation, which once favored liberal immigration but now is pitching a study by Robert Rector claiming that households headed by low-skilled immigrants use $89 billion more in government services than they pay in taxes. We'd be worried too if this were true, but a tour of the serious economic literature shows it isn't.
    The Heritage study calculates the impact only of low-skilled immigrants, those without a high school degree. This group accounts for about one-third of all U.S. immigrants. Higher-skilled immigrants are indisputably fiscal bargains because they have high earnings and pay taxes under the highly progressive American tax code. Even Mr. Rector concedes that "immigrants with a college degree become positive fiscal contributors from the outset; the taxes they pay will exceed the benefits their families receive." Raising the number of H-1B visas for computer scientists, mathematicians and other skilled immigrants should be an easy call.
    Most studies also agree that the fiscal impact of the overall immigration population -- roughly 30 million people -- is also positive. In a comprehensive 1997 study, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that over their lifetimes immigrants and their children pay an estimated $80,000 more in taxes to all levels of government than they receive in benefits.
    The debate is over the impact of the lowest skilled immigrants -- the 4.5 million heads of households, legal and illegal, who don't hold a high school degree. The Heritage study, which has become grist for talk radio, overstates the costs of immigrants.
    First, of the estimated $19,588 of government benefits collected by low-skilled immigrant households each year, $8,462 -- or 43% -- are the cost for educating children. This leads to a strange logic. Under the Heritage cost-benefit framework, children are financial burdens to society and the surest way to balance the budget would be for Americans to stop having kids.
    One of every four children born in America has an immigrant mother, but Mr. Rector is guilty of single-entry bookkeeping: He counts the costs of educating these children of immigrants but he fails to count the taxes they pay as adults. This is a major oversight because scholars have consistently shown that the children of immigrants tend to be the highest achievers and earners of all generations.
    A study by economist Adam Zaretsky of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis compared the earnings and taxes of three groups: the native-born, immigrants, and the children of immigrants. He found that "Recent immigrants pay the least [taxes], but their children, who tend to make more money and live in high-income/high-tax states, pay the most."
    David Card recently showed, for the National Bureau of Economic Research, that "of the 39 largest country-of-origin groups, sons from 33 groups and daughters from 32 groups have higher average educational attainment than the children of natives. . . . Evidence of the intergenerational progress of immigrants' children points to above-average levels of education even for children whose fathers had much lower schooling than native-born fathers." This is powerful evidence of the economic assimilation of the children of immigrant parents.
    Mr. Rector also reports that the average low-skilled immigrant household collects $4,891 in Social Security and Medicare annually. But even conceding his figures, Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system. Retiree benefits are financed by the payroll taxes of current workers. Immigrants subsidize Social Security and Medicare because they pay taxes for 30 or 40 years without any parent collecting a monthly benefit check. This provides a one-generation net windfall -- an insight first pointed out in a 1984 study by the late economist Julian Simon and published by . . . the Heritage Foundation.
    The Social Security Administration trustees agree with the original Heritage study (Simon's) and conclude in their latest actuarial report that the unfunded liabilities of Social Security "decrease with increasing rates of net immigration . . . Each additional 100,000 net immigrants increase the long-range actuarial balance by about 0.07 percent of taxable payroll."
    What does that mean for the Treasury? The net present value of the net payroll taxes paid over benefits received from one million immigrants per year is just shy of $2 trillion through 2080. Even low-skilled immigrants are net contributors to the trust fund.
    Heritage once made this point itself, notably in a 1998 study by economist William Beach, who calculated that Hispanics -- especially young, single males -- pay far more into Social Security than they receive over their lifetimes. Mr. Beach found that, in 1997 dollars, a typical Hispanic couple would receive $347,000 less in lifetime benefits than they pay in, allowing for a normal rate of return on payroll taxes. Maybe Heritage ought to dust off those intellectual archives, unless it's decided to bend to the fashions of the moment.
    Correcting for this overstatement of retirement and education costs erases most of Mr. Rector's alleged fiscal deficit. What about the other $30 billion or so a year? Well, it turns out that about six of 10 native-born American households also receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. No one would suggest that 60% of native-born Americans are economic drains; why conclude this of low-skilled immigrants?
    More broadly, the Rector study ignores that immigrants make economic contributions beyond net tax or benefit payments. One is that immigrants lower costs of production and thus reduce consumer prices, which in turn increase the real income of Americans.
    A second benefit is that the labor provided by low-skilled immigrants complements the skills of native-born Americans, thus raising everyone's productivity and output. A 2006 National Bureau of Economic Research study noted that "immigrants stimulate investment, have skill sets and educational levels that complement those of natives, and do not compete for the same jobs as most natives." Immigration increased the average wages of all native-born workers in the 1990s by 1.1%, except those who did not have a high school diploma.
    The President's Council of Economic Advisers recently added up all these benefits, updating the procedures used by the National Academy of Sciences, and concluded that the value of immigrants to the overall economy is a net positive $30 billion a year. Any such number is by its nature a general estimate, but the key point is that immigrants are an overall economic plus, not a drain.
    A decade ago, Republicans wisely adopted a policy of "immigration yes, welfare no." It has been a great success. Welfare eligibility of immigrants was restricted and the result has been a near-50% decline in welfare use by the foreign born. If low-skilled immigrants are using too many government benefits, conservatives should be fighting to restrict welfare payments, not the immigrants  

6/7/07 Dallas Morning News: Asian-Americans making gains on corporate boards,
by Esther Wu
    Each year, the Committee of 100 surveys the 500 largest U.S. companies to find out how many board members are of Asian descent. The results of the 2007 Corporate Board Report Card were released last month during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.
    "The good news is that the survey shows a 50 percent increase since the committee started keeping track in 2004," said Dallas lawyer Wilson Chu , who spearheaded this year's initiative. 
    However, he said, there is plenty of room for even more Asians in the boardroom.
    The results of this year's survey showed: 
    Asian and Asian Pacific Americans hold 1.5 percent of corporate board seats among Fortune 500 companies, a slight increase from the 1.2 percent reported in 2005.
    Sixty-nine Asian Pacific Americans held board seats in 2006, an increase from 56 in 2005.
    Among the 500 largest public companies in the U.S. , 15 percent had at least one Asian Pacific American on its board. In 2005, only 11 percent of the companies had an Asian on the board.
    Research for this year's report card was prepared with the help of the Asian-American Business Association of the Harvard Business School . 
    When asked why the committee has focused its attention on getting more Asians and Asian Pacific Americans on the boards of major U.S. companies, Mr. Chu said the answer was simple: "It just makes good business sense." 
    "Whether it's about global competitiveness, especially the search for a ' China strategy' or ' India strategy' or the increasingly affluent Asian-American market, corporate America is progressively taking note of the strategic value of having highly qualified Asians and Asian Pacific Islanders in the boardroom," Mr. Chu said in a news release announcing the findings.
    "The initiative was organized to increase awareness of this trend and to highlight forward-thinking companies and their CEOs who 'get it,' " Mr. Chu said.
    Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. John Fugh, chairman of the Committee of 100, said: "The resourceful CEO will find an APA community to be a largely untapped pool of highly qualified candidates. Many of these candidates are leaders in their respective industries, professions and communities, and are individuals with uniquely diverse talents and perspectives who, for example, can strategically assist companies desiring to market to the highly educated and increasingly affluent APA consumer market or to an increasingly global audience."
    The bottom line? Get more Asian Pacific Americans at the table in the boardroom.
    The Committee of 100 was founded in 1989 by a small group of visionaries including I.M. Pei, Yo-Yo Ma and Shirley Young who recognized the need for an organization that brings an Asian-American perspective to U.S. relations and to address the concerns of Americans of Chinese and other Asian heritage. The committee bridges the cultures and systems of Asia and America , and provides a forum for those issues that Americans of Chinese and other Asian descent face in bettering their lives in the U.S.
    The committee's dual mission is to strengthen the relationship between the U.S. and China , and to encourage full participation of Chinese and other Asian-Americans in all aspects of American life.
    And while Asian Pacific Americans have not broken the glass ceiling surrounding the boardrooms at Fortune 500 companies, it is clear that they have been major players in the business community.
    According to statistics provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, Asian Pacific Americans owned more than 1.1 million businesses in the U.S. in 2002. 
    Asian-owned businesses generated more than $326 billion in revenues in 2002, up 8 percent from 1997. 
    And not all Asians own doughnut shops or dry cleaners.
    In 2002, more than three in 10 Asian-owned firms provided professional, scientific, technical, personal, and repair and maintenance services. Asian business owners also provided jobs for an estimated 2.2 million people. 
    More than 290,000 Asian business owners are Chinese, about 231,000 Asian-Indian, 158,000 Korean, 147,000 Vietnamese, 128,000 Filipino and 86,000 Japanese. 
    California , New York and Texas were the states with the largest number of Asian-owned businesses in 2002.
    More than 371,000 Asian-owned businesses were reported in California , followed by 145,000 in New York and 77,000 in Texas . 
    From the Chinese laborers who began cooking and selling food to workers on the transcontinental railroad in the 1800s, to today's Asian-Indians in the hospitality and hotel industry, many first-generation Asian immigrants have a proven track record as entrepreneurs. 
    Mr. Chu's mother, Irene Chu, is among these enterprising immigrants. She opened Chu's Chinese Restaurant in Addison , a business that supported her and her six children. The 88-year-old widow ran the restaurant for more than four decades before it closed last year.
    Today, her son is a merger and acquisitions partner at Haynes and Boone LLP.   He, like many second- and third-generation Asian Pacific Americans, is ready and poised to serve as a director at a Fortune 500 company. 

6/7/07 Wall Street Journal: Benefits of Issuing Visas on Merit Are Questioned: As Immigration Bill Faces Senate Test, Family Pluses Cited,
by June Kronholz and Sarah Lueck
    Washington -- Proponents of the pending immigration bill argue that current U.S. policy does more harm than good to the economy, by issuing most visas based on applicants' blood ties to earlier arrivals rather than on skills and education.
    But it turns out there is scant evidence to back up arguments that a merit-based system -- which would award points for job skills, education and other favorable attributes -- would help ensure immigrants become a boon rather than a burden. Some economists, pointing to the dearth of academic literature on the matter, question whether there is a significant difference in the contributions made by either type of newcomer.
    "People are more than the sum of their tax payments minus benefits," says Ben Johnson of the Immigration Policy Center , a Washington think tank that is generally sympathetic to immigration.
    The family-versus-merit issue is one of many contentious questions buffeting the debate over the comprehensive immigration package. Another involves how to handle the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants that are already in the U.S. Conservative critics say the current version of the proposal offers an unfair "amnesty," and are trying to make it harder for those people to stay in the country.
    The debate over family immigration came to a head last night, as the Senate rejected an effort by Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) to grant permanent residency to some 800,000 people who have applied for legal status based on family ties. Though the proposal fell on a procedural move requiring 60 votes, the 53 votes it received show a strong interest, particularly among Democrats, for giving greater weight to family connections.
    The Senate debate stretched late into the night, and other family-related amendments were expected to be considered. One amendment, proposed by Sen. Barack Obama (D., Ill.) would eliminate the merit-based system after five years and was viewed by Republicans as anathema to the bipartisan immigration deal. The Senate also was set to vote on whether to make English the official U.S. language.
    The Senate passed an amendment giving law-enforcement officials access to the rejected applications of illegal immigrants seeking to gain legal status -- a change that makes it easier to track down people who don't obey orders to leave.
    The immigration bill is set to face its most serious test yet today, with a vote on whether to end debate. Republicans want more time to air their proposals, while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) says there must be an endpoint soon. The survival of the legislation largely depends on whether Senate leaders are able to work out an agreement on a limited set of amendments.
    Many critics of the merit-based approach frame the debate as one pitting morality -- whether to bring families together or keep them apart -- against economics. But some of them say even the economics in favor of the proposed changes aren't sound. In testimony before the House last month, former Urban Institute economist Harriet Duleep argued that family-based immigrants don't hurt but help the economy, by adding flexibility that can more readily fill holes in a changing labor market. Family-based immigrants are more likely than employment-based immigrants or native-born Americans to jump at opportunities by acquiring skills, she argued.
    Many learned construction skills during the recent home-building boom or have enrolled in certification courses to meet health-care shortages, for example. That adaptability means that while many enter the U.S. job market at low wages, their paychecks grow faster than those of employment-based immigrants, whose salaries start higher, Ms. Duleep said.
    Some economists also argue that family-based immigration promotes entrepreneurship. Family members pool their resources and labor to open small businesses or factories. Many of those are in struggling inner cities or rural towns, where the cost of starting a business is lower and immigrant-owned restaurants and shops have become a force behind economic revitalization.
    James P. Smith, a Rand Corp. economist who backs skill-based immigration, says entrepreneurs account for "a relatively small part of who comes. Mostly, [immigrants] do jobs like the rest of us."
    Low-skilled immigrants free up time for higher-skilled workers to be more productive, argues Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati. They run day-care centers so better-educated women can enter the labor force or train as nursing aides, who free nurses for higher-skilled work, for example.
And not all family-drawn immigrants are poor and poorly educated. The sibling of an immigrant cardiologist is also likely to be -- or become -- a professional. Last year, 42,000 family-based immigrants were in management or professional jobs, or almost as many as those admitted on employment-based preferences.
    In any event, no one is talking about ending family-based immigration, or even adopting a system that gives the majority of immigration visas to skilled workers. Under the Senate plan, the spouses and minor children of legal immigrants still could come in unlimited numbers. But their parents for the first time would face an annual cap, and siblings and adult children would have to compete with everyone else around the world who wanted to come to the U.S.
    Last year, the U.S. issued immigration visas to 15,070 people who the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services concluded had "extraordinary" talents, were outstanding scientists or were key executives with multinational companies. It issued 63,255 visas to the brothers and sisters of earlier immigrants.
    Advocates of a high-skills preference argue that immigrants admitted because of family ties are a fiscal drain on the economy: Because they tend to be poorer and less-educated, they pay less in taxes and draw more on public services than those chosen for their talents.
    "It doesn't make sense in these times, when everybody's crying for skilled labor, that you would bring in people" on any other basis than merit, says Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming , who argued for a skills-based system during the last big congressional immigration debate, in 1986.
    The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, estimates that a quarter of legal adult immigrants arrive each year without a high-school diploma, which largely consigns them to low-skilled jobs. Low-skilled immigrant households -- legal and illegal -- paid an average $10,000 a year in taxes in 2004, it calculates, while receiving $30,160 in benefits and services, including education, food stamps and Medicaid.
    "Family unification is a bad deal for taxpayers," says Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Policy, which favors restricting immigration.
    Of 800,000 people admitted last year to join their families, 86,000 were age 60 or older. And because siblings and adult children of immigrants often must wait years for a visa that allows them to follow their families, many arrive past their peak earning years. Last year, 74,000 listed their occupations as "unemployed" and 140,000 as homemakers.
    Still, a system that awards points for desirable attributes isn't guaranteed to do a better job getting the U.S. the higher-skilled newcomers that Senate backers of the measure want, a University of Texas study suggests. The study showed that recent immigrants to Australia and Canada , which use a points system, had more education than those to the U.S. But after excluding Hispanic immigrants, who account for the majority of illegal immigrants, the U.S. attracted better-educated immigrants, even using a preference system based on family reunification.

6/7/07 Associated Press: The family that beats a robber together ... Police arrive in time to save suspect from being whacked with shovel,
    Hinesville , GA - A robbery suspect was rescued by officers after his intended victims disarmed him, beat him with a metal broomstick and were about to whack him with a shovel, authorities said.
    Police officers who were summoned to the home late Tuesday said they found the suspect, identified as Darrel Rolle, 27, lying on the living-room floor as Wu Ni's family held him down.
    "He was so exhausted, we had to help him walk to the patrol car," Sheriff's Deputy Brian Barnes said.
    Ni, a restaurant cook, told officers that he, his wife, his parents and other family members were returning to the home when he was confronted in the master bedroom by a man pointing a gun and shouting, "Give me the money!"
    Ni said the man forced him to his knees and was taking cash from another family member when Ni grabbed his arm and took the gun away.
    But that was just the start of the melee. According to the police report, Ni's parents and a cousin jumped on Rolle, and the combatants moved to the living room, where Ni's wife, Rong Lin, pummeled Rolle with a metal broomstick.
    When the broomstick bent, Rong Lin got a shovel from the back yard, but Barnes and a second officer arrived before Rolle could get hit with the shovel, authorities said.
    "When we walked into the living room, the family let Rolle go," Barnes said. "We were able to cuff him without incident."
    The gun turned out to be a pellet gun, police said.
    Scratches, cuts, bites
    Rolle was treated at a hospital for scratches and a bite on his ear and then taken to jail. He was charged with armed robbery, burglary and battery. Wu Ni was treated at the scene for cuts and a bite on his arm.
    Hinesville police could not say Thursday whether Rolle had an attorney.

6/5/07 San Francisco Chronicle: Ex-general called father of Hmong in U.S. ,
by Matthai Chakko Kuruvila
    More than 30 years ago, Vang Pao led a guerrilla army of Hmong tribesmen fighting to keep communist forces from taking control of his native Laos . When the United States staged its final retreat from Vietnam in 1975, Pao fled to the United States and helped other Hmong to do the same. 
    The former general is now 77 years old and living in Orange County , but federal authorities said Monday that he hadn't given up the fight. They accused him of leading a ring of conspirators that was raising money and weapons to launch an attack against the communist government in Laos . 
    The Hmong are an ethnic and linguistic group native to a region that includes southern China , Vietnam and Cambodia in addition to Laos . Pao, a Hmong, was a general under the Laotian royal government. 
    Laos ' neutrality during the Vietnam War meant the United States could not send its own troops to fight communist forces. But U.S. officials feared that if Laos fell to the communists, so too would South Vietnam and Cambodia .  Paul , Minn. , center of the largest concentration of Hmong Americans.
    Pao encouraged the Hmong to educate themselves, to start businesses and become successful in their new country, said Vue, breaking into tears during an interview. Hmong people would often give jewelry, fine clothes or other presents in gratitude for his help, Vue said. 
    "Vang Pao has been a central figure -- the central figure -- in Hmong life for a very long time," said Anne Fadiman, who wrote an account of a Hmong family in the Central Valley , "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down." But, she said, "he has always been controversial." 
    For those who have immigrated to the United States , the war sometimes creates a generational gap, Fadiman said. Pao is a hero to many older Hmong who long to return home, she said, but many younger Hmong are less taken with him and have little desire to leave the United States , where they were born. 
    Fadiman said about 80 percent of the Hmong in the United States donated to Pao's organization in the early 1980s. Even then, Pao told her that the money was to be used "to carry out guerrilla activities and the eventual overthrow of the communist government presently controlling Laos ," she wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. 
    Vue insisted that Pao is a peaceful person interested only in helping the Hmong. 
    "I don't believe he's the person who would attack the Laotian government," Vue said. "He always says peace comes first. He doesn't want war." 



6/5/07 Miami Herald (Los Angeles Times Service): White male writers dominate Hollywood film, television jobs: The earnings gap between minorities and white males working in film and television has steadily widened, according to a Writers Guild study,
by Richard Verrier
    Hollywood -- Despite some advances by women and minority writers, white male scribes disproportionately dominate film and TV jobs in Hollywood , according to a study released by the Writers Guild of America, West.
    More than 30 percent of the U.S. population is nonwhite, the study noted, yet minority writers accounted for less than 10 percent of employed television writers between 1999 and 2005. In film, the share of minority writers remained at 6 percent, unchanged since 1999, according to the sixth in a series of reports by the guild examining employment and earnings of its members.
    ''Little progress has been made,'' said the report's author, University of California , Los Angeles sociology Professor Darnell Hunt.
    What's more, he said, next year's numbers will likely be worse due to the recent merger of the UPN and WB networks into the new CW, which resulted in the canceling of several minority-themed shows
    Union officials released the latest findings hoping to influence hiring for the upcoming television season.
    ''The disturbing problem which underlies the need for this report is matched only by the disturbing lack of change that has been the industry's response,'' Guild leader Patric Verrone said.
    The earnings gap between minorities and white males working in film and television has steadily widened, with minority writers earning $83,334 in 2005, compared to $118,357 for white males.
    Women television writers, however, earned virtually the same as men in 2005, after an earnings gap of $10,000 in 2004. Nonetheless, the median income for female film writers was $40,000 less for males.
    While older writers earned the most, they are significantly underrepresented on show staffs, the report states.

6/4/07 NY1.com: "Activists Call On DOE To Stop Racial Harassment In City Schools,"
    Lawmakers and civil rights activists are calling on education officials to keep schools free from racial harassment after an alleged hate crime at a Queens high school. 
    They say that last month's incident where the classmate of a 15-year-old Sikh student was forced to have his hair cut against his religious belief is just the tip of the iceberg. 
    The advocates claim the Department of Education has done little to curb what they say is a widespread culture of intimidation against students of Asian descent in schools all over the city. 
    "Why haven't they implemented the Dignity for All Students Act that was passed by the city council years ago? Why are they turning a blind eye to the problem of harassment in our schools, said Councilmember John Liu. 
    "In Queens, of the people we surveyed, over 70 percent of the Sikh are teased or harassed based on their religion. That is not acceptable. That is not what New York is all about, said Amardeep Singh of the Sikh Coalition. 
    In a statement, the DOE says school leaders have worked to create a safe, nurturing environment at Newton High School, the scene of the incident. 
    In general they say discrimination, harassment and bullying isn't tolerated in schools.

6/4/07 Townhall.com: Why diversity doesn't matter,
by Dinesh D'Souza
    The current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has an article defending affirmative action by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. The article is called "Why Diversity Matters" and most of it consists of the usual platitudes: diversity is good, we need diversity, America has become more diverse, diversity enhances education, blah, blah, blah. 
    At one time America looked to its Ivy League presidents to provide intellectual leadership on national issues. Now hardly anyone knows who these people are, and even fewer pay attention to what they say. This is generally a good thing. Judged by the elevated standard of the past, most of these guys are pipsqueaks. But in academia, the pipsqueaks do matter. Bollinger has spearheaded the reactionary movement to protect affirmative action on the campus. He has fought have to prevent racial and ethnic preferences from being seen by courts as a straightforward violation of equal rights. In this he has been partly successful: racial preferences stagger on, battered but not yet defeated. 
    What interested me was this Bollinger statement: "By abolishing all public affirmative action programs, voters in California and Michigan...have not only toppled a ladder of equal opportunity in higher education and so many of us fought to build. They will almost assuredly make their great public universities less diverse--and have in fact done so in California where the impact has become clear." 
    Consider two scenarios for Berkeley or UCLA. In the first, the campus is 45 percent Asian, 48 percent white, 4 percent Hispanic and 3 percent black. In the second, the campus is 30 percent Asian, 55 percent white, 7 percent hispanic, and 8 percent black. Does the second scenario strike you as markedly more diverse than the first? 
    Actually it isn't. The fraction of minorities is roughly the same. The difference is that the first scenario is produced by merit. It represents merit-based diversity. It is a pretty good picture of what Berkeley and UCLA look like now. The second scenario is produced by racial preferences. It represents socially-engineered diversity. It is how Berkeley and UCLA used to look in the era of racial preferences. 
    The advantage of natural diversity is that it achieves its goal without sacrificing merit. The disadvantage of socially-engineered diversity is twofold: First, it is unfair to qualified students who are denied admission. If you want to raise the proportion of under-represented groups, you have to lower the proportion of over-represented groups. But who are these over-represented groups? Basically they are Jews and Asian Americans. And they are over-represented not because they are discriminating against anybody but because they are out-performing everybody. So why should they suffer? 
    The second disadvantage of ethnic and racial preferences is that they often hurt the students they seek to help. How? By putting them into competition with students against whom they are mismatched. A Hispanic student who can do the work and compete effectively at San Francisco State University is admitted to Berkeley , where he is completely overwhelmed by the work and ends up at the bottom of the class, or worse, dropping out. California s public universities had scandalous black and Hispanic dropout rates in the era of affirmative action. 
    I dont see any evidence that people like Bollinger care. Their goal is to make the racial picture look good, to have a campus that looks like America . If they can issue press releases that say Black enrollment up 15 percent, they have achieved their goal. They simply forget to issue the other kind of press release that says that between one-third and one-half of the black students are failing to graduate. As Andre Agassi once put in in a TV commercial for a camera company, Image is everything. 
    Fortunately the courts are becoming increasingly skeptical with trusting equality of rights to people like Bollinger. Id like to see one of the justices say to this fellow, Hey Bollinger, if you feel to bad about historical discrimination and the lack of diversity at Columbia , why dont you step down on the condition that the university replace you with a Hispanic or African American? Why dont you stand behind your convictions and give up your position? Why are you so willing to sacrifice the career prospects of others to promote your idea of what is fair? Such questions are rarely posed to these grand pooh-bahs of academe. 
    The bottom line is that Bollinger is wrong. Yes, diversity is good for higher education, but the issue raised by affirmative action is not one of "diversity" versus "no diversity." It is a matter of the natural diversity produced by talent and hard work, versus Bollinger's type of socially engineered diversity. The National Football League doesn't look like America , the U.S. Congress doesn't look like America , Hollywood doesn't look like America , so why is it so important that UCLA or Columbia look like America ? In this country what matters is not how you look but what you can do. 
    Dinesh D'Souza's new book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 has just been published by Doubleday. DSouza is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

6/3/07 Honololu Advertiser (Associated Press): Hirono slams pay-bias ruling
     Congresswoman Mazie Hirono has joined fellow Democrats in criticizing a U.S. Supreme Court decision limiting the time workers have to sue their employers for pay discrimination.
    The court voted 5-4 Tuesday to throw out a Goodyear employee's complaint that she earned thousands of dollars less than her male counterparts.
    Under the court's decision, an employee must sue within a 180-day deadline of a decision involving pay if the employee thinks it involves his or her race, sex, religion or national origin.
    "The court's interpretation of the Civil Rights Act completely ignores the reality of the workplace, because in many cases workers don't discover they are being subjected to pay discrimination until much later, often beyond 180 days," said Hirono, D-Hawai'i.
    "This decision is a setback for women in their fight for equality, as women are often the ones who bring such claims. This decision is totally one-sided and unfair to workers."
    Hirono is a member of the House Education and Labor Committee, which has oversight of workplace issues.
    "I will support efforts in Congress to remove the time restrictions used by the court to deny the rights of workers to equal and fair pay," she said.

6/1/07 Washington Post: "At Med Schools, a New Degree of Diversity: Classes Reflect A Foreign Flavor,"
by David Brown
    The six members of Medical Team 4 have a lot in common. Each wears a white coat, has a stethoscope for a necklace and has stayed up late this week. They can all start an IV and work up a solitary lung nodule.
    They share something less obvious, too. With one exception, none has a grandparent born in the United States.
    Med 4 at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northwest Washington is the new face of American medicine. Its members happen to come from Georgetown and George Washington universities, but the team is indistinguishable from similar groups of young doctors and doctors-to-be at many of the country's 125 medical schools.
    In the past 15 years, U.S. medicine has seen a huge influx of first- and second-generation immigrants. It follows and augments a different demographic trend that began 30 years ago with the acceptance of increasing numbers of women into medical schools. As a result of that earlier revolutionary change, half of new practitioners today are women.
    The Norman Rockwell-Marcus Welby image of the American doctor -- an avuncular white man, often in a bow tie -- is rapidly disappearing.
    From 1980 to 2004, the fraction of medical school graduates describing themselves as white fell from 85 percent to 64 percent. Over that same period, the percentage of Asians increased from 3 percent to 20 percent, with Indians and Chinese the two biggest ethnic groups.
    Counted in the "white" category, moreover, are a moderate number of ethnic Persians whose families fled the 1979 Iranian revolution, and a smaller number of more recent arrivals from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the "black" category is an unknown number of graduates whose families recently arrived from Africa, predominantly Nigerians and Ghanaians.
    "We are seeing more and more kids of foreign-born parents, especially in the last eight to 10 years. I don't think there is any doubt about it," said Milford M. Foxwell, a physician and dean of admissions at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. In his 18 years on the job, he has reviewed about 75,000 applications.
    Many forces are sketching this changing portrait of the American medical student. They include a general increase in immigration, a large influx of foreigners trained in scientific and technical professions, and a culture of educational achievement in communities of newly arrived immigrants that prepares their children for the competition and rigors of medical school.
    How -- or whether -- this trend will change the practice of medicine in this country is uncertain.
    There is a small amount of evidence that a diverse student body may be more attuned to disparities in medical care than a homogeneous one. A study published in 2004 found that black, Hispanic and Asian medical students (in descending order) are more likely than white ones to think that U.S. medicine often "treats people unfairly" based on race, ethnicity, insurance status, income or ability to speak English.
    In general, though, few are eager to touch on the implications of the new ethnic mix in medical schools. Officials at institutions as different as the University of Vermont and Howard University declined multiple requests to discuss, even anecdotally, the evolution of their student makeup.
    In the case of Med 4, its roots stretch to India (two students), Bangladesh (one), Austria (one) and Russia (one). The sole team member without a family narrative of recent arrival is African American.
    The door to the team's office at the VA hospital humorously telegraphs an awareness that the people inside the windowless warren of cubicles, computers, backpacks and water bottles are not quite a random sample of America. Someone has taped on it a page from the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News.
    "Your doctor could be an alien! They're working undercover!" shouts the headline. Under it is a photo of four masked-and-gowned physicians -- one with dark space-creature eyes -- gathered around a supine patient.
    Team 4's international coloration includes even its senior physician, Divya Shroff, an assistant professor of medicine at GW.
    Her father immigrated from India to study chemical engineering in graduate school, returned to India to marry, then came back to the United States with his bride. Shroff and her younger brother and sister grew up in the Chicago suburbs but spent three years in New Delhi in the 1980s. Her brother is also a physician, her sister an investment banker.
    "We were never forced into medicine," she said recently in her office at the VA hospital. "But in the Indian community in Chicago, everyone was a professional. Everyone was a doctor or an engineer."
    She went from high school into a program at the University of Missouri where students got both a bachelor's degree and a medical degree in six years. Of the 10 people in her group, "maybe one was Caucasian," she recalled. The majority were Indians.
    The culture of high expectation holds true for another South Asian on the team, resident Moneera Haque, who grew up in Bethesda with parents who immigrated from Bangladesh.
    Haque, 30, has a doctorate in social work along with her medical degree. She recently presented a paper on "racial differences in utilization of cardiac rehabilitation" at a scientific meeting in New Orleans and another paper at a conference in Amsterdam. Her brother is a neurosurgeon.
    In her household, the notion that education came first "was simply the way things were," Haque said while sipping a drink in a break room. "For me, that didn't seem like pressure." But she admitted she wasn't studying just for herself: "We have a sense of obligation to our parents to help them fulfill their dreams as well."
    Alexandra Langer, a third-year medical student at GW, traced a distinctly different path.
    Langer, 30, grew up in Yekaterinburg, in central Russia. Her father managed a pension fund, and her mother was a police officer. As a high school student, she aspired to become a doctor, but her parents talked her out of it.
    "In Russia, doctors are much lower status than here," she said. "And they are very low-paid."
    So at 18 she left home and moved to Prague, where she studied Czech, English and international relations, but she never really gave up her original idea. She married an American, moved to the United States, graduated from college in North Carolina and got into medical school.
    "It seems like a very, very long time," she said. "But it's worth it."
    Although the Association of American Medical Colleges asks all medical school applicants and matriculants to describe their race and ethnicity in general terms, there is little published information about national background and none about family history. Anecdotes, however, suggest that immigrants' children are more likely to attend schools on both coasts.
    S. Balasubramaniam, a surgeon at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles who emigrated from India in 1971, recently queried 50 medical schools and calculated that 12 percent of the class that entered in 2006 is of Indian heritage. The highest percentages are in California, Texas, New York, New Jersey and New England.
    Na Shen, 25, a second-year medical student at Maryland who was born in Shanghai, calculated that 12 percent of her school's students are from China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan, and 1 percent from Southeast Asia. When South Asians are included, the Asian portion of the school rises to 21 percent.
    In contrast, University of Kansas medical school students since 1996 have consistently run about 10 percent "either born overseas or of parents who were born overseas," said Glendon Cox, the vice dean.
    The most recent arrivals -- Africans -- are the hardest to quantify.
    Morehouse School of Medicine, in Atlanta, has 12 students born in Africa out of about 210 in the M.D. program. Meharry Medical College, another historically black institution, in the past eight years has had an average of two foreigners per year in its incoming classes of about 60. It has no data, however, on students with recent ties to Africa who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Howard, the third historically black medical school, did not provide information when asked.
    A half-dozen people at the Student National Medical Association -- the main U.S. organization of black medical students -- did not respond to inquiries.
    Lauree Thomas, an African American physician who is associate dean for admissions at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, estimated that "20 to 30 percent of the black applicant pool" at her school is students who were born in Nigeria, or of Nigerian parents. Foxwell, the Maryland dean, estimates that close to half the black students there have recent ties to Africa.
    This is a touchy subject in the black medical community.
    Albert Morris Jr., a diagnostic radiologist in Memphis who is president of the predominantly black National Medical Association, said he recently talked to black students at Pennsylvania State University's medical school in Hershey. Afterward, several took him aside and quietly complained about the rising number of Africans.
    "It was a big topic -- that people were coming in and getting slots that they thought should be going to African Americans," he recalled.
    Blacks constitute about 13 percent of the U.S. population, but only 4 percent of U.S. doctors. There has been much effort in the last two decades to remedy this imbalance. Morris, a graduate of Howard, said he understands the students' sensitivities.
    "We are happy to see doctors who are ready to treat minority populations, no matter their nationality," said Morris, 56. "But we want to make sure that those of us who have helped open the doors [to medical school for blacks] get to share in the bounty."



5/31/07 Dallas Morning News: Can you name these six Asians in history?
by Esther Wu
    May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. It is also time for my annual Asian-American Pop Quiz. This year the focus is Asian-American role models or heroes.
    Growing up in San Antonio , my hero was Davy Crockett.
    In fact, I still have my Davy Crockett mug. I had very few Asian-American role models or heroes outside my immediate family. That wasn't because they didn't exist; it was that I had little opportunity to learn about them. So here's an opportunity for all of us to learn about some folks who have had a major impact on all of us. 
    1. Thanks to the movies, many of us know about Schindler's List. But two Asians also risked their lives to save Jewish people from the Holocaust. Who were they?
    2. There has been a push to get more people of color elected to public office. But one man made history in 1956 when he was elected to Congress long before there were organized political caucuses and coalitions. Who was he?
    3. Each year, thousands of people visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington , D.C. Critics say the 594-foot-long granite wall containing the names of those who died in the war is a fitting tribute. But before construction began, the critics hated the design and the designer. Who was she?
    4. During World War II, more than 120,000 U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry were interned in camps throughout the U.S. But one young man refused to go.  He took his case all the way to the Supreme Court and lost. Nevertheless, many consider him a champion of Asian-American civil rights. Who was he?
    5. When it comes to civil rights, most people usually think of people like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Csar Chvez. But can you name the 84-year-old Japanese-American grandmother who fought alongside activist Malcolm X?
    Answers:
    1. Chiune Sugihara and Dr. Feng Shan Ho saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust during World War II. Dr. Ho was a Chinese diplomat who was sent to Vienna in 1937, shortly before the Nazis occupied Austria . As the Chinese general consul in Vienna , Dr. Ho went against orders from China and issued thousands of Jewish refugees visas to Shanghai , thus saving their lives.  In 1939, Mr. Sugihara was sent by Japan to open a consular office in Lithuania . After the Nazi army marched into Poland , Jewish refugees began pouring into Lithuania . Many of them found their way to Mr. Sugihara's office and begged for transit visas. Mr. Sugihara defied orders and issued an estimated 40,000 visas to Jews who escaped through the Soviet Union and to Japan .
    2. In 1956, Dalip Singh Saund became the first Asian-American elected to Congress. But before he could be elected, he had to fight for the right to become a U.S. citizen.  Born in India in 1899, Mr. Saund came to the U.S. to study. After earning a math degree from the University of California at Berkeley , Mr. Saund could not overcome anti-Asian sentiments in the U.S. to find a job, so he turned to farming. In 1949, he and other Asian Indians fought for and earned the right to become U.S. citizens.  In 1956, Mr. Saund left the fields of California for the halls of Congress, serving three terms before his death.
    3. Maya Lin was a 21-year-old architectural student at Yale University when she won a national design competition for the memorial. But many people said her design a stark black wall etched with the names of those who had died in the war was too somber and depressing. In public meetings to discuss the issue, the young student was met with protesters who subjected her to racial slurs. And though she is Chinese and not Vietnamese, some veterans said it was an insult to have her design the monument. 
    4. Fred Korematsu was arrested when he did not show up at the relocation camp. He refused to report because he didn't want to leave his girlfriend. Mr. Korematsu lost his high court case, but years later, a group of dedicated young attorneys managed to vacate his original conviction for violating the relocation order.
    5. Yuri Kochiyama was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. Born in 1921 in California , she was interned in Arkansas , where she met her husband, Bill.  He was a soldier with the U.S. 442nd Infantry Battalion, one of the most highly decorated units in military history.  After the war, the couple moved to Harlem , where they worked with the redress movement to compensate Japanese-Americans who were interned. They also worked to encourage ethnic studies in schools.  In Harlem , Ms. Kochiyama met Malcolm X and became the only non-African-American member of his Organization of Afro-American Unity. In 1977, she worked with Puerto Rican citizens seeking independence. 

5/30/07 New York Times: Overhaul of Immigration Law Could Reshape New York ,
by Nina Bernstein
    Few places in the United States could be more deeply affected by the proposed overhaul of legal immigration than New York , say scholars and demographers of immigration. 
    The proposed law certainly would not end the flow of legal immigration to New York . But it could profoundly alter the currents that have long fed the citys mom and pop entrepreneurship, its kaleidoscopic diversity, and family networks that nurture and help assimilate newcomers. 
    More of the citys newcomers, compared with immigrants in other parts of the country, continue to gain entry through the very family visas that the pending bill would restrict or abolish and that would be replaced with a point system based on skills and education. 
    New York was front and center when Congress refashioned America s immigration system in 1965, replacing quotas based on race and national origin with a system centered on reunifying families. This time, with heated debate focused on illegal immigrants who cross the Mexican border and settle mainly in the West and South, New York s experience has received less attention. 
    Yet central to the citys storied comeback from the precipice of population loss and bankruptcy in the 1970s, most agree, was the big influx of unexpected immigrants an unintended consequence of the 1965 overhaul, sponsored by an influential Brooklyn representative, Emanuel Celler.
    These days, in a Lower East Side neighborhood that has been a cradle of family chain migration to America for 200 years, the deli at Delancey and Allen Streets is a 24-hour operation run by a man from Bangladesh one of about 70 relatives to follow a Bangladeshi seaman who jumped ship here in 1941. In luxury condominiums nearby, the newest residents include the affluent great-grandchildren of the eastern and southern European immigrants whose teeming poverty in the tenements prompted immigration quotas in the 1920s to keep out their kind.
    And when these newcomers need a key, they turn to Good Locksmith Inc. on Grand Street , a business run by the Lai family from China , who finally unlocked their door to America , relative by relative, after being unwelcome by law for a century.
    I love what I have now, and everything I have now, I work on it, said Steven Lai, 46, whose immigration at 23 depended not only on his mothers sponsorship, but on a long line of male forebears who endured 20-year family separations and exclusion from citizenship as they labored in the United States, first building railroads in 19th-century California. Family is more important than everything else, said Mr. Lai whose mother, Oilhang, 66, helps in the store. 
    Under the proposed point system, Mr. Lai would have been locked out. The measure aims to reduce chain migration the practice of one immigrant sponsoring others and to make room for those the federal government selects as the worlds best, brightest and most easily assimilated. It would end preferences for the adult children and siblings of United States citizens, and eliminate a citizens right to sponsor parents. Instead, the government would admit foreigners who scored highest on a scale that values advanced degrees, skills approved by the Department of Labor, and fluency in English, much more than family ties. Only those admitted on points could sponsor their spouse and minor children. 
    Yet immigrants like Mr. Lai, who learned English and locksmith skills at night school and opened his business 18 years ago with family savings, have been a vital economic engine for the city, said Gary Gerstle, a historian of immigration who teaches at Vanderbilt University . The citys record, he and others say, casts doubt on the dichotomy being drawn in the debate between family ties and other factors that might lead to economic success.
    The way that New York has come back is one of the great American success stories of the last 40 years, and immigrants are absolutely central to it, Professor Gerstle said. Mom and pop stores in New York have been a very dynamic force in the making of American society, and I would not want to see that possibility foreclosed.
    Unlike the rest of the country, the city has experienced a plateau in its large and diversified flow of legal immigrants since a peak in the early 1990s. Its immigration accelerated in the 1970s through a classic pattern of daisy chain migration with seed immigrants sponsoring close relatives who eventually sponsored others. According to 2005 figures, the latest available, more than 72 percent of the citys 102,545 legal immigrants admitted that year came through family ties, mostly as immediate kin of citizens, and only 11 percent through employer sponsorship; in the nation, 58 percent came through family-based visas, and 22 percent through employment.
    Joseph Salvo, the citys demographer, cautions that such numbers are an imperfect reflection of the scramble to find a way through the immigration maze, not a measure of New York s family immigrants, who include large numbers of both the highly educated and the low-skilled. And he is confident, he said, that New York will remain a magnet. 
    To Jamal Hussain, 26, the Bangladesh-born owner of the deli at Delancey Street , it seems obvious that families, which can be banks and safety nets, are the foundation of success. He opened his deli with loans from relatives four years ago, and he points out that families also provide a screening mechanism and an incentive to succeed.
    They know Im a hard worker, motivated, said Mr. Hussain, who has repaid the loans, married, had a baby, and bought a house in the Bronx . Kids are going to school, theyre being doctors, lawyers, he added, citing a niece who is a graduate student in science at New York University . Bottom line, instead of bringing those people already educated from over there, we have the opportunity to be homegrown Ph.D.s.
    It is difficult to forecast the impact of the proposed changes on the mix and number of future immigrants, experts say. The bill aims to reduce legal migration in the future by eliminating family sponsorships outside the overall numbers set by government, and ending the diversity visa, which brings thousands of fresh seed immigrants by lottery to New York each year. But for the first eight years, it would grant family visa applications already in the pipeline, many stalled since the 1990s, when demand to sponsor foreign relatives far exceeded the numbers allowed in categories like sibling of a citizen. 
    Many people in the pipeline might no longer want to come, however; others are already here illegally. And if they overstayed temporary visas, like an estimated 40 percent of illegal immigrants, they would no longer qualify for family visas. Under the bill, they would have to apply separately for legal status, like other illegal immigrants.
    If it was just geared to skilled labor, New York would be in trouble, said David Reimers, an emeritus immigration historian at N.Y.U. Like all big cities, it depends on unskilled labor. If family members are left out, he added, theyre going to come in by hook or crook.
    For now, the proposed system grants up to 47 points for special occupations to be determined later and up to 28 for educational degrees. Only if a would-be immigrant scores at least 55 points would additional points be awarded for family ties: 8 to a citizens adult son or daughter, 6 to the adult child of a permanent resident, 4 to a citizens sibling. 
    Such a scheme could affect New York disproportionately because among states with the most foreign-born, it has the largest proportion of legal to illegal immigrants, demographers say. Some of the citys immigrant groups, like Koreans, Indians and Filipinos, have such high rates of education and professional skill, however, that they could do well under a skills-based points system.
    But Seung Jin Jung, 43, president of the board of the Young Korean American Education and Service Center in New York, said he and his two sisters would have flunked on points 20 years ago, after coming of age in South Korea during a seven-year wait for visas while their parents worked in New York. The children spoke no English and had no degrees when they arrived. Now he has his own import-export business; one sister is a music therapist, he said, and the other is a physical therapist and both are working on their Ph.D.s.
    The current proposed immigration change views the families of immigrants as an unnecessary burden, Mr. Jung said. Thats the wrong approach. Take a look at whats going on in New York once you are here with family members, you not only become part of the work force in this country, you become part of the social fabric.
    Csar Gonzlez, 58, a Dominican immigrant whose family-run bookstore, Librera Caliope, is now a literary cultural center in Washington Heights, echoed the sentiment, noting that he and his brother Jos had little education when they were sponsored by an uncle and a sister. Its the same story for most of the people in the neighborhood, he said. Lots of them would be excluded. Only the well-to-do would qualify and people who already have an education.
    Mexicans, mostly unskilled and illegal immigrants, are the newest group to emerge as a large presence in the city, demographers say. They are now estimated to be among the citys top three immigrant groups, joining Dominicans and Chinese, Mr. Salvo said, with about 350,000 in 2006, up from about 200,000 six years ago, including children born here. In dense and diverse city neighborhoods, they generally have been absorbed as just one more immigrant group, though in many communities in the metropolitan region, as elsewhere, conflict has erupted over their rapid settlement. 
    Peter H. Schuck, a Yale professor of immigration law who supports a points system to meet global competition, says most Americans do not want more immigration, and want to improve immigrants quality. 
    We have a very valuable resource that we are distributing, and we ought to do it in full consciousness of what we want to absorb in the way of immigrants, he said. The country cant simply throw up its hands and say, Weve done it this way for the past few generations, so we just should go on doing it.  
    But Professor Gerstle points out that immigrant families who helped populate the city over the last 40 years have become part of its lifeblood. 
    Theyre New Yorkers, arent they? he asked. A lot of Americans may think thats not American, but it isnt foreign.
    Correction: June 2, 2007
    An article on Wednesday about the impact that a Senate proposal to overhaul immigration law could have on New York misstated a provision of the bill. Immigrants who are relatives of United States citizens and have overstayed their temporary visas could indeed qualify for legalization on the same terms as illegal immigrants who crossed the border surreptitiously. Also, the article referred incompletely to another provision of the bill. While it would eliminate the right of citizens to sponsor their parents a right that is now unlimited it would create an annual quota of 40,000 visas for which citizens could compete to bring parents into the country.

5/28/07 www.politico.com: Pay attention to Asian-American voters 
by: James G. Gimpel and Wendy K. Tam Cho
    With Republicans making little progress in winning over Latino voters and Democrats in little danger of losing many, it may be time for the political parties to consider an ethnic constituency that really is up for grabs, the Asian Pacific American population.
    Consisting of several large nationality groups and a number of smaller ones, Asian-Americans have been mostly ignored, even as they move out of traditional areas of ethnic concentration and vote in higher proportions than Latinos.
    While less numerous than Latinos, the Asian Pacific American population is the fastest-growing minority population, and it is an important electoral presence in a number of states -- not only California and Hawaii but also Arizona, Nevada, Alaska, Utah and Washington in the West; Missouri and Illinois in the Midwest; New Jersey, Maryland, New York and Massachusetts in the Northeast; and Florida, Texas and Virginia in the South. Without question, the Asian-American population is consequential in many additional locations in races for local offices.
    The 2006 national exit poll shows Asians to be much more equally divided in their party identification (35 percent Democratic, 27 percent Republican) than Latinos, with a substantial share reporting to be independents. While only 15 percent of Latino voters reported they were independent in national exit polling, 33 percent of Asian-Americans did.
    Latinos voted 2-to-1 in favor of Democratic gubernatorial candidates in the 2006 elections, but Asians split their support evenly, 48 percent Democratic, 46 percent Republican. In the 2006 U.S.
    House contests, due to incumbency advantages, Asians went more Democratic (59 percent), but nothing like Latinos (71 percent). Given an objective examination of the data, then, this population looks like it could be a genuine swing constituency, and not just in California .
    Of course, referring to Asian-Americans as a "group" is an imperfect definition. After all, they are more likely to identify in nationality terms -- as Korean, Vietnamese or Chinese -- than as a pan-ethnic bloc. It makes the most sense to think of them as local blocs, rather than as a nationally cohesive group that can be characterized as monolithic.
    A smart campaign will approach differences between local Asian voting blocs by accumulating extensive knowledge about the resident population, relying upon volunteers, local operatives and a higher-than-usual amount of shoe leather to assemble a proper understanding. Today's overly professionalized and centralized campaigns are unaccustomed to thinking this way about outreach, and that accounts for both parties' poor performance among Asian-Americans in locations outside California and Hawaii.
    In recent weeks, we have examined two locations where the Asian-American population is worth special note: Nevada , sure to be a presidential battleground state in 2008, and Oregon , where a highly targeted U.S. Senate election in 2008 looms. Could the margins of victory in these contests come down to Asian-Americans? Surely they could, as they might in Florida and a large number of other states.
    Nevada is a fast-growing state, and Californians are spilling into Clark County (which encompasses Las Vegas) and Washoe County (encompassing Reno ) in search of a lower cost of living. As of fall 2006, Nevada was home to 14,000 Chinese-American registered voters, 6,000 Vietnamese, 7,600 Koreans and nearly 7,000 of Japanese ancestry -- surely consequential numbers in any close election. Voter registration records suggest that Asians in Nevada lean toward the Republican Party more than they do nationally, but not by much.
    Notably, in 2006, turnout was lower than it could have been for all of these nationality groups except for those of Japanese ancestry, who happen to have the deepest roots in the United States. For the Vietnamese, Koreans and Chinese, however, turnout in Nevada 's midterm elections hovered between 31 percent and 36 percent -- a clear sign that these voters were not being activated by the two major political parties.

5/28/07 New York Times: In Queens , Classes in Mandarin Are Also Lessons in Adaptation, 
by Ellen Barry
    Something extraordinary happened to Maria Farren of Flushing, Queens , on a recent trip to the grocery store. From the familiar background chatter of people speaking Chinese, a syllable leapt out from nowhere. It was not that she understood the word she didnt but the sound was familiar. That was enough of a surprise that she paused in mid-aisle.
    Its just a din of noise, Ms. Farren said, and all of a sudden you recognize something. 
    So on a rainy Wednesday evening, she was back in the basement room of the Queens housing project where two dozen adults gather every week to learn Mandarin. The free classes at the James A. Bland Houses draw a motley assortment of students; the current session includes an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, a black woman who grew up in the housing project and the practical-minded daughter of Hungarian immigrants. 
    They have in common these two attributes: They have lived in Flushing since before it was Asian, and they have decided that the time has come to adapt. 
    Kind of like, If you cant beat em, join em, said Ms. Farren, whose Italian-American relatives cannot fathom why she hasnt left for New Jersey .
    Pitched battles have been fought over language in Flushing , whose white ethnic population has receded as Korean and Chinese immigrants have arrived. In the late 1980s, when City Councilwoman Julia Harrison proposed a bill requiring businesses to post signs in English, a public divide seemed to open: On one side were the waves of Asian newcomers; on the other, longtime residents who felt displaced and alienated. 
    But Man-Li Kuo Lins weekly Mandarin class arranged by Ms. Harrisons successor, Councilman John C. Liu provides a different view of Flushing . Ms. Lins students filter in after finishing a days work as paramedics or elementary school teachers. They set up chairs under pipes labeled hot kitchen/bath and chilled water supply, which are periodically traversed by mice. Some eat supper discreetly out of paper bags. Then they stumble, with boisterous good humor, over the basics of Mandarin grammar.
    In the center of the front row, every Wednesday, sits an old man with a freckled scalp and a frizz of white hair. This is Frank Sygal, 85, a retired stockbroker whose enthusiasm in pursuit of Mandarin amazes and amuses his classmates. 
    His first question of the night during one recent class, delivered in the accent of his native Poland , was followed rapidly by several dozen follow-ups: Why do you say two words for bladder? I have one bladder! For one bladder its two words? What is word for state of Israel ? What is word for oral surgeon? If I go to study medicine in China , what do they teach me? 
    Nobody taught you in Poland to speak Chinese, Mr. Sygal said. 
    Mr. Sygal grew up outside Krakow and lost his parents on an August day in 1942 when German soldiers rounded up Jews, stripped off their jewelry and machine-gunned them. His facility with languages helped him survive: He spoke Russian with the Russian soldiers, Ukrainian with the Ukrainians and German with the Germans, reserving Hebrew for private spaces. Once he arrived in New York in 1949, there were two more languages to learn English and Spanish. 
    Now, at 85, he has embarked on his last great linguistic effort. His progress has been maddeningly slow; at one point, Mr. Sygal approached dozens of Chinese people, he said, in a fruitless attempt to translate the word ka-ching, a term he had seen in a headline in The New York Post and assumed to be Chinese. He hopes that he will be able to carry on a conversation in Mandarin by the time he is 95.
    If I be around, he said, I be able to speak.
    To his left was Cathy Stenger, driven to this class by the stubborn silence in her buildings elevator. She bought an apartment in a Flushing co-op in 1986 and has since seen 90 percent of the units go to Korean and Chinese families. She has a mute bond with a woman from the sixth floor, who embraces her every time they meet, and with an elderly man who soulfully grabs her hand. 
    The fact of the matter is, I cant talk to them, said Ms. Stenger, 65, whose parents immigrated from Hungary .
    Her interest is not casual. Her co-op board is threatened by a breakaway group of Asian tenants, she said, who are challenging bylaws about subletting or dividing units. A downstairs neighbor manufactures medicinal herbs, and though the woman added ventilation after Ms. Stenger complained, the scent sometimes wafts up through her radiator connections. And when gas leaked into a hallway recently, Ms. Stenger said, one of the neighbors hesitated to call 911 because she was afraid that she would be charged for the service. 
    Still, none of the changes have made her consider leaving Flushing .
    A lot of my friends it bothers, she said. My friends moved. 
    The Mandarin classes, now in their second 10-week session, were the brainchild of Donald Henton, 73, a retired city bus driver who has lived in Flushing since 1968. 
    Mr. Henton asked Councilman Liu to sponsor the lessons last year during a community meeting at which most of the comments were made in Mandarin. He feels a responsibility for the classes success; on Tuesday nights, he calls 40 people just to remind them to come.
    There have been moments of disappointment for Mr. Henton, who expected the classes to be standing-room-only. He has met cold shoulders among his own neighbors in the Bland Houses, where 78 percent of the tenants are black or Hispanic. On a sunny afternoon in the housing projects courtyard, Robert Winston, whose family moved to New York from Jamaica , responded to the idea of studying Mandarin with a long belly laugh. Anita Garcia, whose parents moved from Puerto Rico , practically spat. 
    I was born here, said Ms. Garcia, who is 44. Why should I learn their language?
    For years, tenants in the Bland Houses have worried that they would be priced out of an increasingly crowded and prosperous neighborhood. From the bench where he sits with his friends, Mr. Winston said, he can see both the Asian-dominated playgrounds and the basketball court used by the Bland Houses old guard.
    Mr. Henton, a longtime supporter of Councilman Liu, agreed that big changes are coming. Its time to adjust, he tells people at Bland Houses. But only one of his neighbors is attending the second session of Mandarin classes, he said, even after he slipped 400 fliers advertising the lessons under tenants doors.
    You know what they say? They didnt get it, he said. 
    Still, students return week after week. At break time, Ms. Lin leads them a clumsy, giggling corps de ballet in dance sequences from Chinese opera. A vivacious woman who volunteers her services, she peppers the class with small revelations: Under Chinese etiquette, when you sneeze, a person will pretend he or she did not hear you; Chinese people will not ask or answer the question How are you for fear of hearing or prompting a lie; the fourth of the tones used in Mandarin known as the high falling sound is so difficult that if you say it too many times, as she put it, you will feel hungry. 
    After six lessons, the students have begun to come to class with stories of progress: words overheard on the subway, characters recognized on signs. Dolores Morris, who has lived next door to a Chinese family for a year and a half, finally approached her lovely neighbor.
    Affection has grown between the two families, despite the language barrier. The neighbors take out the Morrises garbage to save her husband, who is 75, the physical strain, and they send their daughter to the Morrises door with steaming plates of food. Ms. Morris, 63, decided to begin Chinese lessons as a surprise. After a few lessons, she took a big deep breath and went up to her neighbor in the back yard.
    Nervously, she repeated the Mandarin phrase she had learned I am learning to speak Chinese and proudly showed her textbook to her neighbor, who looked surprised and disappeared inside. Though Mandarin is the dominant dialect in Flushing, the womans daughter emerged from the house and explained that her mother never learned to read or speak it; a native of Fujian province, she only spoke Fuzhounese, the dialect spoken in the city of Fuzhou and its region. 
    Ms. Morris laughed, telling the story. She said she has no immediate plans to begin studying Fuzhounese. 
    As it stands, when the neighbors bring gifts of food, Ill point to my mouth and rub my stomach and smile, she said. Well probably keep doing that.

5/25/07 AsianWeek.com: Democratic Chair Dean on Immigration, FilAm Vets, by Jose Ricardo G. Bondoc
    Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean recently convened a series of roundtable meetings with Asian American Pacific Islander and Muslim American community leaders in Chicago, Illinois and Washington, D.C. AsianWeek talked to the former Vermont Governor and presidential candidate on a recent visit to San Francisco. 
    Q: Please talk about immigration reform.   
    I believe immigrants are vital to this country. When I am giving a speech, I will often stop and ask how many people in the audience are Native Americans. A couple of people might put up their hands. Then I say, "The rest of you are all immigrants, the sons and daughters and grandchildren and descendants of immigrants." This is the legacy of our country. 
    Today, immigrants are among the hardest-working people in this country. They came here for a better life and are looking to raise their kids and give them a better life. This aspiration and hard work are part of the strength of our nation. We cannot allow politicians to turn us against them on the basis of their being immigrants or on the basis of race. 
    America needs comprehensive immigration reform that strengthens our borders, protects U.S. workers and their wages, and allows immigrants who pay taxes and obey the law to earn the opportunity to apply for the responsibilities of citizenship. 

5/24/07 San Francisco Chronicle: Asians frustrated, angry over immigration plan,
by Tyche Hendricks
    San Francisco resident Francisco Villacrusis and his wife petitioned 13 years ago for their grown children to join them from the Philippines and keep them company in their final years. 
    But if Congress passes immigration changes now being proposed, Villacrusis has little chance of realizing his dream because the immigration service canceled the paperwork when his wife died because she had filed it, and the changes would invalidate any new petitions for adult children or siblings filed after April 30, 2005.
    "I'm lonely. It's very hard to live alone," said Villacrusis, a retired sales manager and a U.S. citizen since 1999. "I have prayed for this for a long, long time." 
    In the Bay Area, with a high concentration of Asians, who face some of the longest waits to immigrate, proposed changes to family-sponsored and job-specific green cards are angering Asian American community leaders. Immigrant advocates say the changes would undermine the family ties that bind most immigrant communities. They also would unfairly shut out the region's large population of highly skilled workers here on visas from building a permanent life in the United States . 
    "I feel frustrated, angry, deceived," said Mahesh Pasupuleti, a software engineer in Emeryville who came from India eight years ago on an H-1B visa and has applied, with his employer's sponsorship, for a green card. Under the changes, he wouldn't be able to stay longer than six years, even if he were in line to receive a green card. 
    "There are half a million people like me," said Pasupuleti, who is a member of Immigration Voice, a group that lobbies to ease the path to permanent residence for highly skilled temporary workers. "If anybody gets special treatment, it should be us, because we've been playing by the rules and contributing to this economy." 
    Much of the debate over the Senate bill has so far focused on legalizing an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants and creating a temporary program for low-skilled workers, elements that tend to affect immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America , who make up about two-thirds of the nation's illegal immigrants. 
    Foreign-born Asians -- who make up 40 to 63 percent of immigrants in the Bay Area's five largest counties, compared to 27 percent of the nation's foreign-born population, according to 2005 census estimates -- are more likely than immigrants from Latin America to naturalize. 
    Immigrants from China , India and the Philippines in particular must wait longer than most other immigrants to bring in family members because their countrymen have tended to fill the annual immigration quotas for their countries more quickly than immigrants from other countries. 
    The current "family reunification" system -- the system that required Villacrusis' children to wait 15 years, but at least allowed him to apply for them to immigrate -- would be replaced by a point system. New weight would be given to a prospective immigrant's education, job skills, English ability and other measures, and the importance of kinship ties would decline dramatically. 
    "It's the only part of the bill that would affect U.S. citizens and the only part that's retroactive," said Joren Lyons, a staff attorney at San Francisco 's Asian Law Caucus, who is assisting Villacrusis with his case. 
    Lyons and other leaders in the Bay Area Asian community spoke out Wednesday to denounce the scaling back of family-based immigration, which has been central to U.S. immigration law since 1965. 
    "The point system is discriminatory because it works against low-income, limited-English speakers," said Christina Wong, a staff member for Chinese for Affirmative Action, at a press conference in San Francisco . "We deserve a system that truly eliminates backlogs, that respects our communities and that looks at the contributions we've provided this country." 
    Other immigration analysts said it is time to eliminate the "chain migration" that arises when immigrants can sponsor their relatives. Instead, the United States should focus on attracting immigrants who can make the greatest contributions to the national interest. 
    "The rationale, and I think that was sound reasoning, was that (family-based immigration) didn't seem like a good idea economically," said Steve Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington , D.C. , which favors reducing immigration.
    "So many of these people are unskilled, they create a fiscal problem and seemed to be overburdening the bureaucracy." 
    Hans Johnson, a demographer at the Public Policy Institute of California, said many immigrants who come on family reunification visas actually are highly skilled. But he said the point system could bring a different flow of well-educated immigrants to the Bay Area. 
    "This proposal would favor people with high skills but not necessarily those with family here," he said. "It could lead to more migration from Asia , but not necessarily family members of people who are already here." 
    Nam Vo, a 25-year-old immigrant from Vietnam sponsored by his mother, was sworn in as a U.S. citizen Wednesday in San Jose . An electrical engineer and a graduate of UC Berkeley, Vo said the current immigration system allowed his family members to reunite and put their talents to work in their adopted country. 
    "I think it's terrible," Vo said, of the proposal to eliminate some family preference visas. "I feel bad for all the families whose brothers and sisters could not come. If they cannot come here, they lose their parents." 
    KEY PROVISIONS OF PROPOSED CHANGES:
    Illegal immigrants: Anyone in the country illegally before January could receive probationary legal status, a four-year "Z visa," renewable once, if they come forward immediately. To adjust their status to lawful permanent residence, they must also pay $5,000 in fees, and the head of each household must temporarily return to the home country. 
    Green cards: None would be processed for Z visa holders until border security and workplace enforcement goals have been met and an existing backlog of green card applications is cleared (an estimated eight-year process). 
    Point system: 380,000 immigrant visas would be awarded annually (with 50 percent of weight for employment criteria, 25 percent for education, 15 percent for English proficiency, 10 percent for family ties). This system would replace 226,000 family-preference green cards, 140,000 employer-sponsored green cards and 50,000 other green cards currently awarded annually. 
    Family ties: Spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and permanent residents would continue to be eligible for green cards, but adult children and siblings would not. Visas for parents of U.S. citizens would be capped at 40,000 annually and those for spouses and children at 87,000 a year. 
    Source: Associated Press; Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (Senate Bill 1348); U.S. State Department. 
    BAY AREA IMMIGRANTS, 2005
    -- Alameda County : 30 percent foreign-born (including 30 percent Latin American, 57 percent Asian) 
    -- Contra Costa County : 23 percent foreign-born (43 percent Latin American, 40 percent Asian) 
    -- San Francisco : 36 percent foreign-born (20 percent Latin American, 63 percent Asian) 
    -- San Mateo County : 35 percent foreign-born (34 percent Latin American, 49 percent Asian) 
    -- Santa Clara County : 36 percent foreign-born (28 percent Latin American, 60 percent Asian) 
    -- United States : 12 percent foreign-born (53 percent Latin American, 27 percent Asian) 
    Source: U.S. Census Bureau estimates for 2005 (available only for geographies with more than 1 million residents).  

5/24/07 Miami Herald: The Oppenheimer Report: Migrant plan stacks deck against Latins,
by Andres Oppenheimer
    Here's some little-noticed potential fallout of the immigration reform package being debated in the U.S. Congress: Its merit-based admissions criteria may favor Asian immigrants over Latin Americans.
    Under the bipartisan immigration overhaul bill, foreigners seeking legal status in the United States would be selected through a point system based on their levels of education, proficiency in English and occupation. Which means that we would roll out a red carpet for Indian engineers, while making it harder for Mexican gardeners to achieve the American dream.
    Until now, the immigration system has been largely based on family-reunification requests and employers' sponsorships. But, by introducing a point system that would make it easier for well-educated, English-speaking foreigners to become permanent immigrants, the new admissions process would smack of racial and intellectual engineering.
    It would also hurt Latin American economies -- creating even greater immigration pressures in the future -- and may lead to a shortage of low-skilled workers in the United States .
    Consider the educational background of most immigrants who have arrived in the United States since 1990, according to a new study by the Migration Policy Institute:
    More than 76 percent of all immigrants from India have at least a bachelor's degree, as well as 52 percent from China , 62 percent from South Korea and 51 percent from the Philippines .
    By comparison, 61 percent of Mexican immigrants, 62 percent of Salvadoran immigrants and 66 percent of Guatemalan immigrants have not completed high school.
    Education levels of South American immigrants are somewhat higher -- nearly 40 percent of Colombians, 31 percent of Peruvians and 49 percent of Venezuelans have at least a bachelor's degree -- but still below that of their Asian counterparts.
    ENGLISH NUMBERS
    When it comes to proficiency in English, 70 percent of all immigrants from India , 59 percent from the Philippines and 26 percent from South Korea speak fluent English. By comparison, only 12 percent of immigrants from Mexico and 15 percent from El Salvador speak English fluently.
    ''Clearly, the point system would disadvantage immigrants from Latin America,'' says Douglas Rivlin, a spokesman for the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigration group in Washington . ``It's heavily weighted toward higher education levels and doesn't take into account the need for lower-skilled workers.''
    Pro-immigration advocates note that, as the U.S. population grows older and the labor force pool shrinks in a near full-employment economy, there will soon be more shortages of agricultural laborers, construction workers and waiters than of white-collar workers.
    The National Restaurant Association projects that its labor force of 12.8 million will grow by 15 percent over the next 10 years, but the U.S. government estimates that the overall U.S. workforce will grow by only 10 percent.
    ''We are worried that we will not be able to find enough workers,'' says John Gay, a senior National Restaurant Association official.
    Won't Americans fill those jobs if you raise your wages, I asked him. No, he answered. ''The average construction worker makes $21 an hour, and there is a shortage of workers in the construction industry,'' he said.
    My opinion: The United States would be better off providing more similar paths to permanent citizenship to both highly skilled and low-skilled workers.
    Why low-skilled workers? First, the U.S. will need them. Second, if we rely mostly on temporary workers for low-end jobs, they will stay in the country anyway, and we will be creating an underclass of disenfranchised people. (Think of the 2005 riots by Muslim youths in Paris, and you'll get the idea.)
    FORGET FENCE
    Third, and most important, because if instead of helping boost Latin American and Caribbean economies we close the door and reduce the $65 billion their migrants send home in remittances every year, we will be paving the way for greater economic hardship in the region and even greater unchecked emigration in the future. (And if you think that a border fence will keep them out, you are kidding yourself: They will circumvent it, or dynamite it, if necessary.)
    In the long run, the only way to slow the immigration flow will be helping promote development in Latin America .
    In the meantime, while the proposed immigration package is overall a positive in that it provides a path to legalization to millions of undocumented workers, its point system should be reshuffled.
    It's OK to give special treatment to Indian engineers at the top of the education ladder, but we should also grant fast admission to those at the bottom.

5/24/07 Dallas Morning News: 'Invisible' Asians have visible impact on U.S,
by Esther Wu
    After attending an Asian Pacific American Heritage Month program recently, a friend commented that despite how far we've come, Asians are an invisible race in America . 
    Considering the U.S. census reports that show the Asian population growing at a rapid pace, I think we are anything but invisible. 
    Today there are an estimated 14.5 million residents of Asian descent in the United States . That's about 5 percent of the U.S. population. 
    Texas ranks fourth among states with the largest Asian populations, following California , New York and Hawaii . An estimated 500,000 live in North Texas alone. They represent 30 ethnic groups, all with diverse cultures, languages and customs. 
    So how can we be invisible? I asked. 
    None of that matters, my friend responded.  Asian-Americans are invisible because our stories are not being told, our history has been ignored and our names are not recognized among those who hold power in politics or business, he said.
    And worst of all, he said, instead of teaching our children to be proud of their heritage, we encourage them to assimilate into the mainstream. 
    "In short, we're invisible," he said. 
    He may be right. The contributions and achievements of Asian-Americans are often overlooked. And this may be the best argument for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. 
    Asian-Americans have been an integral part of the landscape that makes up America . 
    For this reason, I've compiled a few facts about Asian-Americans that may open a few eyes: 
    Do you enjoy orange juice with breakfast? If so, you may want to thank Lue Gim Gong, a Chinese immigrant who developed a frost-tolerant orange that opened the door to establishing Florida 's citrus industry. 
    How much paper do you handle in an average day? Did you know that paper, as well as noodles, ketchup and firecrackers, all came from China ? 
    OK, maybe you don't use as much paper in this high-tech world of ours. Have you ever sent e-mail or searched the Internet using Yahoo? Yahoo is the brainchild of Dave Filo and Jerry Yang, who did not even know how to speak English when he arrived in this country from Taiwan at age 10 in 1978. Sabeer Bhatia, who is from India , co-founded Hotmail in 1996, selling it six months later to Microsoft for a cool $400 million. 
    Look at your cellphone. If it's a Samsung device, chances are it was assembled in South Korea . If it's another brand, it's likely that the phone contains a microchip from an Asian country or was assembled in Asia . 
    In 1992, Eugene Chung became the first Asian-American player to be drafted in the first round of an NFL draft. Like most professional players, Mr. Chung was probably involved in his share of instant replays when he was with the New England Patriots. But a former television broadcaster who worked with the Dallas Cowboys can be credited with developing the technology that makes instant replays possible. In appreciation of his work, Jerry Jones named a wing of the Cowboys' broadcast studios in honor of the late John Chang, director of broadcasting for the team. 
    Norman Yoshio Mineta became the first Asian-American to serve as mayor of a major U.S. city in 1971 when he was elected in San Jose, Calif. Joe Chow, who won his first bid for mayor of Addison in May 2005, is the first Asian-American to lead a Texas city. Mr. Chow ran unopposed for the mayor's seat this month. 
    In the late 1800s, an estimated 15,000 Chinese laborers worked on the Transcontinental Railroad, which connected several lines that enabled travelers to go coast to coast. The Chinese were often chosen to take on the most dangerous tasks, including dynamiting mountainsides to create tunnels for the train. It is estimated that five Chinese workers died for every three miles of track that were laid. 
    Perhaps more awareness of their achievements and contributions will keep Asian-Americans from staying invisible. 
    Rap artist Beau Sia said it best in a public-service announcement for AZN Television: "It may be Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, but if you open your eyes, you'll find our heritage in every day of the year."

5/22/07 Associated Press: Duke cheating case hit Asian students,
    Durham, N.C. - All of the students expelled in a cheating scandal at the Duke University business school were from Asian countries, while other students were punished less severely, their attorney says.
    Many of the students involved in the case at the Fuqua School of Business confessed instead of fighting the charges because of different cultural norms in their countries, Durham attorney Robert Ekstrand said.
    "There is something else going on here, something that needs to be explained before we go forward with this, because it doesn't look right," Ekstrand said in Tuesday in The News & Observer of Raleigh .
    In their home cultures, he said, "a confession or an admission of guilt can be a way to apologize." He said they sometimes wrote confession letters without understanding the specific accusations.
    Officials disclosed last month that 34 business school graduate students were convicted of cheating on an exam and other assignments. Nine were expelled, and 15 were suspended for a year and given a failing grade in the class. The others received failing grades.
    Ekstrand has filed appeals on behalf of 16 students.
    The nine expelled students, all from Asian countries, would likely lose student visas and have to leave the country in the next couple of weeks if their appeals fail, Ekstrand said.
    Duke officials have said students involved in the cheating case were from various countries, including the U.S. They declined to comment on the cases until appeals are completed next week.
    "We must respect the confidentiality that the appeals process requires and our students deserve," said Mike Hemmerich.
    The investigation began after a professor found similarities in answers to a take-home exam. In an appeal filed last week, Ekstrand said honor code violations were mostly minor and unintentional and questioned why some possibly exculpatory evidence was not given to students before the appeals.

5/22/07 Miami Herald: Asians meet with police after death,
by Carli Teproff
    After the shooting death of Wai ''Ray'' Ng in his family's Chinese restaurant in Tamarac on Mother's Day, many members of South Florida 's Asian community feared they too could be victims. 
    ''We are all scared,'' said Irene Chong, owner of Sang Chinese Restaurant in North Miami Beach . ``It could happen to any of us.'' 
    Some community leaders suggested meeting with local police to learn more about how business owners can protect themselves in a robbery. But as with other immigrant groups, many newcomers from Asia didn't trust the police. 
    So community leaders asked officers to meet with business owners and build better relations. The first of two such meetings was Monday in North Miami Beach , and another is today in Coral Springs . 
    Johnson Ng -- no relation to Ray Ng -- executive director the United Chinese Association of Florida , said he helped plan the meetings because he wanted to help fight a misconception that the government will not help. 
    `COMMUNIST CHINA ' 
    Ng said that stems from a ''Communist China mentality,'' held by many, that ``government is bad.''
    ''People think that police aren't going to help us,'' he said. ``That's what happened in China .'' 
    More than 30 people attended Monday's meeting at the North Miami Beach Police Department to learn universal tips including: the importance of remaining calm, how to be a good witness and why a person shouldn't disturb the crime scene. The two-hour session, given by North Miami Beach Crime Prevention Specialist Thomas Carney, was translated into Cantonese. 
    Winnie Tang, the president of the Organization of Chinese Americans, said people in the Asian community believe they are easy targets because of the language barrier and the fact that many restaurants use cash and not credit. Tang said many robberies don't even occur at the restaurants, but instead, they are followed home. 
    ''We need to help each other and look out for each other,'' said Tang. ``We try to make it as easy as possible for people to protect themselves.'' 
    Johnson Ng said with a growing Asian community in South Florida it is important to ``get to know the police.'' 
    According to the American Community Survey 2005 there are about 52,000 people of Asian descent living in Broward out of nearly 1.8 million residents. In Miami-Dade, there are about 33,000 people of Asian descent out of the nearly 2.3 million living in the county. 
    Tang said the population is spread through both counties, with large groups in North Miami Beach and Coral Springs . 
    According NMB Police Chief Linda Loizzo, three of the city's seven Chinese restaurants have been robbed or burglarized in the past year. 
    CASH REGISTER 
    One of the victims was at the meeting. Yan Wong, owner of China Temple , said she got a call from police on May 9 that someone had broken her glass door with a rock and made away with her cash register, which only had about $60. 
    ''Luckily no one was there,'' she said. Wong said she felt more comfortable knowing the police are easily accessible. 
    Bill Lam, whose father owns 888 Chinese Restaurant in Lauderdale Lakes, said he has been scared for his parents ever since Ray Ng was shot and killed May 13 at Hong Kong City BBQ in Tamarac. 
    ''He wasn't doing anything wrong and he got killed,'' Lam said. ``We have to learn to protect ourselves.'' 
    Community leaders have raised $2,000 in reward money for the capture of Ng's killer, and they're trying to raise more. 
    Anyone with information on Ng's death is urged to call Broward Sheriff's Office homicide Detective John Berrena at 954-321-4210 or Crime Stoppers, anonymously, at 954-493-8477.

5/21/07 The Orange County Register: Back to his roots: Filmmaker Justin Lin returns with an Asian-American indie movie,
by Richard Chang
    Justin Lin is standing onstage at the Directors Guild of America, shoulder-to-shoulder with a crew and cast of more than two dozen people who helped make his latest film, "Finishing the Game," possible. The movie has just had its Southern California premiere, and an audience of mostly Asian-Americans is applauding enthusiastically.
    Lin is doing the film festival circuit again. It's familiar turf for the director of "Better Luck Tomorrow," one of 2003's stand-out independent hits.
    The Buena Park-raised filmmaker is trying to get word out about his new film a comedy about the search for the next Bruce Lee.
    He took the risk of shooting the film on his own without studio financing. When he completed it earlier this year, he didn't have a distributor. 
    But after a couple of forays in the studio world, Lin feels confident and is returning to his indie roots.
    "It did mean a lot for us to go out and do it ourselves," says Lin, 35, who now lives in Silver Lake . "I think, if anything, this project to me symbolizes that I've earned a little bit of independence. It's a big risk that's the reality.
    But I want to make a movie that's outside the norm to studios."
    In a short time, Lin has become one of the nation's foremost Asian-American filmmakers. "Better Luck Tomorrow" an edgy drama about Orange County honor students caught up in a life of petty crime and unexpected violence was the first Asian-American film to be distributed by a major studio.
    Financed on 10 maxed-out credit cards for $250,000, it made $3.8 million in U.S. theaters, according to boxofficemojo.com. The trade publication Variety named Lin one of 2002's "10 directors to watch." 
    The buzz and success surrounding "Better Luck" led to deals with other studios, including "Annapolis" with Disney/Buena Vista and "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" with Universal Studios. The third installment of the car-racing franchise was a blockbuster, bringing in $62.5 million domestically and $95.9 million abroad.
    Lin was able to "retire" his parents who had run a fish-and-chips restaurant in Anaheim for 26 years.
    And Lin has shared his experiences as an Asian-American filmmaker with audiences at screenings, on panels and in classrooms.
    "I like to learn and share all these things that we've learned," he says. "There's no way I could have made the leap alone."
    Dustin Nguyen, who plays Troy Poon in "Finishing the Game," calls Lin "the real deal."
    "He's a very rare Asian-American in a certain position of influence as a director," says the actor, who made his first big mark in TV's " 21 Jump Street " as Officer Harry Truman Ioki. "He goes out of his way to do something positive, to create positive roles in his movies."
    Lin was born in Taipei , Taiwan . He came to the U.S. when he was eight years old and attended Dickerson Elementary School in Buena Park and Cypress High School .
    He grew up loving all kinds of movies, including big, overblown Hollywood productions. He recalls watching Bruce Lee's final movie, "The Game of Death," and being totally confused by Lee's stand-ins, who played the main character Billy Lo after Lee's untimely death at 32.
    "I didn't understand who the stand-in was," Lin said.
    "It made no sense to me. But as I got older, I understood that's movie making. It was the same character, and (Lee) died. It really intrigued me who was that guy, and how did he get that job?"
    "Finishing the Game" is a mock-documentary set in the late '70s. A group of Hollywood executives are intent on finishing "The Game of Death" and aim to find a Lee look-alike. An audition attracts more than 50 aspirants, most of whom bear no resemblance to the martial-arts icon.
    The movie stars Roger Fan and Sung Kang, who also had key roles in "Better Luck Tomorrow," as well as Nguyen, James Franco, Meredith Scott Lynn and MC Hammer. It made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, and screened earlier this month at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival.
    Kang, who has had roles in three Lin movies, said the director has given him and other Asian-American actors roles that "traditional Hollywood would never let us play."
    "If I had never met Justin, I would probably not be acting today," Kang said.
    Lin has done much to provide opportunities and dispel stereotypes of Asian-Americans in cinema. He blew away the model-minority myth in "Better Luck Tomorrow," and cast Fan as a naval academy student, a non-ethnic-specific role, in " Annapolis ." 
    In "Fast and the Furious," Lin was pleased to create "a post-modern Western with a 3-D cool-ass Asian character."
    Finally, in "Finishing the Game," he exposes Hollywood stereotypes of Asian men as silent, sinister or emasculated. In his movie, they're funny, loquacious and buffed out.
    "I definitely had to make that movie," Lin said. "You can't expect Hollywood to take a risk. This is not a 'Fast and the Furious' movie. It's a passion project."
    Once again, he relied on friends, industry colleagues and independent producers. His buddy Brian Tyler wrote all the funky, '70s-era music, and played all the instruments himself.
    "That's the thing I truly enjoy, when you can work with good people who are very talented. There's not a lack of talent, there's a lack of opportunities. My dream would be to do this again, but to pay everybody what they deserve."
    Lin and his growing gang have hit the road for this film, screening it at festivals in Chicago , Oregon , San Francisco and Utah .
    "If we fail, we fail. I don't want to ever second-guess anything. I feel like I'm just getting started. I guarantee my best movies are still ahead of me." 
    After lengthy negotiations, Lin recently learned that the Independent Film Channel wants to distribute "Finishing the Game" in the fall and collaborate on future projects.
    This is a huge weight off the young filmmaker's shoulders.
    "There's no guidebook on how to be a filmmaker," he said. "I just try to do my best. My journey is my personal journey."

5/17/07 Associated Press: Bush hails deal on immigration reform,
by Julie Hirschfield Davis
    Washington - Key senators in both parties and the White House announced agreement Thursday on an immigration overhaul that would grant quick legal status to millions of illegal immigrants already in the U.S. and fortify the border. 
    The plan would create a temporary worker program to bring new arrivals to the U.S and a separate program to cover agricultural workers. Skills and education-level would for the first time be weighted over family connections in deciding whether future immigrants should get permanent legal status. New high-tech employment verification measures also would be instituted to ensure that workers are here legally.
    The compromise came after weeks of painstaking closed-door negotiations that brought the most liberal Democrats and the most conservative Republicans together with President Bush's Cabinet officers to produce a highly complex measure that carries heavy political consequences.
    Bush called it "a much-needed solution to the problem of illegal immigration in this country" and said, if approved, the proposal "delivers an immigration system that is secure, productive, orderly and fair."
    "With this bipartisan agreement, I am confident leaders in Washington can have a serious, civil and conclusive debate so I can sign comprehensive reform into law this year," he said in a written statement.
    Bush planned to make remarks about the bill later Thursday at the White House.
    Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts , his party's lead negotiator on the deal, hailed it as "the best possible chance we will have in years to secure our borders and bring millions of people out of the shadows and into the sunshine of America ."
    Anticipating criticism from conservatives, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), said, "It is not amnesty. This will restore the rule of law."
    The accord sets the stage for what promises to be a bruising battle next week in the Senate on one of Bush's top non-war priorities.
    Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), called the proposal a "starting point" for that debate, but added that it needs improvement.
    "I have serious concerns about some aspects of this proposal, including the structure of the temporary worker program and undue limitations on family immigration," Reid said in a statement.
    The key breakthrough came when negotiators struck a bargain on a so-called "point system" that prioritizes immigrants' education and skill level over family connections in deciding how to award green cards.
    The immigration issue also divides both parties in the House, which isn't expected to act unless the Senate passes a bill first.
    The proposed agreement would allow illegal immigrants to come forward and obtain a "Z visa" and after paying fees and a $5,000 fine ultimately get on track for permanent residency, which could take between eight and 13 years. Heads of household would have to return to their home countries first.
    They could come forward right away to claim a probationary card that would let them live and work legally in the U.S. , but could not begin the path to permanent residency or citizenship until border security improvements and the high-tech worker identification program were completed.
    A new temporary guest worker program would also have to wait until those so-called "triggers" had been activated.
    Those workers would have to return home after work stints of two years, with little opportunity to gain permanent legal status or ever become U.S. citizens.
    They could renew their guest worker visas twice, but would be required to leave for a year in between each time.
    Democrats had pressed instead for guest workers to be permitted to stay and work indefinitely in the U.S.
    In perhaps the most hotly debated change, the proposed plan would shift from an immigration system primarily weighted toward family ties toward one with preferences for people with advanced degrees and sophisticated skills. Republicans have long sought such revisions, which they say are needed to end "chain migration" that harms the economy, while some Democrats and liberal groups say it's an unfair system that rips families apart. 
    Family connections alone would no longer be enough to qualify for a green card except for spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens. 
    New limits would apply to U.S. citizens seeking to bring foreign-born parents into the country.

5/17/07 Los Angeles Times: California is leading nation in diversity: Minorities make up 57% of the state's population and one-third of the nation's, data show. The growth is likely to affect public policy,
by Teresa Watanabe
    Deepening the nation's diversity, the minority population of the United States reached 100.7 million in 2006, led by California as home to the largest numbers of the two fastest-growing racial groups, Latinos and Asians, the Census Bureau reported today.
    Minorities now account for one-third of the nation's 300 million U.S. residents, with the largest share of them 21% living in California .
    They now constitute 57% of the state's population, including 13.1 million Latinos, 5 million Asians, 2.7 million blacks and 689,000 Native Americans and Alaska Natives, according to population estimates taken between July 1, 2005, and July 1, 2006.
    Non-Hispanic whites were still California 's largest racial group, at 15.7 million, but represented a shrinking proportion of the state's population. 
    "As goes California , so goes the nation," said Marcelo Gaete, senior program director for the Los Angeles-based National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund.
    Gaete and others said the nation's increasingly diverse population would probably have a significant effect on politics and public policy because minorities tend to vote differently than whites. 
    In California , minority voters have shown "systematic differences" from whites in their electoral choices, with more support for more generous immigration policies, taxation and public investment in schools, according to Dowell Myers, a USC professor of urban planning and demographics. 
    He said the difference is partly rooted in the fact that minorities are younger, with a greater personal stake in public schools, for instance.
    Nationally, the median age for Latinos was 27.4, compared with 30.1 for blacks, 33.5 for Asians and 40.5 for whites.
    "There is a schism," Myers said. "Older folks want older folks' benefits. They don't want to invest in younger folks' benefits, especially if they're minorities. But these people are the future workers, taxpayers and homeowners. To not embrace them is putting your dollar into the wrong end of the life cycle.
    "Fundamentally," Myers said, "people have to realize we all have shared fates. It's necessary to pull together to have one shared future."
    The Census Bureau's estimates are based on population change from 2000 using annual data on births, deaths and international migration. 
    Gaete said the new numbers underscored the importance for California to hold an early presidential primary election in February 2008.
    Otherwise, he said, states with largely white populations, such as New Hampshire and Iowa , will end up with oversized influence in narrowing the field for a national population they do not demographically reflect.
    "The country is becoming increasingly diverse, increasingly colorful, and our political system should reflect that," Gaete said.
    The demographers added what many political experts already know: that multicultural coalitions are the key to winning a growing number of elections today. 
    Nationally, Latinos accounted for almost half the nation's population growth of 2.9 million.
    Their numbers increased by 3.4% to 44.3 million in 2006, constituting 14.8% of the nation's population, with the largest numbers in California, Texas and Florida. 
    Blacks increased by 1.3% to 40.2 million, making up 13.3% of the nation's population. New York , Florida and Texas had the largest black populations. 
    Asians grew by 3.2% to 14.9 million, accounting for 5% of the nation's population.
    The largest numbers were in California , New York and Texas . 
    The census also counted 4.5 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives and 1 million native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders. The total of non-Hispanic whites who indicated no other race grew 0.3% to 198.7 million in 2006.
    Increasing diversity
    Minorities now account for one-third of the nation's 300 million residents and make up 57% of California 's population.
    Census Bureau population estimates as of July 1, 2006 (in millions)
    California    Nation 
    White* 15.7    198.7 
    Latino 13.1    44.3 
    Asian 5.0    14.9
    Black 2.7    40.2 
    Native American 0.7    4.5 
    Pacific Islander 0.3    1.0 
    Total population 36.5    299.4 
* Non-Hispanic whites who indicated no other race
    Note: Group totals do not add up to the population totals because members of minority races may be counted in more than one group. Source: Census Bureau
    (A1) Minorities
    California is home to 20.7 million members of racial and ethnic minority groups, 21% of the nation's total.
    California - 21%
    Rest of U.S. - 79%
    Source: Census Bureau estimates 2006

5/16/07 Dallas Morning News: Asian directions, few Asian directors,
by Cheryl Hall 
    Companies go global, but only 1.5% of board seats go to minorities
    When it comes to grand plans for business in Asia, Dallas attorney Wilson Chu says, America 's largest corporations are taking the slow boat to China .
    Wilson Chu , a merger and acquisition partner at Haynes and Boone, chaired a major national initiative to find out how many Fortune 500 board members are of Asian descent. He also serves on the Dallas Museum of Art's board. Mr. Chu, a well-known merger and acquisition partner at Haynes and Boone LLP, chaired a major national initiative to find out how many Fortune 500 board members are of Asian descent. Pei in 1990.
    In 2006, only 74 of the 500 largest pubic companies in the U.S. had directors of Asian descent. Sixty-nine Asians hold 81 seats at those companies, or 1.5 percent of the combined 5,563 board spots.
    That's a slight improvement from 2005's 1.2 percent.
    We all know that an inclusive boardroom is largely an oxymoron.
    But what makes these statistics startling is that so many of these companies have major operations in Asia or have pinpointed this part of the planet as their Promised Land for selling products and services.
    How many times have you heard a CEO espouse the importance of going global?
    "Look at GM," Mr. Chu says. "What's the only bright spot in their report? Growth in business with China .  How many Asian-Americans do they have at the top?  Zip."
    Based on Fortune's 2006 rankings, you not only pass by General Motors Corp., but also Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Ford Motor Corp. before you get to an Asian-American director at General Electric Corp. in the No. 7 spot.
    Looking at the list, obvious local names such as Texas Instruments Inc. and AMR Corp. are also without an Asian-American on the board. But there are plenty more I could pick on.
    Mr. Chu thinks such omissions are shortsighted.
    "Do you just want to go to the country club, have drinks with your buddies, call it a board meeting and watch the world go by?" he asks. "If you want to gain strategic insight into 40 percent of the world's population, then devote one seat to someone who can help with that perspective.
    "Here's the question: Why wouldn't you want that?"
    In seats
    The purpose of the New York-based nonprofit is twofold: To encourage stronger relationships between the U.S. and Greater China ( China , Taiwan and Hong Kong) and to promote full participation by Asian-Americans in all aspects of U.S. society.
    Mr. Chu, who came from Beijing to Dallas at age 4 with his widowed mother and five siblings, is the group's general counsel and the guy in charge when it comes to C-100's efforts to give Asian-Americans more clout in corporate America .
    To do that, Mr. Chu says, you start at the boardroom.  "My model is the airline model: Get butts in seats." 
    Research for the report, done with the help of the Asian-American Business Association at Harvard Business School , was completed before last month's release of Fortune's 2007 corporate rankings.
    The full report is being released today in conjunction with Asian-American Heritage Month and is available online at www.committee100.org.
    Consider the enticing demographics, Mr. Chu says.
    Asian-Americans account for 5 percent of the population, have the highest household incomes of any racial or ethnic group, and are better educated than the U.S. norm.
    "If you're Charles Schwab, you want to tap into this thriving Asian-American market that has the highest per capita net worth of any ethnic group," Mr. Chu says. "It just makes sense."
    Enlightenment
    He gives his family as a case study. His mother, 88-year-old Irene Chu, reared and educated her six children from the profit of her restaurant, Chu's in Addison , which she closed last year.
    "Five of us have postgraduate degrees in various professions," Mr. Chu says, "an orthodontist, architect and former insurance executive." 
    Nearly a third of all Silicon Valley companies were started by Asian-Americans including household names Yahoo Inc. and YouTube Inc., which is now owned by Google Inc.
    As chairman of the task force, Mr. Chu decided against action items. "I don't need to tell Fortune 500 companies what to do. I just need to give them the reasons to do it. I call the companies that have 'The Enlightened.' "
    Big Dim
    Unfortunately, Big D is still the Big Dim, he notes.
    " Dallas was No. 5 [now No. 4] in Fortune 500 companies last year. And there are two at Celanese, two at Triad Hospitals, one at Neiman Marcus, and that's it."
    And the Dallas-based retailer is on the Committee of 100's list even though it ranked 512 in 2006. It and nine others were added to backfill for companies that dropped off the rankings because they were acquired or merged.
    AMR apparently thinks Mr. Chu has a point. Roger Frizzell, vice president of corporate communications, says that although its board is already diverse, with Hispanic, black and female representation, "This may be an area of opportunity for AMR in the future, especially since we are always looking to continually strengthen our governance in every possible area."
    Texas Instruments says it's content with its current lineup, which includes four women three nonminorities and one minority on its 12-person board. 
    "TI has been a global company for decades, with operations in Europe, Asia and the Americas ," a company spokesperson says. "Likewise, several of our directors' companies also have a global presence."
    Exxon Mobil did not respond to my inquiry.
    Dallas is doing better than the state as a whole.
    Texas had 57 Fortune 500 companies with a total of 613 board seats. Asian-Americans held seven slots, including the five in Dallas .

5/16/07 Press Release: Democrats Hold Successful Asian American and Pacific Islander Town Hall  
    Washington, D.C. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC) Chair Mike Honda, and other Democratic Members delivered remarks at the second annual meeting of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community leaders this morning.  The "2007 Democratic Leadership's Asian American and Pacific Islander Town Hall: A New Direction" drew more than 150 leaders from across the country. 
    "This year's town hall was a great opportunity for dialogue with the Asian American and Pacific Islander community," Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.  "Today, Democrats heard directly from the community their ideas and concerns and we look forward to continuing our relationship with AAPIs into the future." 
    Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, "Democrats are working to advance the priorities that matter to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.  The concerns of this diverse community are the concerns of all Americans fair immigration policy, affordable health care for our children and veterans, strong civil rights, better educational opportunities, and much more. Democrats are delivering on our promise to take American in a new direction, and this year's town hall is an important part of that effort." 
    "Our Democratic Leadership's 2007 Asian American and Pacific Islander Town Hall this morning was a great success," said Senator Debbie Stabenow. "Senate Democrats have fought side by side with Asian American and Pacific Islander leaders to improve the quality of education, expand opportunities for affordable housing, and ensure we create quality jobs for all Americans.  I look forward to continued action on these many shared priorities, and demonstrating the real difference that a Democratic majority has made for all our families." 
    Congressman Mike Honda said, "I am thrilled by the success of Democratic Leadership's Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Town Hall.  I would like to thank Speaker Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Reid, and the rest of Democratic Leadership for their continued commitment to the AAPI community.  Their participation, along with that of CAPAC Members, other Democratic Members of both houses of Congress, and community advocates, was integral to the success of today's town hall.  On behalf of CAPAC, I look forward to working with Democratic Leadership to push forward the legislative issues that are important to AAPIs, including justice for our Filipino veterans, ensuring the preservation of a robust family-based immigration system, and eliminating racial and ethnic health disparities." 
    The town hall focused on issues of concern to the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community including immigration, health care, housing and economic development, education, veterans' affairs, Native Hawaiian issues, and civil rights.  Members that presented policy issues included: Senators Akaka, Clinton , Reed, Salazar, and Cardin and Representatives Larson, Becerra, Abercrombie, Scott, Wu, Solis , Bordallo, Green, Matsui, and Hirono.

5/15/07 Miami Herald: Son gives his mom night off, is slain: A Broward man gave his mom the evening off at the family's restaurant on Sunday. That night, a robber held up the business and killed him,
by Kathleen McGrory
    For Mother's Day this year, Wai Ng may have saved his mother's life.
    His gift to her was simple: The 28-year-old son, known to friends as Ray, offered to work his mother's shift on Sunday at the family's Chinese restaurant in Tamarac .
    But late that night, authorities said, a gunman stormed into the almost-empty restaurant and demanded money. Before making his exit, cash in hand, the stranger fired a single shot, leaving Ng dead on the floor.
    Friends and family were stunned -- especially Ng's mother.
    ''She didn't want to stay home,'' said Aaron Yun, Ng's best friend and an employee at the restaurant. ``She wanted to help.''
    Ray Ng was a teenager when his family came to the United States from Hong Kong . His single mother, Pui Chun Ng, chose Coral Springs because her adult daughter had already settled there, friends of the family said.
    The teen liked his new life. He learned English quickly and attended high school in Coral Springs , according to friends. He even developed a taste for basketball.
    Still, there were challenges.
    Ten years ago, Ng's older sister died of breast cancer. She left behind The Hong Kong City BBQ, the Chinese restaurant she had owned on North State Road 7.
    Pui Ng took over as owner. Ray Ng dropped out of high school to help.
    ''He pretty much took over the business,'' said Carrie Ho, a close friend. ``He was the oldest son. It was his job to support the family in a foreign country.''
    Ray Ng was a familiar face at the restaurant, patrons said.
    ''He would always come over and say hello,'' said George Tucker, of North Lauderdale , a frequent diner.
    ``He made it feel like it was our neighborhood place.''
    A BUSY DAY
    Like most other holidays, Mother's Day was busy around the restaurant. Pui Ng usually worked long hours, employees said. This year, Ray Ng wanted things to be different.
    They were.
    The gunman appeared just before closing, authorities said. One customer was still eating dinner. At least five employees were inside.
    Tony Lui, a waiter, was talking to his wife on the phone when two of his co-workers sprinted past him.
    They were headed toward the back door, he said.
    `A ROBBERY'
    'One waitress said, `There's been a robbery. Why aren't you running?' '' Lui said.
    He followed, not once stopping to look behind him.
    When a single gunshot rang out, he thought he had been shot.
    Later, he learned it was Ng who took the bullet.
    ''He was like my brother,'' Lui said. ``I still can't believe it.''
    Friends and family didn't tell Pui Ng what had happened to her son until Monday.
    MOTHER GRIEVES
    ''She's heartbroken,'' said Ho. ``That was her only son.''
    Late Monday afternoon, Ng's friends gathered outside of the restaurant, many speaking quietly in Cantonese.
    One man stuck eight incense sticks in the ground outside of the restaurant, a traditional Chinese mourning practice.
    ''This is really sad for me,'' said Victor Wong, who knew Ng for more than a decade. ``He was a good boy from a good family.''
    Anyone with information is urged to call Broward Sheriff's Office homicide Detective John Berrena at 954-321-4210 or Crimestoppers, anonymously, at 954-493-8477.

5/13/07 Associated Press: 2 CBS shock jocks fired over Asian slurs,
    New York - One month after CBS Radio fired radio host Don Imus, it has permanently pulled the plug on a pair of suspended New York shock jocks for a prank phone call rife with offensive Asian stereotypes.
    The Dog House with JV and Elvis, hosted by Jeff Vandergrift and Dan Lay, "will no longer be broadcast," CBS Radio spokeswoman Karen Mateo said Saturday.
    The cancellation of the show on WFNY-FM, nearly three weeks after the hosts were suspended, was another indication of the increased scrutiny on radio hosts and the heightened management sensitivity to complaints in the wake of the Imus firing.
    CBS Radio dismissed Imus in April for his racist and sexist remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team.
    Vandergrift and Lay broadcast a call to a Chinese restaurant in which the caller, in an exaggerated accent, placed an order, claimed he was a student of kung fu, and compared menu items to employees' body parts.
    The initial airing of the call went unnoticed, but a rebroadcast after Imus's firing prompted an outcry from Asian-American groups. Vandergrift and Lay were initially suspended without pay, but Asian-Americans quickly demanded the same penalty applied to the much higher-profile Imus.
    "This is a victory not only for the Asian-American community, but for all communities who find themselves constant targets of racist and sexist programming," said Jeanette Wang, an executive with the Organization of Chinese Americans.
    Mateo would not comment on the status of the DJs' contracts or whether they were still on the CBS payroll.
    Imus plans a $120 million breach of contract suit against CBS Radio.

5/11/07 AsianWeek.com: Two APAs Elected to Sierra Clubs Board of Directors,
by Muy Yam
    For the first time, two Asian Americans will serve on the Sierra Clubs Board of Directors. 
    On April 23, the Sierra Club, which claims to be the nations oldest, largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization, elected Chinese American Allison Chin of Stanford , CA to her first three-year term and re-elected Indian American Sanjay Ranchod of San Francisco to serve his second term. 
    The election of two Asian Americans from California is a milestone for an organization known for its internal controversies about immigration. Since the 60s, anti-immigration activists within the organization have deemed population growth as being a central cause of environmental problems. 
    Though the Sierra Club never officially supported restrictions on immigration, in 1969 its board called for stabilization of the population as part of a policy on global population growth and in 1978, urged Congress to study the effects of immigration on domestic population growth and environmental quality. In 1998, activists within the club known as Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization, tried to pass a ballot initiative for the Club to advocate an end to U.S. population growth through reduction in net immigration, but the membership voted to take "no position" on U.S. immigration policy. A similar initiative was overwhelmingly defeated by the membership 85 percent to 15 percent in 2005. 
    Well aware of the Clubs colorful past, Ranchod, an attorney in San Francisco , co-chairs the Clubs Diversity Council, the first organization-wide, Board-supported initiative to comprehensively address diversity issues in the Club. Ranchod believes increasing diversity of the Clubs membership, volunteer leadership and staff is important to advance the Clubs conservation mission. 
    "As the first South Asian American to serve on the Board, I know the challenges of getting Asian Americans and other communities of color to become active in the Sierra Club," he said. "But it is critically important that we meet these challenges if we are to succeed in building a movement to embrace global warming solutions and securing a clean energy future and stronger economy."     
    Ranchod said the election of he and Chin reflects the growing number of Asian American leaders and members in the Sierra Club. "The conservation movement has never been healthier, and I believe we will be more successful at engaging even more Asian Americans in the Sierra Club with a diverse leadership," he said. "As the Club builds partnerships with environmental groups in India and China to curb global warming and public awareness of this issue increases, I am hopeful that more Asian Americans will realize the Sierra Club offers all kinds of opportunities to make a difference."

5/11/07 CNN: Asian-Americans' diverse voices share similar stories,
By Manav Tanneeru
    Being Asian and American is often a complex balancing act.
    The challenge for millions of people is managing to assimilate into American society while maintaining the principles of cultural heritage.
    About 13.5 million U.S. residents say they are Asian or a combination of another race and Asian, according to a 2004 census report. The number represents 4.7 percent of American households.
    The 1990 census counted 6.9 million Asians.
    The demographic includes dozens of ethnic groups, languages, religions, customs and origins from across the globe, stretching from Japan and China to Pakistan and India . Academic observers and community members say the diversity within the group is so rich and disparate, it seems folly to treat it as a single bloc.
    For example, the experiences of South Asians, who come from the Indian subcontinent and surrounding areas, are distinct from those of East Asians, especially in the post-9/11 world, where fears of racial profiling and discrimination are widespread.
    There are also vast differences between the experiences of Asian-Americans born in the United States and those who have newly immigrated.
    Despite the lack of definition, there are some experiences common to the disparate groups.
    A January 2007 study led by Derald Wing Sue, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University in New York City , found several common themes among Asians-Americans regarding race and stereotypes.
    Many Asian-Americans, for example, feel they are not completely accepted as Americans despite roots that go back several generations, the study found.
    The perception is the result of everyday slights and indignities, which are, in many cases, unintentional.
    "I was born here and I speak only English, and yet many expect me to know an Asian language," Conan Hom of Lexington , Massachusetts , wrote in an I-Report to CNN.com. (Read more of CNN.com readers' perspectives on the Asian-American experience)
    "In fact, I'm often asked, Where am I from? Or what am I? And when I answer U.S. (or American), I'm told, 'No, really, tell me.' "
    Many Asian-Americans also feel their complaints of discrimination are left out of racial dialogues, which primarily focus on white and black relations or white and Latino relations, according to the Columbia study.
    Praise that excludes, debilitates
    While their parents and grandparents faced racism, the types of discrimination aimed at Asians today is more subtle and invisible to the general public, Sue said.
    "When I get out of a cab after having a conversation with a white cab driver, they'll say something like, 'Boy, you speak excellent English,'" he said.
    "From their perspective, that's meant as a compliment, but another hidden meaning is being communicated, and that is that I am a perpetual foreigner in my own land."
    The "model minority" stereotype -- a phrase often used to describe the economic and academic success of the Asian-American community relative to other minorities -- is a debilitating factor, even it is sometimes viewed as praise, Sue said.
    It perpetuates the cultural taboos about reporting mental illness or emotional problems, he said. It also glosses over economic and educational inequities among the many Asian groups.
    The stereotype also has the power to pigeonhole Asian-Americans, perpetuating the idea that Asian-Americans can succeed only in areas such as math and science.
    Calvin Sun, a 20-year-old junior at Columbia , is studying biochemistry but has a passion for filmmaking and works at MTV in his spare time. The cultural stereotype cuts both ways, he said, especially for the generation currently making its way through high school and college.
    "Our parents still push to be successful in a way that they feel will be successful, like math or science," he said during a telephone interview. "There is a huge question between what makes you happy and what makes you successful."
    "Why can't I do both?" he said, and later answered his question, mischievously raising the possibility of making a movie about scientists.
    Moving 'beyond Apu'
    Yet, the environment has changed considerably for Asian-Americans during the last 20 years.
    Though critics say they are still vastly under-represented, there are more Asian-Americans visible across society's many roles -- from media and popular culture to sports and the business world.
    "You can't say we've gone beyond the model minority myth," said Nitasha Sharma, a professor of Asian-American studies and African-American studies at Northwestern University . "But I definitely think it's moved beyond Apu," the Indian convenience store clerk on "The Simpsons."
    Technological advances like e-mail, the ease of international travel and reverse migration -- thanks to the global economy -- are reducing some of the angst related to keeping customs intact.
    Meanwhile, the proliferation of ethnic communities and cultural organizations is providing a better context for fitting in, Sharma said.
    "I think issues of assimilation and integration -- am I Asian? Am I American -- will be always be there. But I think we understand that," she said.
    Sharma said she was curious about how the Asian-American community would deal with emerging issues like homosexuality and interracial relationships.
    Other looming generational issues like the impending retirement of the baby boomers will spotlight the differences between the Asian custom of caring for the elderly at home versus common Western practices, Sharma said.
    "There is now the opportunity to say, 'What are we going to do with our success?' " she said.
    


5/10/07 Press Release: President Bush Celebrates Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and Presents the Presidents Volunteer Service Award.
East Room
    THE PRESIDENT: Thanks for coming, and welcome to the White House. I'm glad you're here. Fifteen years ago, my dad -- or as we call him around the house, "number 41" -- signed a law designating May as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. This afternoon, Number 43 -- (laughter) -- has the honor of continuing Number 41's tradition. And we're glad you're here. (Applause.) 
    I thank you for joining me to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Across our nation, Americans of Asian Pacific descent are leaders in fields from education to business to government. Every day, Asian Pacific Americans make our communities more vibrant -- and this afternoon, we honor the many contributions that are made to our great democracy. 
    I want to thank Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, for being here today. Madam Secretary, we're proud you're here. Thank you for serving. (Applause.) A former member of my Cabinet, now retired -- well, not exactly retired -- (laughter) -- but a close friend, Norm Mineta, is with us. Thanks for coming, Mr. Secretary. (Applause.) You're looking pretty good. Yes, I see that. (Laughter.) I appreciate the fact that Deputy Secretary of Commerce David Sampson is here. He cannot claim any Asian American heritage, but nevertheless, he is serving well. (Laughter.) Thank you for coming. 
    I appreciate the members of the President's Advisory Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islanders who are here today. Thanks for serving. Thanks for your good work. I want to thank the recipients of the President's Volunteer Service Award. We will talk about you all a little later on here. But we're honored you're here. I do want to thank the members of the Diplomatic Corps who have joined us. Ambassadors, thank you for being here. We're honored to have -- by your presence. I do want to thank World War II veterans and Japanese American veterans who have joined us today. We're proud to have you here, and thanks for this great example you've set for those who wear the uniform today. (Applause.) We're really glad you're here. (Applause.) 
    The story of Asian Pacific Americans is an important part of the American story. During the 19th century, Asian Pacific Americans endured great hardships, for example, to lay the tracks for our first transcontinental railroad. During times of war, Asian Pacific Americans have defended our Nation with honor and courage. And during times of prejudice, Asian Pacific Americans have overcome discrimination to build strong and lasting communities in our country. 
    Today, more than 15 million Americans can trace their lineage to Asia or the Pacific Islands . We see the influence of these Asian Pacific Americans across all our society. All you have to do is look to see the tremendous impact our fellow citizens are making. It's a great passion for art and music which brings new culture -- new life to our cultures. The love of learning has helped improve our schools, and raise the standards for all children. A commitment to innovation and free enterprise has helped strengthen our economy and created jobs. In 2004, I formed a presidential advisory commission to examine ways of expanding economic opportunities for Asian Pacific Americans -- and tomorrow I will receive the commission's final report, and I'm looking forward to getting it. 
    As Asian Pacific Americans realize the opportunities of our nation, they're also answering the call to give back to our communities -- and by doing so they create new opportunities for others. Men and women of Asian Pacific descent volunteer their talents and time to help their neighbors in a lot of ways. This afternoon, we honor six Americans of Asian Pacific heritage with our nation's highest honor for community service: the President's Volunteer Service Award. 
    The volunteers we recognize have set a powerful example for all Americans. They have served important causes -- from providing aid to victims of natural disasters, to sharing the joy of science with students, to raising money for libraries in far away lands. These acts of kindness have changed lives; they've laid the foundation for stronger communities. And they really speak to the strength of America . Our strength is not our military, although we'll keep it strong, and our strength is not necessarily the size of our economy, although we'll keep it robust. The true strength of the country lies in the hearts and souls of citizens who hear the call to love a neighbor and do something about it. 
    One of the honorees is a Virginia Tech student. I had the privilege of meeting Adeel Khan. See, Adeel is the President of the student government at Virginia Tech. He took office shortly before the terrible violence hit that campus. He's had what we call a difficult presidency. (Laughter.) And yet he understood the need for leadership. He's an impressive guy. He worked hard with classmates to organize a campus-wide vigil. He helped bring that important community together. He dealt with the tragedy the way you'd expect a leader to deal with tragedy. This good young man helped lead his fellow students in healing. And we know, as he did so, it helped heal the entire nation. 
    We see the true spirit of the Asian Pacific American community in the compassion and decency of citizens like Adeel Khan. We're grateful for the many contributions that Asian Pacific Americans have made to our nation. We're proud to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. I congratulate all the honorees. And now I ask Lieutenant Commander Roncska to read their citations. 
    LIEUTENANT COMMANDER RONCSKA: 
    Angela An. The President's Volunteer Service Award to Angela An: From 2004 to 2006, Angela served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Secondary Education program in Bulgaria, where she taught English and Information and Communication Technology to students age 12 to 18 at school in a town -- remote mountain town. In addition, she helped to organize a summer leadership camp for 40 youth from throughout the country called Camp GLOW -- Girls Leading Our World. Angela is currently an active volunteer at Sunrise Assisted Living Facility, and helps deliver groceries for in-bound senior citizens with Food for All. (Applause.) 
    Anna DeSanctis. Anna DeSanctis. (Applause.) The President's Volunteer Service Award to Anna DeSanctis: Anna created the Odyssey Project where she raised more than $22,000 in 18 months to help create libraries in four orphanages in the region of China where she was born. The project allowed her to help children learn about the world through reading. The additional funds leftover by the Chinese social welfare organizations were used to construct water wells in two remote villages. (Applause.) 
    Kay Hiramine. (Applause.) The President's Volunteer Service Award to Kay Hiramine: In 2001, Kay launched Humanitarian International Services Group -- HISG -- a U.S.-based humanitarian NGO that helps to find and to mobilize resources to meet humanitarian needs around the world, and to respond to disasters and emergencies. In 2006, HISG's activities involved more than 60 nations and 120 projects worldwide, and sent over $8 million in donated humanitarian assistance. (Applause.) 
    In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, HISG's team launched a private sector operation center in Houston that mobilized over 1,500 volunteers into the disaster zone within one month after the hurricane. (Applause.) 
    Adeel Khan. (Applause.) The President's Volunteer Service Award to Adeel Khan: In response to the tragic events at Virginia Tech on April 16th, Adeel has worked diligently to recognize [sic] Hokies United to promote school spirit and to help heal the community nationwide. Hokies United helped to organize a candlelight vigil at the university, which was attended by 40,000 students, faculty, staff and community members. Adeel serves as the president of the Student Body, is a member of the Student Alumni Associates, is treasurer of the Delta Sigma Phi fraternity, and is the office manager of the Collegiate Times Business Department. (Applause.) 
    Linda Uehara. (Applause.) The President's Volunteer Service Award to Linda Uehara: For over 40 years, Linda has been working with youth, families, schools and communities to promote and support safe and healthy lifestyles in Hawaii . In 2003, she was appointed by the Governor of the state of Hawaii to serve on the Juvenile Justice State Advisory Council, a group that affects services for about 1,800 youths each year. As a volunteer with the Hawaii Girls Court she co-facilitates Girls Street Smart, a life skills program for Asian and Pacific Island girls ages 12 to 18 years, and Girls Circle , a strength-based approach to honor gifts and talents, build healthy relationships, and address girls' needs. (Applause.) 
    Jonathan Wu. (Applause.) The President's Volunteer Service Award to Jonathan Wu: Jonathan established Science Alliance, a program that recruits high school honor students to work with 5th graders from 16 elementary schools on advanced science projects. The mentors and their "buddies" work together after school throughout the year learning about science, at the end of which all of the kids share their projects at a science fair extravaganza. Now in its third year, Science Alliance is currently providing valuable science training to more than 160 elementary school students. (Applause.) 
    THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all for coming today. In our diversity we find our strength; in our hearts we find such wonderful compassion. Thank you all for setting a great example. May God bless you all, and may God continue to bless the United States of America . Thank you. (Applause.)

5/9/07 Sacramento Bee: Rousing Manzanar's memories: More than 60 years ago, Japanese Americans were forced to leave their homes and move to a Sierra camp. Last month, a group took a painful trip back,
by Jennifer Garza
    Independence , Inyo County -- Carol Hironaka steps off the chartered bus and into the midday heat. She had forgotten how hot it can get here, she says. Hironaka readjusts her straw hat and moves on.
    Later, during the half-mile hike, concerned friends ask if she would like to stop and rest. No, Hironaka, answers politely. She wants to continue.
    She is determined to see the place where she and her family had been imprisoned. 
    As a teenager, Hironaka dreamed of leaving Manzanar. Now 82, she is anxious to see it again.
    The grounds of Manzanar are littered with tumbleweed, sand and memories. Strong winds, high temperatures and dust storms are common. One of 10 World War II internment camps, Manzanar is considered by many as the bleakest.
    More than 10,000 people once lived on one square mile here. Every year thousands travel to this small town in the eastern Sierra Nevada foothills to remember them.
    For the second year in a row, a group of Sacramento area residents recently joined hundreds from across the state in a pilgrimage to Manzanar, a trip described by several as a religious experience and a reaffirmation of the human spirit.
    They are teachers, state workers, doctors, students -- 50 local people who have traveled seven hours to the site to hear speeches and participate in an interfaith ceremony, but mostly to learn about the past. Thirteen were former internees at various camps.
    Four had been interned at Manzanar.
    Most are Japanese Americans, but it is a diverse group, including several Muslim Americans.
    "We know what it's like when a community is isolated and singled out due to war hysteria," says Hamzah El-Nakhal, a retired university professor and president of the Sacramento Valley Council on American- Islamic Relations.
    "There was a climate of fear then, and there is one now," says El-Nakhal.
    Carol Hironaka heard about the trip from a friend and knew she had to go. She brought her daughter and two granddaughters.
    Now as she walks the grounds, Hironaka is bombarded with questions from her fellow travelers.
    What was it like?
    Hironaka smiles, but can't seem to find the right words.
    Her family had been forced to move from their home in the town of Florin in Sacramento County , bringing only what they could carry. Hironaka's father sold 40 acres of farmland at a fraction of its value. For three years, seven members of her family squeezed into a small barracks, never knowing what would happen next.
    Like so many of her generation, after the war Hironaka rarely spoke about those years. Instead, they simply said, "Shikata ga nai" -- "It cannot be helped."
    At least that's the way it was for decades. Returning to Manzanar has awakened conflicting feelings.
    "I made good friends there. I was young, and there were a lot of things to do," says Hironaka, who arrived at the camp when she was 17 years old and left when she was 20.
    "But my parents lost everything, so I feel bad for what they went through," she says. "And no matter what, you never forgot where you were."
    Manzanar was built in 1942 after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.
    Citing national security, he ordered the evacuation of anyone with greater than 1/16 Japanese ancestry from the West Coast and into war relocation centers.
    More than 120,000 people were taken from their homes. Two-thirds were American citizens.
    In 1992, Congress declared Manzanar a National Historic Site, a reminder to future generations "of the fragility of American civil liberties," according to Manzanar's Web site.
    "What camp were you in?"
    This was the way a generation of Japanese Americans greeted one another after the war. Some Sacramentans went to Tule Lake in Modoc County , or Heart Mountain in Wyoming , or Jerome , Arkansas , to name a few. But for 600 residents of Florin , the answer was "Manzanar, 30 Block."
    That's where Hironaka lived. "30 Block" was about 100 yards from the women's latrine and within site of the guard tower.
    Betty Abe lived nearby.
    Now 81, Abe is listening quietly at the pilgrimage ceremonies as the speakers address the crowd gathered near the Manzanar memorial.
    Abe says she would never be able to stand in front of hundreds of people and talk about the internment camps. It would be against her private nature, she is too shy.
    And yet ... 
    Many people who lived in the camps are getting older. Who will tell their stories?
    Abe was 15 when her family was sent to Manzanar. Abe says the residents were told they had been sent to the camp for their own protection.
    But they didn't believe that. After all, the gun from the guard tower was pointed inside the fence.
    During her time at Manzanar, there was a riot. An internee was killed. "It was scary; you always thought, 'What is going to happen next?' " Abe says. "We were all caged in."
    In May 1945, after the war ended in Europe , her family was given $25 and told they could leave. They had no place to go. Abe and her family moved in with an uncle in Loomis.
    She worked as a domestic and later as a receptionist. She married and had children.
    But Abe never forgot what it was like to live behind barbed wire. Once a year, she gets together with friends she met when they were all teenagers at Manzanar.
    These friendships are important to Abe.
    "They're the only ones who really understand what it was like there," she says.
    Life at Manzanar was hard, there was little privacy and conditions were crowded.
    To pass the time, internees formed sports teams and several baseball leagues. They organized dances and attended weekly movies at the outdoor theater.
    Ernie Takahashi is a Sacramento optometrist and also one of 541 babies born at the Manzanar hospital.
    On his birth certificate, the town of Independence is listed as his birthplace.
    Takahashi, 62, joined the pilgrimage to get a sense of where he came from. "I wanted to see what my family described to me." He looks at the area where the hospital once was, now barren land.
    "I wish it was still here," he says "But after the war they got rid of it, of a lot of this."
    The U.S. government sold the barracks as scrap lumber. There are some remains from the time period including two stone sentry posts, the high school auditorium (now the interpretive center) and the camp cemetery. A replica of a guard tower has been built.
    At the interpretive center, there are exhibits, screening rooms, and a store where DVDs and books such as "Farewell to Manzanar," by former internee Jeanne Wakatsuki, are sold. "It's frightening," says Maren Shawesh, 26, of Sacramento , walking through the center.
    After 9/11, she says Japanese Americans were among the first to speak out against racial scapegoating.
    "Coming here, I have a better understanding why," Shawesh says.
    The sun beats down on hundreds of pilgrims as they prepare for the interfaith service led by a Shinto priest, a Christian minister, a Buddhist priest and others.
    As the wind kicks up sand, a former internee from another camp says, "I thought Arkansas was bad. This is terrible."
    But many of the pilgrims don't seem to mind. Some in the Sacramento group are visibly moved by walking the grounds.
    Andy Noguchi, who helped organize the pilgrimage, had two uncles who were here as orphans. Mary Shimazu, a former internee, wanted her family to see Manzanar. Stan Umeda, who can still remember his family identification number, was interned at another camp but always wanted to see Manzanar.
    "I heard so much about it," he says.
    Hironaka says she is surprised by the large turnout for this year's pilgrimage and is particularly impressed with the ethnically diverse group of young people who made the journey.
    "Maybe they'll make sure it doesn't happen again," Hironaka says.
    She is exhausted. She found the sites of her family's old barracks, the former softball field, the mess hall. She was hoping to see someone she knew from the camp, but did not.
    "Too many years have gone by," she says.
    The next morning, Hironaka joins her fellow pilgrims and boards the bus for the long ride back to Sacramento . She plans to come back next year if she is able.
    For now, she is happy to leave the past behind.

5/07: Idiot Lawyer Sues Korean-American Owners of Dry
Cleaner for $65 Million Over Lost Pants

Contribute to the Custom Cleaners Defense Fund. 
I have done so. http://www.CustomCleanersDefenseFund.com

Write the District of Columbia government to remove plaintiff as
an administrative law judge.

5/4/07 Washington Post: Customer Sues for $65 Million Over Pants,
by Lubna Takruri, The Associated Press
    Washington -- A missing pair of pants has led to one big suit. A customer
got so steamed when a dry cleaner lost his trousers that he sued for $65 million.
Two years later, he is still pressing his suit.
    The case has demoralized the South Korean immigrant owners of the
mom-and-pop business and brought demands that the customer - an
administrative law judge in Washington - be disbarred and removed from office
for pursuing a frivolous and abusive claim.
    Jin Nam Chung, Ki Chung and their son, Soo Chung, are considering moving
 back to Seoul , seven years after they opened their dry-cleaning business in the
nation's capital, said their lawyer, Chris Manning.
    "They're out a lot of money, but more importantly, incredibly disenchanted with
the system," Manning said. "This has destroyed their lives."
    The customer, Roy L. Pearson Jr., who has been representing himself,
declined to comment.
    According to court documents, the problem began in May 2005 when Pearson
became a judge and brought several suits for alterations to Custom Cleaners in
Washington. A pair of pants from one suit was missing when he requested it two
days later.
    Pearson asked the cleaners for the full price of the suit: more than $1,000.
    But a week later, the Chungs said the pants had been found and refused to pay.  Pearson said those were not his pants, and decided to take the Chungs to thecleaners and sue.
    Manning said the cleaners have made three settlement offers to Pearson:
$3,000, then $4,600, then $12,000.
    But Pearson was not satisfied and expanded his calculations beyond one pair
of pants. Because Pearson no longer wanted to use his neighborhood dry cleaner, he asked in his lawsuit for $15,000 _ the cost of renting a car every weekend for 10 years to go to another business.
    Manning said Pearson somehow thinks he has the right to a dry cleaner within
four blocks of his apartment.
    The bulk of the $65 million demand comes from Pearson's strict interpretation of Washington consumer protection law, which imposes fines of $1,500 per violation, per day. Pearson counted 12 violations over 1,200 days, then multiplied that by three defendants.
    Much of Pearson's case rests on two signs Custom Cleaners once had on its
walls: "Satisfaction Guaranteed" and "Same Day Service." He claims the signs
amount to fraud.
    The case is set for trial June 11.
    Sherman Joyce, president of the American Tort Reform Association, an
organization that fights what it considers abusive lawsuits against small businesses, has asked that Pearson be denied a renewal this week of his 10-year appointment.  The association has also offered to buy Pearson the suit of his choice.
    Chief Administrative Judge Tyrone Butler had no comment on Pearson's
reappointment prospects.
    Melvin Welles, former chief administrative law judge with the National Labor
Relations Board, wrote to The Washington Post to say that if he were the judge in the case, he would throw out the lawsuit and order Pearson to pay the Chungs for their legal expenses and their mental suffering. He also called for Pearson's ouster and disbarment.
    "The manifest absurdity of it is too obvious to require explanation," Welles wrote.
    To the Chungs and their attorney, one of the most frustrating aspects of the case is their claim that Pearson's gray pants were found almost right away, and have been hanging in Manning's office for more than a year. Pearson claims in court documents that his pants had blue and red pinstripes.
    But Manning said: "They match his inseam measurements.  The ticket on the pants matches his receipt."

Press Release: Commission Urged To Reconsider Tenure of Law Judge Who's Suing Dry Cleaner for $65 Million Reappointment to New 10-Year Term, at Taxpayers Expense, Could Start Tomorrow
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, CONTACT: Darren McKinney, dmckinney@atra.org, 202-682-0084
    Washington, DC, May 01, 2007 -- The American Tort Reform Association yesterday delivered a letter to four District of Columbia officials, urging them to consider carefully the "judicial temperament" of an administrative law judge who is seeking reappointment while suing a local dry cleaner - over a lost pair of pants - for more than $65 million.
    His pants were found long ago and are readily available to him, explained ATRA president Sherman Joyce. What may no longer be available to him, unless he withdraws his lawsuit, is a reputation as a jurist with appropriate judicial temperament.
    As recently reported by The Washington Post, FOX News Channel and other local and national media outlets, D.C. administrative law judge Roy Pearson Jr. has sued Custom Cleaners in Northeast D.C. under the Districts Consumer Protection and Procedures Act, alleging among other things that window signs advertising Satisfaction Guaranteed and Same Day Service fraudulently deceived customers.
    The Districts consumer protection act and many others in states across the country  are well-intentioned but loosely worded, Joyce continued. They were crafted largely in the late-1960s and into the 1970s, before personal injury litigation was industrialized by the trial bar in the 1980s, and Judge Pearsons lawsuit appears to be a somewhat typical, if wholly outrageous example of the exploitation such laws are increasingly subject to these days.
    ATRA pledges to raise sufficient funds to buy Judge Pearson a high-quality suit of his choosing if hell do the right thing and let this hardworking family business get back to serving its community and paying taxes to the District government, added Joyce.  But since that may not do the trick, weve reached out to the commission considering his reappointment to the well-paid, taxpayer-supported position hes held since May 2, 2005.
    He noted that D.C. administrative law judges first serve a two-year term upon initial appointment and can then apply for reappointment to a 10-year term. Judge Pearsons initial term expires today, and a source at the Commission of Selections and Appointments of Administrative Law Judges of the Office of Administrative Hearings confirmed to ATRA that he has applied for reappointment. The OAH telephone number is (202) 478-1421.
    Joyces letter to Chief Administrative Law Judge Tyrone Butler and Commissioners Robert Rigsby, Henry Levine and Peter Wilner also was copied to D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, all members of the D.C. Council and D.C. Superior Court Judge Rufus King, all of whom have a role in deciding who will serve on the commission in the future.  Judge Pearson also was copied. Full text of the ATRA letter follows below:

April 30, 2007
Chief Administrative Law Judge Tyrone Butler
D.C. Office of Administrative Hearings
825 N. Capitol Street, NE
Washington, D.C.    20002

Commissioner Robert Rigsby
Commissioner Henry Levine
Commissioner Peter Wilner
Commission on Selection and Tenure of Administrative Law Judges
441 Fourth Street NW, Suite 540 S
Washington, D.C. 20001

RE: Administrative Law Judge Roy Pearsons Pending Reappointment to a 10-Year Term

Dear Judge Butler and Commissioners Rigsby, Levine and Wilner:

    On behalf of the American Tort Reform Association, which works to combat lawsuit abuse, I urge you to carefully reconsider the reappointment of Administrative Law Judge Roy Pearson Jr. to a 10-year term scheduled to commence in three days on May 2.
    As you are almost surely aware by now, thanks to extensive local and national media coverage, Judge Pearson has chosen to exploit the Districts well-intentioned but loosely-worded Consumer Protection and Procedures Act in suing a family-owned D.C. dry cleaner for more than $65 million over a lost pair of suit pants.
    Though the pants have long since been found and made available to him, Judge Pearson has stubbornly continued to waste precious Superior Court resources in a clearly misguided effort to extort a hardworking family that provides a service to its community and tax revenue to the District government.
    In a letter to the editor in todays Washington Post, former National Labors Relations Board chief administrative law judge Melvin Welles urged any bar to which Mr. Pearson belongs to immediately disbar him and the District to remove him from his position as an administrative law judge.
   To those of us who carefully study the litigation industrys growing abuse of consumer protection laws around the country (see ATRA general counsel Victor Schwartzs recent article from Executive Counsel magazine, Consumer Protection Acts Are a Springboard for Lawsuit Abuse, enclosed) and to everyday D.C. taxpayers who collectively provide Judge Pearson with a
considerable salary, his persistence in this lawsuit raises serious doubts about his capacity to serve the city as a fair, impartial, effective, and efficient judge, as required by the Office of Administrative Hearings Establishment Act.
    If Judge Pearson goes ahead with his lawsuit, any party who comes before him in future administrative hearings could understandably lack confidence in his judgment and judicial temperament. Furthermore, this case will become fodder for late night comics, various members of Congress and other assorted critics of D.C. government if this case, scheduled for trial June 11, remains in the headlines.
   Judicial temperament is a critical characteristic of an outstanding jurist. Any individual who chooses to pursue a case such as Judge Pearsons, at a minimum, calls into question his or hers. As you consider his reappointment, we strongly urge you to examine closely his judicial temperament and decide whether it is sufficient to serve the people of the District of Columbia properly as an administrative law judge.

Sincerely,
Sherman Joyce
President
American Tort Reform Association
Enclosure: Consumer Protection Acts Are a Springboard for Lawsuit Abuse,
Executive Counsel, March/April 2007, Vol. 4 No. 2

Cc: Mayor Adrian Fenty, Council Chair Vincent Gray, Superior Court Chief Judge Rufus King, all D.C. Council Members and Administrative Law Judge Roy Pearson

The American Tort Reform Association (ATRA) is the only national organization dedicated exclusively to tort and liability reform through public education and the enactment of legislation.  ATRA's membership includes non profits, small and large companies, as well as state and national trade, business, and professional associations.

5/7/07 Victorville (CA) Daily Press: Barb Stanton fired from radio talk show: Clear Channel Victorville fired radio talk show host Barb Stanton. Jerry Doyle will replace Stanton 's noon to 3pm show,
By Mitch Deacon
    Victorville In the wake of controversial statements aired on Talk 960, talkshow host Barbara Stanton was fired Monday by Clear Channel Victorville. 
    Stanton ignited criticism on April 26 by falsely declaring the president of East West Bank to be a foreigner, accusing the president of Desert Community Bank of lying on her show, and encouraging her listeners to suck your money out of DCB. 
    The Daily Press obtained an internal memorandum from Clear Channel stating: Barb Stanton is no longer employed by KIXW-AM. 
    Clear Channel officials on Monday confirmed that Stanton had been terminated. 
    The management of any organization has to make decisions that are internal and personal, and I am compelled to appreciate and respect their decisions, said Ronald Wilson, president of Desert Community Bank. 
    Stanton s remarks could potentially constitute a violation of state banking law, according to a legal expert. 
    Stanton falsely claimed on the air that the president of East West Bank is not an American citizen, asserted that the bank merger is going to be a big time for all, except us, the true Americans, and publicly urged depositors to withdraw their funds from Desert Community Bank. Eighty-four percent of East West Bank is institutionally owned by American companies. 
    According to the California Department of Financial Institutions, section 3369 of the financial code states: Any person who willfully and knowingly makes, circulates or transmits to another or others, any statement or rumor, written, printed or by word of mouth, which is untrue in fact and is directly or by inference derogatory to the financial condition or affects the solvency or financial standing of any bank doing business in this State. . . is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of not more than $1,000 or by imprisonment for not more than one year, or both. 
    Representatives of Desert Community Bank are uncertain whether they will pursue legal action. 
    I think what she said certainly has a risk of having violated that section, said Alan Rosen, legal counsel for Desert Community Bank. 
    Her statements were false and designed to cause financial harm to the bank, he said. 
    The San Bernardino County District Attorneys office of Victorville declined to comment on the matter. 
    Attorneys for the bank have not ruled out the possibility of a civil lawsuit against Stanton , Rosen said. 
    There are potential lawsuits there, but we have not made any decisions over whether we will seek civil remedies, he said. 
    Besides asserting that Ron Wilson lied during an appearance on her show several weeks ago, Stanton also said that Dominic Ng, the president of East West Bank , is a foreigner. 
    She just didnt know what she was talking about, Rosen said. 
    Dominic Ng is not only a U.S. citizen, he happens to serve on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco , he said. 
    Stanton has not responded to repeated requests for interviews. 
    Rosen said bank officials will continue to work to make the merger transaction succeed. Our goal remains making sure that this merger becomes a reality, he said. 

5/5/07 San Diego Union Tribune: University of California marks decade of race-blind admissions,
by Michelle Locke, Associated Press
    Berkeley A fit of spring-cleaning led Eric Brooks to a box of old newspaper clips. Inside were stories from 1997 when he was the lone black student to enroll in the incoming law school class at the University of California , Berkeley , following the end of affirmative action admissions.
    He didn't read them. That box doesn't hold pleasant memories.
    I felt bad for myself at the time because of my situation, but worse for the people who were denied admission, said Brooks. That ate at me for my entire time there.
    Ten years later, a lot has changed. The numbers of black and other underrepresented minorities at the University of California have rebounded at the undergraduate level, although they haven't kept pace with high school graduation growth for those groups. At the same time, there's been a redistribution within the system, with more blacks and Hispanics going to lesser-known branches of the 10-campus system and fewer to the flagships of Berkeley and UCLA, a trend that troubles some.
    Meanwhile, Florida , Texas and Michigan have rewritten admissions rules and colleges nationwide are bracing for more change with Ward Connerly, the UC regent who started it all, taking his campaign for race-blind admissions to more states next year.
    The legacy of California 's consideration of this issue ... has been a national front on the issue of equity in American society, said David Hawkins, public policy director for the National Association for College Admission Counseling. This debate just will not go away.
    Connerly agrees.
    If things unfold the way I am predicting they will unfold, I think we are witnessing the end of an era, he said.
    The debate over affirmative action begins with how you define affirmative action.
    To Connerly, it's a system of racial preferences that he argues only drive a wedge between people. To his opponents, it's a way of recognizing that not every student starts out with the same advantages, that poor schools, often attended by high numbers of minorities, may not have enough teachers, textbooks or even desks to go around.
    The debate came to UC in 1995 when, in a bitterly contested 14-10 vote, the system's governing Board of Regents voted to stop looking at the race of applicants, a change effective for graduate students in 1997 and for undergrads the following year.
    In 1996, Connerly took the movement statewide, chairing a successful Proposition 209, which banned consideration of race in public hiring, contracting and education. A similar measure passed in Washington state in 1998.
    Texas affirmative action policies fell in 1996 with a federal appeals court ruling.
    In Florida , Connerly launched a campaign similar to Proposition 209. Then-Gov. Jeb Bush opposed the measure as divisive but implemented his own One Florida plan eliminating the use of race or gender in public hiring, contracting and higher education.
    Affirmative action struck back in 2003 with what seemed to be a major victory. The Supreme Court, ruling in two University of Michigan cases, said race could be used as a limited factor in college admissions.
    But Connerly and his supporters promptly countered with a successful initiative campaign last fall banning consideration of race in Michigan admissions.
    What has it all meant?
    In Texas and Florida , lawmakers guaranteed eligibility to high school students who graduate at the top of their class (Top 10 percent in Texas , Top 20 in Florida ). UC has a similar program, but on a smaller scale, guaranteeing eligibility to the top 4 percent of graduating classes.
    In Florida , figures released last fall showed black students made up 13.7 percent of enrollment in state universities, compared to 14.2 percent when One Florida was implemented in 1999. Hispanic enrollment increased from 14.1 percent to 16.9 percent.
    At the University of Texas at Austin , minority enrollment dropped after the 1996 federal court ruling, but has since rebounded. Last fall, 1,914 black students enrolled compared to 1,911 in 1996.
    At the University of Michigan , officials say they won't defy the ban on race-based admissions, but they won't give up on diversity. We don't believe that we can deliver a 21st-century education if we're not a diverse learning community, said Julie Peterson, associate vice president for media relations and public affairs.
    In April, Connerly and his supporters announced plans for initiative campaigns in more states, including Colorado , Missouri , Oklahoma and Arizona .
    That's left university administrators across the country scrutinizing their policies, said Hawkins. To be an admissions officer in this environment is very challenging.
    The year Brooks became a critical mass of one, there were 14 black students admitted to UC's Boalt Hall School of Law, but none attended.
    He'd been admitted the year before but deferred admissions, putting him in the doubly uncomfortable position of being the last black student admitted under the old affirmative action policies.
    Boalt has made changes since 1997, stepping up recruitment, asking students to write longer personal statements and looking at students' socio-economic background.
    Last fall, 13 black students enrolled in the incoming class, a big increase from 1997 but still below the mid-90s totals of 20 or more.
    The bottom line on Proposition 209, from where I sit, is it has continued to suppress enrollment, said Ed Tom, director of Boalt admissions. It certainly has not expanded the number of African-American applications we have received over time.
    Does it matter if the numbers of black students dip at elite campuses?
    Not to me it doesn't, said Connerly. As long as all of our kids have an equal chance to get an education.
    UC administrators have responded to the tumbling numbers by revising admissions policies to take a more comprehensive view of candidates by considering their economic background and whether they overcame hardship.
    But critics say the campuses still don't represent California as a whole.
    And more blacks and Hispanics are graduating from high schools now than 10 years ago, meaning the gap between those numbers and UC enrollment has widened.
    When segments of the population are missing in the classroom, it's less than what we consider to be ideal, said Susan Wilbur, director of UC's undergraduate admissions. We are no better today as a proportion of our total class than we were in 1995.
    Interestingly, Asians, who did not benefit under affirmative action, now make up 36 percent of admissions, up from 33 percent in 1997. At Berkeley , Asians are the biggest ethnic group, making up 39 percent of last fall's freshman class. That makes Asians overrepresented since California is roughly 44 percent white, 35 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Asian and nearly 7 percent black.
    [WARNING: Liberal bias: Bigots for the Left would never write: That makes Jews overrepresented since California is roughly roughly 44 percent white, 35 percent Hispanic, 3 percent Jewish and nearly 7 percent black.]
    Connerly thinks the growth in Asian admissions since '97 shows they were being discriminated against under the old system.
    But Van Nguyen, a Berkeley student of Vietnamese descent and a member of a regent-appointed task force studying the impact of dropping affirmative action admissions, sees discrimination in the new system as well.
    I don't think it's a liberal-conservative issue. he said. It's really, Do you believe in equality? Do you believe in access? Do you believe in everyone having an equal shot to get to Berkeley ? If you believe that then we need to really rethink this 209 issue.
    These days, Brooks can stroll the halls of Boalt Hall without qualms. His first visit wasn't so easy.
    Administrators helped to alleviate outside pressures by screening mail and dealing with numerous interview requests. And he survived, making friends, passing classes and becoming president of his third-year class. After the first year, another black student transferred in.
    Still, the pressure never really went away.
    Brooks remembers sitting on the law school steps looking at a sheet of Boalt bar passage rates broken down by race.
    I remember thinking, 'Well, that's going to be fun when I take the bar,' he said. It's either going to be 100 or zero.
    In 2000, he did pass the bar (I studied doubly hard.) and began working as a lawyer. Partly because of his experiences, he became active in diversity issues, serving on the state bar's ethnic minority relations committee for some years.
    Brooks says affirmative action may change, but he doesn't think it's time to banish the concept. I think that it's useful in that it remedies past discrimination, he said.
    But Connerly thinks most Americans are with me. They realize that this thing has probably outlived its usefulness and it's just a question of how it's going to end and when it's going to end, not whether it's going to end.

5/7/07 DiversityBusiness.com: Annual Asian American Consumer Behavior Study Reveals Key Findings In Retail, Automobile, Insurance And Telecom Industries,
Contact: Dorothy Parikh, interTrend Communications, Inc., (562) 733-1780
Long Beach, California
    The third annual Consumer Research Study conducted by interTrend's Knowledge Center reveals relevant findings and insightful views into brand loyalty, lifestyle habits, purchase drivers, as well as media consumption of Asian Americans. This year's study increased the sample size to include the Asian Indian segment as well as added questions relating to cell phone usage to gain insights into the U.S. Asian telecom market. The findings will lay a foundation that will present not only the significant potential for marketers to enter this market, but also the fact that this market can no longer be ignored in the multicultural marketing strategies of Fortune 500 companies. 
    The study surveyed 1,380 Asians including Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino and Asian Indian sub-segments, both in-language and in English, nation-wide across four major DMAs to examine their consumer behavior patterns and attitudes in various industry categories. The 2006 findings demonstrate that Asian Americans are highly receptive to culturally relevant messaging and targeted marketing. 
    interTrend's Knowledge Center is committed to conducting this study annually so marketers can take away key data and have a platform to build their business case and ultimately reap the success from entering this market. With an estimated $454 billion buying power in 2007, it is important that marketers not only realize the potential in the Asian American market, but also the specific insights and opportunities this study presents. 
    Internet Usage
    The findings reveal that the Internet plays a critical role in the life of Asian Americans with nearly ninety percent (90%) of respondents online and seventy percent (70%) visiting ethnic websites/portals. In fact, more than half the respondents shop online, which has doubled from last year. Web surfing online also moved up from 8th in ranking in 2005 to 5th in 2006. Asian Indians and Chinese spend the most hours on the Internet and young Asian Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 are the heaviest Internet users. The average online shopping expenditure in the last 12 months is $138. The average online spending amongst the Vietnamese segment increased dramatically from an average of $180 in 2005 to $230 in 2006. The top products purchased online amongst Asian Americans remains as apparel and books. 
    Media Consumption
    The study also examines media consumption amongst Asian Americans. The study revealed that eighty percent (80%) of the respondents consume ethnic media with print having the highest penetration followed by TV and radio. The study also revealed that Asians prefer to be reached and targeted through in-language advertising. Only seventeen percent (17%) of the respondents prefer English only advertising with the majority preferring either in-language or bi-lingual advertisements. 
    Brand Preference and Consumer Behavior in Industry Specific Categories 
    Retail
    According to the study, Asian Americans shop frequently at department stores with nearly one third frequenting department stores at least 1 to 3 times a week. 
    Automotive
    The findings also show that Japanese auto brands are a top choice among the respondents with Toyota and Honda having the highest ownership. Among the sub-segments, Asian Indians and Koreans have the highest purchase intention among all other groups. 
    Insurance
    The study found that Asian Americans have the highest product ownership rate for auto insurance followed by health insurance and life insurance. Price and reputation are the top criteria for selecting an insurance company. 
    Wireless/Telecom
    The study also gauges purchase factors when choosing a wireless phone service provider. The findings illustrate that the quality of local and national coverage were the top criteria in their purchase decision. Other top features stated by respondents included text messaging/SMS capability. 
    Need for Culturally Relevant Marketing
    "Marketers are increasingly committed to capitalizing on the Asian American consumer market opportunity," explains Tanya Raukko, Director of Strategic Planning at interTrend Communications. "There is definitely a hunger to understand this segment's distinct preferences and our goal for the study was to be able to offer marketers relevant data, insights and valid entry points to help them build their business case." 
    "Asian American consumers continue to grow and evolve as a significant market segment. The interTrend Knowledge Center was created to better understand and track changes in Asian American consumption behavior so that marketers can establish more effective relationships with Asian American consumers," explains Julia Huang, President and CEO of interTrend Communications. "With this knowledge and understanding, marketers can maximize their market share and ROI in this consumer segment. This is a strategic investment that we are making for our clients." 
    About the Knowledge Center Study
    The results and findings of this 2006 study were represented by a sample size of 1,380 Asian Pacific Islander Americans. The sample collected was based upon segment population densities across four major DMAs and respondents included Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino and Asian Indian Americans 18 or older in age. Interviews were conducted one-on-one, both in-language and in English, by phone. In early 2004, interTrend launched a unique division, known as the " Knowledge Center ," which deploys and houses a complex synergy of qualitative and quantitative research data analysis, consumer insights, and diverse consulting expertise in various industries.
    interTrend's Knowledge Center is a pioneer in monitoring, assessing, and applying specific behavioral market trends of Asian Americans toward specific targeted marketing strategies. 
    About interTrend Communications, Inc.
    interTrend Communications, Inc. is a leading full-service marketing agency targeting the Asian American segments such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Asian Indian, and Filipino. With a proven track record, interTrend has successfully helped Fortune 1000 clients nurture and establish brand leadership positions in this emerging market through an integrated mix of advertising, public relations, promotions, events and interactive strategies via various in-language media outlets. 
    interTrend delivers excellence to clients, working as marketing partners. Today, long-term partnerships have been established with Toyota Motor Company, JCPenney, State Farm Insurance, Western Union, AT&T, Northwest Airlines, Southern California Gas Company, San Diego Gas & Electric, Nestl and The Walt Disney Company. 

5/4/07 PacificCitizen.org: APA groups are pushing for the immediate firings of New York 's 92.3 Free FM shock jocks,
by P.C. Staff and Associated Press
    Don Imus is gone, but the hosts of a New York morning radio talk show are still employed after their on-air racist and anti-Asian antics - it's a hypocrisy Asian Pacific American groups are vehemently protesting. 
    Vandergrift and Lay were recently suspended for prank calling a Chinese restaurant to make racist and offensive remarks. But APA leaders also point out that the radio hosts have a long track record of racism towards APAs.
    "This isn't about one prank. This is about a history of denigrating Asian American people. We as a community cannot stand up if there are people like this constantly telling us you're nothing," said William Lee, a producer of Falloutcentral.com.
    Community leaders are quick to draw comparisons between the Imus backlash, which ultimately resulted in the removal of the broadcast veteran from television and radio. Imus' statement snagged headlines and ignited a debate about hate speech that CBS Radio could not ignore. 
    CBS, the parent company of 92.3 Free FM, sent out a clear message that it is wrong to denigrate African Americans. If the media company does not fire Vandergrift and Lay then they are condoning hate speech against APAs, said Lee.  
    Putting Hate in the Dog House 
    92.3 Free FM is currently broadcasting reruns of the "Doghouse" show, but APAs want their show to be taken off the air.
    In the six-minute segment aired on April 5 and again April 19, a 92.3 Free FM's "Doghouse" team member prank called a Chinese restaurant and peppered an order for takeout with lewd language and racial slurs.
    The caller told one female employee he wanted to come to the restaurant to see her naked and refers to a part of her body as "hot, Asian, spicy."
    The caller also attempted to order "shrimp flied lice" and at one point he refers to a part of an employee's body as a  "tiny egg roll."
    CBS Radio has suspended hosts Vandergrift and Lay indefinitely and without pay, said Karen Mateo, of CBS Radio. 
    Station management has been in contact with a coalition of APA groups and will be having an in-person meeting to discuss the situation, but the date has not yet been determined said Mateo in an e-mail to the Pacific Citizen.
    This isn't the first time Vandergrift and Lay have made offensive remarks towards APAs. 
    Days after the Virginia Tech tragedy, the duo used a stereotypical Korean accent to mock gunman Seung Hui Cho's confession tape. In 2005, Clear Channel Communications fired them from Wild 94.9 FM for offensive remarks they made about a drum and bugle corps. 
    "Mainstream networks should understand the wide influence they wield, and take responsibility to combat rather than perpetuate racial and sexual stereotypes," said Congressman Mike Honda in a statement calling for the immediate firing of Vandergrift, Lay and the show's producers.
    Trying to Deflate the Power
    Over at New York 's Power 105.1 FM, the morning team of the "Ed Lover Show with Egypt and Ashy" faced similar criticism over an April 11 segment where callers were challenged to outsmart a stereotypical Asian character named "Hung Lo."
    The April 11 show gaffe featuring a segment called "Are You Smarter Than an Asian?" did not ignite as much controversy as the "Doghouse" show, but station management did issue an apology. 
    In the segment, an "Asian" guy named Mr. Hung Lo speaks broken English with a stereotypical Chinese accent and listeners are asked questions like "How does an Asian pronounce 'fried rice?'"
    "This segment made a mockery of the many contributions of Asian Americans to the United States , right before the month of May, which is Asian American Heritage Month, when people all over the country celebrate the contributions of Asian Americans to United States ' history, economics and culture," said OCA Westchester President Jeannette Wang in a statement.
    Radio shock jocks that push the envelope and enrage communities are not part of a new phenomenon. Last year, APA groups successfully pressured Los Angeles radio host Adam Corolla into apologizing for a racist spoof of the Asian Excellence Awards. The list of offenses goes on and in the discussion about shock jocks and racism, the question of freedom of speech continuously arises. 
    "They're shock jocks of a comedy show. Comedy is an art form..." said Mike Saavedra, 27, from Matawan , New Jersey . "I know they didn't mean it in malice or in anger."
    Saavedra, who is a longtime listener of the "Doghouse" show, left a message of support on the "Doghouse" show's MySpace page saying that as an APA he was not offended by their remarks.
    "I'm all for free speech," said Lee, but also added those who continuously spew racist and insulting speech across public airwaves should be fired.

5/3/07 Dallas Morning News: How films affect the way we see Asians,
by Esther Wu
    Like many baby boomers, I spent many of my formative years parked in front of the television set. I had lots of favorite actors and actresses, but none was of Asian descent. For many years, I thought all Asians were cooks (Hop Sing on Bonanza), housekeepers (Mrs.Livingston in The Courtship of Eddie's Father) or chauffeurs (Kato in The Green Hornet). 
    Movies were worse. Asian roles were often caricatures, such as the role of Mr. Yunioshi played by Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, or they played villainous, treacherous spies or enemies of the state.
    Adding insult to injury, many roles calling for Asian actors were often given to non-Asians such as Paul Muni, who played Wang in The Good Earth, and Luise Rainer, who played O-Lan. 
    But when I saw Flower Drum Song, everything changed. 
    For the first time, I saw Asian actors playing real people. They were businessmen and business owners, mothers and fathers concerned for their children, young star-crossed lovers and teenagers who danced like all the other kids on American Bandstand. Was it any wonder that my first adolescent crush was on James Shigeta, who played the handsome young lead in Flower Drum Song? 
    Unfortunately, stars like Mr. Shigeta are few and far between, as proved by the PBS documentary The Slanted Screen: Asian Men in Film and Television. 
    The Slanted Screen, a film written and directed by Jeff Adachi , examines how Asian men have been presented on screen and the challenges they face.
    Using archival footage of Sessue Hayakawa from the silent film era to interviews with today's Hollywood actors such as Jason Scott Lee, this groundbreaking film is a critical examination of how the film industry has affected our image of Asians on and off screen. 
    KERA is presenting this documentary as part of its series of television and radio specials commemorating Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May. 
    To kick off this series, KERA in cooperation with the Texas Chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association, the Asian Film Festival of Dallas and the Asian American Forum will hold a special free screening of The Slanted Screen at 7 tonight at KERA, 3000 Harry Hines Blvd. in Dallas . A panel discussion will follow at 8 p.m. Panelists will include Dallas Morning News film critic Chris Vognar, The News' Sunday editor Tom Huang, Texas Christian University professor of sociology Morrison G. Wong and Dallas Asian Film Festival executive director Chiho Mori. 
    The Slanted Screen is a provocative film that puts a historical as well as a social-economic perspective on the role of Asian men in Hollywood . 
    Mr. Adachi, the director, interviews veteran actors who have opened doors and paved the way for the current cadre of young actors in Hollywood often at the expense of perpetuating Asian stereotypes on screen. But he also talks to a new generation of filmmakers who are working to redefine these age-old stereotypes. 
    One of the most prolific Asian actors in Tinseltown was Mako, who starred in more than 80 feature films and more than 100 television shows. He was the second Asian-American to be nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Sand Pebbles. Mr. Adachi had the opportunity to interview Mako just before he died in 2006. In the documentary, Mako recalls a studio executive's reaction when questioned about casting a non-Asian in the lead of a new television series, Kung Fu. 
    "I remember one of the vice presidents in charge of production, I suppose who said, 'If we put a yellow man up on the tube, the audience will turn the switch off in less than five minutes,' " Mako recalled. 
    Racial barriers, fear of nonacceptance by audiences, the economy and even World War II all had an impact on the roles available to Asian men in Hollywood . 
    Mr. Hayakawa was a popular matinee idol during Hollywood 's silent era. Though he was often cast as the exotic lover who posed a menacing threat to his romantic interest, by 1915, he was one of the highest paid actors on the silver screen. 
    After he turned down the lead in The Sheik to start his own film company, the role went to Rudolph Valentino, who became an overnight success. 
    When the talkies became popular, Mr. Hayakawa's Hollywood career began to wane. He left the United States to act in Europe and Asia . He was called back to Hollywood to star in The Bridge on the River Kwai, which earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor in 1958. It was the first nomination to go to an Asian actor. 
    Mr. Hayakawa died in 1973 after a long and illustrious career. He starred in more than 80 films and was a star on three continents. During his heyday, he rivaled Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and John Barrymore in popularity among audiences. Yet the Hollywood legend is all but forgotten today. 
    In 1949, Mr. Hayakawa made a statement that probably could be said of any Asian-American actor today: "My one ambition is to play a hero." 
    But Mr. Hayakawa was a hero not on the big screen, but in real life. He was a pioneer who led the way for others in the motion picture industry. 
    And thanks to actors like Mr. Hayakawa, we know that Asians can be more than cooks, housekeepers and chauffeurs. 
    The Slanted Screen premieres on KERA-TV (Channel 13) at 10 p.m. May 10. Visit www.kera.org for a compete list of Asian-American films and radio programs that will be aired this month.

5/3/07 Straight.com Vancouver (http://www.straight.com): The invisible visible minority,
by Craig Takeuchi 
    May might be Asian Heritage Month, but there hasn't been a lot to celebrate about the Asian North American male image lately.
    The most prominent Asian-male name in the media at the moment is that of disturbed loner student Seung-Hui Cho, who carried out the Virginia Tech school massacre. Racist sentiments that arose from the tragedy inadvertently exposed a lack of other Asian-male images. Had there been more multifaceted representations of Asian North American men in the mediarather than just as foreigners, enemies, and geeksperhaps the actions of one individual would have been recognized as simply that.
    Local entrepreneur Phil Chow monitors the representation of Asians in the media as a hobby. Since the '90s, he has dutifully searched for and collected articles about Asians that have appeared in print and on the Internet. 
    In a phone interview, Chow says he became interested in the subject because he grew up as the only Asian at his school in Victoria in the '60s. He never saw himself reflected in the media, and when he did, he felt that "you come across as a fool. Plus, the kids would get their material to make fun of me from the media." They called him Tokyo Joe and mocked his "squinty eyes and buckteeth" and "ching-chong" language. (In December 2006 on The View, Rosie O'Donnell imitated the Chinese language in the same way and didn't issue an apology.)
    "At one point," Chow says, "I was ashamed and basically hated my own skin colour."
    One day, he found an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about how stereotypes affect interracial dating patterns. "It talked about the stereotypes of Asian men not being visible and portrayed as gangsters or geeks, or sexist and oppressive. And it was just like, 'Whoa, this article is validating what I've always felt.'
    "There were those stereotypes in the mediathe martial artist [Gedde Watanabe as the geeky foreign-exchange student] in Sixteen Candles.In contrast, whenever I saw an Asian female on TV or the movies, she was paired up with a white guy. It makes you feel kinda unwanted.It makes you feel unattractive."
    While the number of Asian students attending B.C. schools has mushroomed since Chow's day, the media has been slow to reflect this changing reality. 
    The saying "two steps forward, one step back" certainly rings true here. Leading Asian men in action films, such as Jet Li and Jackie Chan, have given way to Asian American stars in a range of lead roles: John Cho as stoner Korean American investment banker Harold Lee in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle; Daniel Dae Kim as one half of a Korean couple on Lost; and Masi Oka as Hiro, the nerdy Japanese salaryman with superpowers on Heroes. Nonetheless, Chow points out, "I do find it kinda funny that of all the major medical TV shows, there's never been an Asian male lead doctor, even though there are a lot of medical students [in real life] that are Asian males."
    What's more, these aren't the actors who are likely to give any of the Hollywood A-list actors like Matthew McConaughey or George Clooney a run for their money. They lack the deciding factor of true Hollywood marketability: the looks.
    While there are numerous hot leading-male actors who are African American and Latino, no Asian American male sex symbol has filled the void since the anomaly of Bruce Lee, who died in 1973. Male stars from Asia such as Chow Yun-Fat and Ken Watanabe have not garnered the same kind of hype that female counterpart Zhang Ziyi has. Survivor winner Yul Kwon, who Chow points out says he went on the show to help change the image of Asian men, was included in People's 2006 Sexiest Man Alive issue. Nevertheless, who has been a bigger Asian American male household name in recent years? American Idol reject William Hung, the Asian American Sambo. 
    In fact, the portrayal of Asian American women as the love interest in interracial relationships has become so ubiquitous it's a clich. Steph Song's role in Everything's Gone Green, which is set in Vancouver , reflects the social reality here; in the Straight's own February 2007 sex survey, in response to the question "If you married outside your race, which would you prefer?" 29.8 percent of Vancouver men answered Asian, while only 9.7 percent of Vancouver women chose Asian men. Yet when there are so many other examples on-screen of Asian women in interracial relationshipsGong Li (Miami Vice), Lucy Liu (Lucky Number Slevin), Sandra Oh (Grey's Anatomy), Ming-Na Wen (ER)is art imitating life or is life imitating art?
    How often is an Asian male portrayed in an interracial relationship? Almost never. Although the CBC TV miniseries Dragon Boys featured Asian male lead characters with Caucasian women, the series focused on a negative aspect of the community: Asian organized crime.
    Yet with China rising as both an economic and cultural force, and with the growth of Asian Canadian diasporas, studios and networks choose to ignore the opportunity to integrate Asian North American men at their own peril.

5/3/07 Houston Chronicle: House passes expanded hate crimes bill,
by Jim Abrams, Associated Press Writer
     Washington Just hours after the White House issued a veto threat Thursday, the House voted to add gender and sexual orientation to the categories covered by federal hate crimes law.
    The House legislation, passed 237-180, also makes it easier for federal law enforcement to take part in or assist local prosecutions involving bias-motivated attacks. Similar legislation is also moving through the Senate, setting the stage for another veto showdown with President Bush.
    "This is an important vote of conscience, of a statement of what America is, a society that understands that we accept differences," said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.
    Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the only openly gay man in the House, presided over the chamber as the final vote was taken.
    The vote came after fierce lobbying from civil rights groups, who have been pushing for years for added protections against hate crimes, and social conservatives, who say the bill threatens the right to express moral opposition to homosexuality and singles out groups of citizens for special protection.
    The White House, in a statement warning of a veto, said state and local criminal laws already cover the new crimes defined under the bill, and there was "no persuasive demonstration of any need to federalize such a potentially large range of violent crime enforcement."
    It also noted that the bill leaves other classes, such as the elderly, the military and police officers, without similar special status.
    "Our criminal justice system has been built on the ideal of equal justice for all," said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas , top Republican on the Judiciary Committee.
    "Under this bill justice will no longer be equal, but depend on the race, sex, sexual orientation, disability or status of the victim."
    Republicans, in a parliamentary move that would have effectively killed the bill, tried to add seniors and the military to those qualifying for hate crimes protection. It was defeated on a mainly party-line vote.
    Hate crimes under current federal law apply to acts of violence against individuals on the basis of race, religion, color, or national original. Federal prosecutors have jurisdiction only if the victim is engaged in a specific federally protected activity such as voting.
    The House bill would extend the hate crimes category to include sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or disability and give federal authorities greater leeway to participate in hate crimes investigations.
    It approves $10 million over the next two years to help local law enforcement officials cover the cost of hate crimes prosecutions.
    Federal investigators could step in if local authorities are unwilling or unable to act. The Human Rights Campaign, the country's largest gay rights group, said this federal intervention could have made a difference in the case of Brandon Teena, the young Nebraska transsexual depicted in the movie "Boys Don't Cry" who was raped after two friends discovered that he was biologically female and then murdered when local police did not arrest those responsible.
    But Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, warned that the true intent of the bill was "to muzzle people of faith who dare to express their moral and biblical concerns about homosexuality." If you read the Bible in a certain way, he told his broadcast listeners, "you may be guilty of committing a 'thought crime.'"
    "It does not impinge on public speech or writing in any way," countered Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., pointing out that the bill explicitly reaffirms First Amendment and free speech rights.
    Conyers said in a statement that state and local authorities will continue to prosecute the overwhelming majority of such cases and the bill requires the attorney general or another high-ranking Justice Department official to approve any federal prosecutions.
    The legislation restates already-enacted penalties.
    Those using guns to commit crimes defined under the bill face prison terms of up to 10 years. Crimes involving kidnapping or sexual assault or resulting in death can bring life terms.
    The Judiciary Committee cited FBI figures that there have been more than 113,000 hate crimes since 1991, including 7,163 in 1995. It said that racially motivated bias accounted for 55 percent of those incidents, religious bias for 17 percent, sexual orientation bias for 14 percent and ethnicity bias for 14 percent.
    The bill is H.R. 1592

5/3/07 Los Angeles Times: Lam defends her performance as a U.S. attorney Statements indicate fired prosecutors are becoming convinced politics were behind their firings,
by Richard A. Serrano
    Washington In a strongly worded defense of her four-year tenure as U.S. attorney in San Diego, Carol C. Lam told congressional investigators that she was constantly given conflicting instructions from Washington and was expected to bring more prosecutions with fewer resources. 
    According to written statements released Wednesday her first public comments since testifying two months ago about her firing Lam also said she was given just weeks to clear out of her office and was informed by Justice Department officials that her ouster was "coming from the very highest levels of the government." And, she said, Washington wanted her to pretend as though it was her decision to leave office.  When Michael A. Battle, then a Justice Department supervisor for U.S. attorneys, called her in December to tell her she was being terminated, she said, "He advised me to simply say publicly that I had decided to pursue other opportunities." 
    Lam's statements, and those of five other fired federal prosecutors, are contained in written responses to the House Judiciary Committee, which is pursuing allegations that the terminations were politically motivated. In all, eight prosecutors were removed last year. The firings have prompted Capitol Hill Democrats, and some Republicans, to call for the removal of Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales. 
    The responses, released by the House panel, also show that several of the ousted prosecutors are becoming increasingly convinced they were dismissed for political rather than performance reasons. Daniel G. Bogden, the former U.S. attorney in Las Vegas , said Justice Department officials told him he was being replaced to make room for future Republican officeholders. He said acting Associate Atty. Gen. William Mercer told him that with the Bush administration in its final years, the GOP wanted to promote up-and-comers to federal judgeships and political offices. 
    Looking back at what has happened since his ouster in December, Bogden said his removal "may have been due, in part, to an effort to politicize the Department of Justice." Others said they felt threatened when Justice Department officials cautioned them not to complain about their firings.
    Former U.S. Atty. Paul Charlton of Phoenix said that Michael Elston, an aide to the deputy attorney general, suggested that if Charlton did not publicly complain about being removed, Gonzales would not speak ill of him on Capitol Hill. "Elston was offering me a quid pro quo agreement," Charlton said. "My silence in exchange for the attorney general's." John McKay, the fired prosecutor in Seattle , said he too felt threatened. "Mr. Elston's tone was sinister," McKay said, and "he was prepared to threaten me further if he concluded I did not intend to continue to remain silent about my dismissal." Another fired prosecutor, H.E. "Bud" Cummins III of Little Rock , Ark. , said he was told that he was being pushed aside to make room for a protege of White House political director Karl Rove. He said Elston urged him not to complain a suggestion Cummins shared with the other fired prosecutors. "They were offended and viewed the statements made by Elston as a threat," Cummins said.
    "One remarked, 'What's next? A horse head in the bed?'
    " Mercer and Elston have not spoken publicly about the firings. But they and other top Justice Department officials, including Gonzales, have maintained that the prosecutors were dismissed for performance reasons. Yet several of the fired prosecutors said in the written statements that they could not get a truthful answer from Battle when he called to tell them they were being terminated. David C. Iglesias, former U.S. attorney in Albuquerque , said he pressed Battle on why he was being removed, only to be told:
    "I don't know and I don't want to know." Bogden said Battle told him the decision was made by "higher-ups" whose identities he did not know. Cummins, outraged at how the prosecutors were treated, said that for the administration to now suggest that performance problems were behind the firings "was a bunch of hogwash." Battle also has not commented about the dismissals; he recently resigned from his Justice Department post. 
    Lam said that after Battle told her she had to go, she pleaded with Elston for more time because of "pending investigations and several significant cases that were set to begin trial." Her office was in the final preparations for grand jury indictments of defense contractor Brent R. Wilkes and Kyle Dustin "Dusty" Foggo, a former top CIA official, on corruption charges arising out of the bribery conviction of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Rancho Santa Fe). Lam said Elston told her that her request for more time was "not being received positively," and "he insisted that I had to depart in a matter of weeks, not months, and that these instructions were 'coming from the very highest level of the government.' " 
    She said that though she never had felt Washington sufficiently supported her in San Diego, it was only later that she learned Justice officials were publicly saying she was fired for performance reasons. Lam, who has been criticized for not prosecuting more immigration cases, said that such criticism was unfair and that Washington knew she was targeting larger cases for greater impact. She also said there were up to 15 key vacancies in her office that were never filled because of budget restraints.
    "Fewer attorneys and staff makes it more difficult to cover the wide spectrum of cases we thought we should prosecute," Lam said. The complete responses from the six former U.S. attorneys can be viewed at http://judiciary.house.gov.

4/27/07: The DiversityInc Top 10 Companies for Asian Americans
By the Editors of DiversityInc
    Although Asian Americans only are 4 percent of the U.S. population, they are growing rapidly and will be 8 percent by 2050, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections. Their median household income now is $60,367, double that of blacks and Latinos and 16 percent higher than whites.*
    How are companies recruiting, retaining and promoting Asian Americans? How are they using Asian-American employee-resource groups and top talent to reach this fast-growing community? Which companies are having the most success answering these questions? The DiversityInc Top 10 Companies for Asian Americans.
    Here are some key points about the Top 10 Companies for Asian Americans:
    An average of 11 percent of new hires are Asian American, compared with 9.5 percent for The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity. Nationally, Asian Americans are 4.5 percent of the adult U.S. work force.* 
    An average of 9 percent of their managers are Asian American, compared with 7 percent for the Top 50. Nationally, Asian Americans are 4.3 percent of managers.* And an average of 11 percent of management promotions went to Asian Americans, compared with 9 percent for the Top 50. 
    An average of 12 percent of the top 10 percent highest-paid women in these companies are Asian American, compared with 8 percent for the Top 50. 
    Forty-three percent of managers in these companies participate in mentoring programs, compared with a 31 percent average for the Top 50. 
    Here are the 2007 DiversityInc Top 10 Companies for Asian Americans:
    No. 1: Cummins
    Also No. 38 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list
    On the Top 50 for the first time this year, Cummins reports that 12 percent of its total management is Asian American, compared with 7 percent for the Top 50 and 4.3 percent nationally.* Ten percent of its female managers are Asian American, compared with 7.8 percent for the Top 50. Thirteen percent of promotions in management went to Asian Americans, compared with 9 percent for the Top 50.
    No. 2: Ernst & Young
    Also No. 43 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list, No. 9 for People With Disabilities, and No. 5 for GLBT Employees
    The accounting giant reports that 14 percent of its work force is Asian American, compared with 7 percent for the Top 50 and 4.5 percent nationally.* And 15 percent of its new hires are Asian American, compared with 9.5 percent for the Top 50 average. Thirteen percent of its managers are Asian American, compared with 7 percent for the Top 50 and 4.3 percent nationally. And 16 percent of its female managers are Asian American, compared with 7.8 percent for the Top 50 average.
    No. 3: Novartis
    Also No. 16 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list
    The global pharmaceutical company reports that 11 percent of its new hires in the United States are Asian American, compared with 9.5 percent for the Top 50. Twelve percent of its managers are Asian American, compared with 7 percent for the Top 50. And 15 percent of promotions in management went to Asian Americans, compared with 9 percent for the Top 50.
    No. 4: PricewaterhouseCoopers
    Also No. 12 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list, No. 3 for People With Disabilities, and No. 2 for GLBT Employees
    Clearly, accounting firms are ahead of the curve when it comes to Asian Americans. Longtime diversity leader PricewaterhouseCoopers reports that 17 percent of new hires are Asian American, compared with 9.5 percent for the Top 50 and a U.S. work force that is 4.5 percent Asian American. Seventeen percent of women promoted in management are Asian American, compared with 9 percent for the Top 50.
    No. 5: MetLife
    Also one of the 25 Noteworthy Companies in 2007
    The insurance company reports that 11 percent of new hires are Asian American, compared with 9.5 percent for the Top 50 and a U.S. work force that is 4.5 percent Asian American. Ten percent of promotions in management went to Asian Americans, compared with 9 percent for the Top 50. Asian Americans are 4.3 percent of all managers nationwide.*
    No. 6: The Coca-Cola Co.
    Also No. 4 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list and No. 5 for Recruitment & Retention
    Thirteen percent of its part-time workers are Asian American, double the Top 50 average of 6.5 percent. And 28 percent of its part-time new hires are Asian American, almost three times the 10 percent average for the Top 50.
    No. 7: Merrill Lynch
    Also one of the 25 Noteworthy Companies in 2007, No. 2 for People With Disabilities, and No. 8 for GLBT Employees
    Thirteen percent of its new hires are Asian American, compared with a 9.5 percent Top 50 average and a U.S. work force that is 4.5 percent Asian American.* Eleven percent of managers are Asian American, compared with a 7 percent Top 50 average. Nationwide, Asian Americans are 4.3 percent of managers.* Eleven percent of the top 10 percent highest-paid women in the company are Asian American, compared with a Top 50 average of 8 percent.
    No. 8: Bank of America
    Also No. 1 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list, No. 1 for Recruitment & Retention, No. 1 for Executive Women, No. 3 for Latinos, No. 3 for GLBT Employees, and No. 6 for Supplier Diversity
    The No. 1 company on the Top 50 has a work force that is 10 percent Asian American, compared with 7 percent for the Top 50 and 4.5 percent nationally.* Nine percent of the top 10 percent highest-paid employees are Asian American, compared with 7 percent for the Top 50 average.
    No. 9: Procter & Gamble
    Also No. 14 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list, No. 9 for Recruitment & Retention, and No. 5 for People With Disabilities 
    Eleven percent of its female new hires are Asian American, compared with 9 percent for the Top 50 and 2 percent nationally.* Eight percent of promotions in management went to Asian Americans, who are 4.3 percent of managers nationwide.*
    No. 10: Wells Fargo
    Also No. 20 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list and No. 8 for Latinos
    The California-based bank has a work force that is 10 percent Asian American, compared with 7 percent for the Top 50 and 4.5 percent nationally.* Twelve percent of the top 10 percent highest-paid employees are Asian American, compared with a Top 50 average of 7 percent.
    *Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics 
    Methodology
    To calculate this list, we looked at all demographic questions broken down by race/ethnicity in the Top 50 survey and pulled out Asian-American data. We also looked at the data for Asian-American men and women separately. Those demographics include boards of directors, work force, new hires, management in total, and management broken down by three levels: CEO and direct reports, direct reports to those direct reports, and all other managers. We also examined management promotions, as well as top 10 percent highest-paid employees. We factored in retention rates for Asian Americans in the work force and in management, compared with all other groups. We looked at other factors that contribute to recruitment, retention and promotion of Asian Americans, such as work/life benefits and employee-resource groups.

4/27/07 AsianWeek: California State Senator, NY and Jersey APAs Demand Firing of CBS Radio Hosts,
    Sacramento California State Senator Leland Yee and media watchdog groups last Tuesday turned the heat up on CBS and New York Station WFNY to fire two suspended radio hosts for making harassing, racist, anti-gay and sexual calls to Chinese restaurant employees.
    Yees demand came after CBS suspended without pay radio hosts Jeff Vandergrift and Dan Lay known as "JV and Elvis." 
    The two New York radio hosts were former San Francisco Bay Area radio personalities who called the restaurant on April 5 ostensibly to order food. 
    During the six-minute segment, one woman is harassed as a DJ said, "Should I come to your restaurant so that I can see you naked that way I can see your hot Asian spicy ass." 
    Another worker was referred to as "a very nice Chinese man probably cant drive for shit, but who cares." 
    Other references are made to ordering "shrimp flied lice" and describing a workers body part as a "tiny egg roll." Another worker was called "faggy." 
    "While I commend CBS for hearing our concerns, if they truly have a zero tolerance policy, Vandergrift and Lay should be immediately fired," said Yee. If they are not fired, said Yee, "I hope advertisers respond as they did in the Don Imus case." 
    Imus was fired from MSNBC and CBS radio for his recent sexist and racist remarks made towards a Rutgers University womens basketball team. 
    Yee cited that failing to fire "JV and Elvis" would be a "double standard" against Asian Americans in light of Imus racist references to African Americans and women. 
    Yee said that the Asian Americans and those insulted by the "JV and Elvis" comments deserved an "immediate apology from CBS." 
    The Organization of Chinese Americans and four New York and New Jersey chapters representing more than two million APAs also denounced the episode and demanded firings and apologies. 
    "The blatant racism, sexism and homophobia in this segment and in the DJs other work is appalling," said Ginny Gong, OCA National President. 
    The Organization of Chinese Americans, Coalition Against Hate Media, civil rights and community organizations were expected to protest on Friday, April 27 at CBS Headquarters in New York . 
    So far, only Vandergrift apologized twice last Monday. CBS, according to spokeswoman Karen Mateo on Tuesday, said it was broadcasting reruns and that the suspensions would be "until further notice." 

4/26/07: Pelosi, Reid, Democratic Leaders Announce 2007 Asian American and Pacific Islander Town Hall   
    Washington , D.C. - Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Chair Debbie Stabenow, and Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Chair Mike Honda announced today the second annual meeting of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community with Democratic leaders next month.  
    The 2007 Democratic Leadership's Asian American and Pacific Islander Town Hall: A New Direction will be held on Wednesday, May 16.  The town hall will focus on issues of concern to the AAPI community such as immigration, health care, housing and economic development, education, veterans' affairs, and civil rights. 
    "The goal of the town hall is to hear from the AAPI community," Pelosi said.  "We as congressional leaders need to make sure that we have input from all the facets of our diverse nation." 
    Reid said, "The annual Democratic Asian American and Pacific Islander Town Hall is an opportunity to have a dialogue about key issues impacting the AAPI community, and to reflect upon priorities that advance the well being of the AAPI community and all Americans." 
    "Our new Democratic majority is committed to continuing the strong relationship we have always enjoyed with the AAPI community," Stabenow said.  "This town hall is a wonderful opportunity to talk about our shared priorities for America ." 
    "Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) comprise one of the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. population. The diverse interests of our community range from family reunification and due process in our immigration system, full benefits for Filipino veterans, and addressing disparities in health care," Honda said.  "This town hall provides a great opportunity for Members of CAPAC and Democratic Leadership to listen to the voices of the AAPI community." 
    In addition to listening to the concerns of the AAPI community, legislators and key staffers will update participants on congressional activities that affect AAPIs.  Democrats are committed to maintaining a dialogue with the AAPI community.  

4/24/07 NY Sun: Commentary: A Bad Week for Asian Americans Gets Worse,
by Grady Hendrix
    It's been a lousy 10 days for Asian Americans. Last Monday, 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 of his fellow students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the media were quick to try and link the shootings to Asian movies by directors Park Chan-Wook and John Woo. That same day, the Ed Lover radio show on Power 105 aired a comedy skit called "Are You Smarter than an Asian?" featuring questions like "How does an Asian pronounce fried rice'?" On Sunday, "The Sopranos" featured a quiet Asian-American resident of Uncle Junior's mental hospital who turned out to be a violent psychopath. And this coming Friday, you can watch "The Condemned," a new action movie featuring a sadistic Japanese martial artist who burns a rival to death.
    At a time when a Stepin Fetchit descendant, Uncle Ben, is being remade as a corporate CEO, it seems incongruous that Christopher Walken will be donning "yellow face" to play a Fu Manchu clone named Feng in the forthcoming dire-looking comedy "Balls of Fury." When Don Imus can get fired for saying "nappy headed hos," how can Ed Lover stay on the air with "Are You Smarter than an Asian?"
    "We're a convenient minority," said Greg Chang, the manager of operations at the ImaginAsian theater, a Manhattan cinema that screens exclusively Asian fare. "A comedian can make fun of Asian Americans and seem edgy without running much risk. Or a school can point to their Asian students and say that they have a lot of minority students even if they don't have any African-Americans enrolled."
    Max Han, who runs the Korean news site NewYorkSeoul.com, points to the emphasis placed on Cho Seung-Hui's nationality as an example of Asian Americans still being excluded from the mainstream. "Major media outlets labeled Cho as a Korean national. Even though he came to the U.S. at age eight, he was considered a foreigner. For the Virginia Tech shooting, we put an emphasis on his Asian ethnicity."
    That may be because Asians are the bad guys again. Ken Leung, who played Carter, the psychopathic mental patient on "The Sopranos," is a professional bad guy. He's known for playing a sadistic mutant who grows quills in "X-Men: the Last Stand," for playing the psycho killer, Sang, in "Rush Hour," and for playing that most evil of all creatures, a high school guidance counselor, in "The Squid and the Whale."
    Ever since women have been given the choice to be either virgins or whores, Asians have been given the choice: gangster or geek? On the one hand, in pop culture you have the lovable nerd Hiro on the NBC's hit show "Heroes." On the other, you have DC Comics' best-selling comic series of 2006, "52," which features a sinister villain known as Chang Tsu, a revamped Wonder Woman Yellow Peril baddie from the 1960s previously known as Egg Fu, who assembled a cabal of evil scientists on the mysterious Oolong Island .
    "Four of America 's last five wars have been fought on Asian soil against Asian armies and that's become part of our collective unconscious," Jeff Yang, an author and a consultant on Asian-American marketing for Iconoculture, said. "Four decades of hostility, on and off, have given us this image of a cunning, heartless, inhuman Asian invader."
    But it goes back earlier than that. In 1914, Jack London wrote a breathless fantasy about the extermination of all Chinese people called "An Unparalleled Invasion"; Buck Rogers made his debut fighting "Mongol hordes;" and the names Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless have entered our vocabulary along with James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. And these stereotypes are getting rehabilitated fast.
    Americans are worried about their jobs being outsourced to India , magazine covers are proclaiming that China is the world's next superpower, and North Korea 's Kim Jong-Il is not only ramping up his nation's nuclear program, but he's been named as part of the science-fiction sounding "Axis of Evil." "There's a sense of anxiety and it's coming out in popular culture," Mr. Yang said.
    "Any other ethnicity or race is very vigilant and vocal about this," Mr. Yang said. "They know all too well that the first signs of cultural danger are when people embrace these media images because from there everything else flows."
    But things are hardly looking better for the future. The Olympics are going to Beijing in 2008. America is bringing China up for trade violations in the WTO. India and America are at loggerheads over a nuclear deal. So it comes as no surprise that next summer's big comic book movie is "Iron Man" starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr. Its villain? He's called "The Mandarin."

4/24/07 PRNewswire-USNewswire: PBS to Offer Special Programming for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, May 1-May 31, 2007,  
     Arlington , Va. , -- In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, celebrated each May, PBS will present a special line-up of new and encore presentations that focus on Asians and Pacific Islanders. From a history of Asian-American actors in film and television (THE SLANTED SCREEN) to young Cambodian refugees facing separation from their families through deportation (INDEPENDENT LENS "Sentenced Home"); from Pacific Islander and Maori dancers (BLACK GRACE) to the power of art to heal one man's life (INDEPENDENT LENS "The Cats of Mikiritani"), PBS presents a wide range of exciting programs made by and about Asian Pacific Americans year-round.  
    Reflecting the diversity of ethnicities, experiences and regions with a

breadth unlikely to be found anywhere else, these compelling programs

examine the rich history, cultural contributions and absorbing heritage of

Asian Pacific Americans.

    Press Preview Copies of Programs Available Upon Request

     New Programming

    INDEPENDENT LENS

    This anthology series showcases documentaries, and a small number of

dramas, united by the creative freedom, artistic achievement and

unflinching visions of their independent producers. Encompassing the full

spectrum of film -- from history to drama to animation to shorts to

social-issue films -- INDEPENDENT LENS allows audiences greater access to

powerful and innovative programs. Terrence Howard hosts.

    "The Cats of Mirikitani"

    Tuesday, May 8, 2007, 10:30-11:30 p.m. ET

    Eighty-year-old Jimmy Mirikitani has survived the trauma of internment

camps, Hiroshima and homelessness by creating art. But when 9/11 threatens

his life on the New York City streets and a local filmmaker brings him to

her home, the two embark on a journey to confront Jimmy's painful past.

This film is an intimate exploration of the lingering wounds of war and the

healing powers of friendship and art. By Linda Hattendorf and Masahiro

Yoshikawa. http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/catsofmirikitani/

    "Sentenced Home"

    Tuesday, May 15, 2007, 10:00-11:00 p.m. ET

    Raised as Americans in inner-city projects near Seattle, three young

Cambodian refugees each made a rash decision as a teenager that irrevocably

shaped his destiny. Now facing deportation to Cambodia years later, they

find themselves caught between a tragic past and an uncertain future by a

system that doesn't offer any second chances. By Nicole Newnham and David

Grabias. http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/sentencedhome/

    THE SLANTED SCREEN

    Thursday, May 10, 2007, 10:00-11:00 p.m. ET

    From silent film star Sessue Hayakawa to Harold & Kumar Go to White

Castle, Jeff Adachi's film explores the portrayals of Asian men in American

cinema and television, chronicling the experiences of actors who have had

to struggle against ethnic stereotyping and limiting roles. Through a

parade of 50 film clips spanning a century, the film presents a critical

examination of Hollywood 's image-making machine. The program includes

interviews with actors Mako, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, James Shigeta, Dustin

Nguyen, Phillip Rhee, Will Yun Lee, Tzi Ma and Jason Scott Lee; comedian

Bobby Lee; producer Terence Chang; casting director Heidi Levitt; writer

Frank Chin; and directors Gene Cajayon, Justin Lin and Eric Byler and

features a new song performed by the San Francisco rock-punk band Say Bok

Gwai. Presenter: Center for Asian American Media.

    BLACK GRACE: FROM CANNON'S CREEK TO JACOB'S PILLOW

    Thursday, June 21, 2007, 10:00-11:00 p.m. ET

    When Black Grace, a dance troupe of Pacific Islander and Maori men,

first burst onto the New Zealand stage in 1995 they were a revelation.

Fusing traditional Pacific and contemporary dance forms with athleticism

and grace, they electrified audiences. Led by Artistic Director Neil

Ieremia, Black Grace evolved from a crew of Neal's "mates" into one of New

Zealand 's national treasures and conquered the world's dance festivals,

culminating with Jacob's Pillow in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts.

This film follows Black Grace's journey from Cannon's Creek, a small town

outside of Auckland , New Zealand , to the prestigious Jacob's Pillow Dance

Festival, the oldest one of its kind in North America . Presenter: Pacific

Islanders in Communications (PIC).

    KEEPERS OF THE FLAME: THE CULTURAL LEGACY OF THREE HAWAIIAN WOMEN

    May 2007 (check local listings)

    KEEPERS OF THE FLAME chronicles the lives of three Hawaiian women who,

more than any other 20th-century figures, helped to revive the flame of

traditional Hawaiian culture. Historian and author Mary Kawena Pukui,

dancer and chanter 'Iolani Luahine, and kumu hula and teacher Edith

Kanaka'ole kept their culture alive in a time when things Hawaiian were

under threat. They were instrumental in the Hawaiian renaissance. Producer:

The Hawaiian Legacy Foundation. Presenter: Pacific Islanders in

Communications (PIC).

    TIME AND TIDE

    May 2007 (check local listings)

    Expatriates return to the tiny island nation of Tuvalu to find a place

vastly different from the one they remember. As the locals and ex-pats

struggle to cope with the dramatic effects of globalization on Tuvaluan

culture, an even greater threat looms. Driven by global warming, a steadily

rising sea level is stealing their precious land. TIME AND TIDE is a poetic

and absorbing documentary about a land, its people and irreversible

tragedy. Presenter: Pacific Islanders in Communications (PIC).

    Encore Programming

    DANCES OF LIFE

    May 2007 (check local listings)

    This performance documentary reveals the cultural history and diversity

of the Pacific Islands -- a vibrant and complex region encompassing 25,000

islands, spread over 10 million square miles of ocean, in which 30 million

people speak hundreds of different languages and dialects -- through their

"dance stories," which for nearly 50,000 years have been an expression of

Pacific Islanders' origins, their journeys, their struggles and their very

existence. The program views dance through the eyes of the people who

practice it as an art form and as a way of life. Keisha Castle-Hughes, the

young star of Whale Rider, narrates. Producer: KQED San Francisco .

Presenter: Pacific Islanders in Communications (PIC).

    INDEPENDENT LENS " Vietnam : The Next Generation"

    May 2007 (check local listings)

    Eight young Vietnamese -- some born in the final days of the Vietnam

War, others in the war's tragic aftermath -- are entrepreneurs and street

kids, farmers and students, artists and engineers. Together they embody the

hopes, dreams and frustrations of a new Vietnam . Through their stories,

this groundbreaking program takes an in-depth look at modern-day Vietnam ,

where communism and capitalism are going head-to-head. Producer: Sandra

Northrop. http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/vietnam/

    TIME OF FEAR

    May 2007 (check local listings)

    In World War II, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were forced to

leave their homes and relocate to military camps. This documentary tells

the story of the 16,000 men, women and children who were sent to two camps

in southeast Arkansas , one of the poorest and most racially segregated

places in America . It also explores the reactions of the native Arkansans

who watched in bewilderment as their tiny towns were overwhelmed by this

influx of outsiders. With rare home movies of the camp and interviews with

Japanese Americans and Arkansans who lived through these events, TIME OF

FEAR is a tale of suspicion and fear, of resilience and of the deep scars

left by America 's long and unfinished struggle with race. Producer: Ambrica

Productions.

    AN UNTOLD TRIUMPH

    May 2007 (check local listings)

    Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2002 Hawaii

International Film Festival, this film documents and honors the 7,000 men

of the 1st and 2nd Filipino Infantry Regiments of the U.S. Army who fought

in World War II. Even though they endured a racist prewar climate and

weren't even considered U.S. citizens, Filipinos in America rallied to join

the American war effort after the fateful bombing of Pearl Harbor . On

January 2, 1942, President Roosevelt signed an executive order allowing

Filipinos to join the U.S. Army and form a volunteer all-Filipino unit.

These troops proved to be skilled fighters and an indispensable force in

freeing the Philippines from the Japanese and, ultimately, in the winning

of World War II. AN UNTOLD TRIUMPH imparts personal accounts of the men's

contributions and sacrifices during the war. Lou Diamond Phillips narrates.

Presenter: Center for Asian American Media.

    PBS is a media enterprise that serves 355 public noncommercial

television stations and reaches more than 75 million people each week

through on-air and online content. Bringing diverse viewpoints to

television and the Internet, PBS provides high-quality documentary and

dramatic entertainment, and consistently dominates the most prestigious

award competitions. PBS is a leading provider of educational materials for

K-12 teachers, and offers a broad array of other educational services. PBS'

premier kids' TV programming and Web site, PBS KIDS Online

(http://www.pbskids.org), continue to be parents' and teachers' most

trusted learning environments for children. More information about PBS is

available at http://www.pbs.org, one of the leading dot-org Web sites on

the Internet.

4/24/07 Associated Press: CBS Radio suspends two New York shock jocks: Hosts broadcast racially charged prank call to Chinese restaurant,
    New York - Still recovering from the Don Imus scandal, CBS Radio suspended two local shock jocks after they twice broadcast a racially charged prank call to employees at a Chinese restaurant.
    The hosts of the daily morning show, WFNY-FMs The Dog House With JV and Elvis, have been suspended indefinitely without pay, CBS Radio spokeswoman Karen Mateo told The New York Times in an e-mail Monday. One of the hosts, Jeff Vandergrift, apologized on Mondays show, she said.
    Local chapters of the Organization of Chinese Americans, an advocacy group, released a statement Sunday protesting the segment. By Monday, California state Sen. Leland Yee and others joined the campaign.
    In the segment, broadcast on April 5 a day after the infamous Imus comment on CBS and again last week, a caller to a Chinese restaurant intersperses an order for takeout with lewd language.
    The caller tells one female employee he wants to come to the restaurant to see her naked and refers to a part of her body as hot, Asian, spicy. The caller also attempts to order shrimp flied lice.
    The shows hosts, Vandergrift and Dan Lay, have been campaigning online and on the air in support of Imus since his firing for calling the Rutgers University womens basketball team nappy-headed hos on April 4.

4/23/07: Organization of Chinese Americans Press Release: Asian Americans Outraged Over Racist Radio Segment; OCA calls for firing of DJs and producer responsible,
Contact: Hope Chu, Communications Manager, 202-223-5500
    Washington , DC OCA, a national Asian Pacific American (APA) organization dedicated to ensuring social justice for Asian Pacific Americans, expressed outrage at an offensive radio segment aired on WFNY 92.3 FM ( New York City ) on 5 April 2007, and re-aired on 19 April 2007. 
    The segment features a prank call made by station DJs JV and Elvis to a Chinese restaurant in which they make numerous comments that demean Asian Pacific Americans, women, and the gay community. During the six-minute segment, the DJs address restaurant employees as Asian lady and Chinese man; make demands for lots of Asian food, son of a bitch; and ask for shrimp flied lice and some old dung. 
    The DJs also accost one woman on the phone, saying, Should I come to your restaurant so that I can see you naked that way I can see your hot Asian spicy ass.  They tell another restaurant employee, You are a very nice Chinese man probably cant drive for shit, but who cares.  The DJs also call one employee faggy. 
    The blatant racism, sexism, and homophobia in this segment and in the DJs other work is appalling, said, Ginny Gong, OCA National President, We will be working with our chapters in the New York City metropolitan area as well as our partners in the civil rights community to seek an apology from WFNY and to demand that the DJs and producers who are responsible for airing this racist segment are fired.
    While one of the DJs has apologized and both have been suspended indefinitely without pay, OCA issued demands that both DJs as well as the producer responsible be fired. 
    Following so closely on the heels of the Don Imus incident, it is unbelievable that another CBS Radio affiliate would air such derogatory and demeaning content, said Michael Lin, OCA National Executive Director, referring to radio personality Imus recent firing for offensive on-air remarks he made about members of the Rutgers University womens basketball team.  The right of free speech is being abused by so-called shock jocks and their producers to make crass and unnecessary comments at the expense of other peoples dignity. 
    OCA was alerted to the radio segment by its local chapters in the New York City area.  What is especially disturbing to the Asian American community is that the segment first aired on April 5 just a day after Don Imus referred to the Scarlet Knights, the Rutgers University womens basketball team, as nappy-headed hos, said Vick Shu Smolin, OCA-New York chapter President, Even more infuriating is that after CBS rightly fired Don Imus on April 12, JV & Elvis aired the segment AGAIN on April 19. It is apparent that not only did JV & Elvis not learn anything from the Don Imus scandal, but CBS and CBS Radio decided that Asian Americans are easy prey for racist radio broadcast. 
    Florence Chen, OCA- New Jersey chapter president added, New Jersey is home to numerous technology, manufacturing and telecommunication firms and home to nearly three-quarters of a million Asian Pacific Americans.  Until we are satisfied with the actions of 92.3FreeFM, we will be calling on the strength of the Asian American market to urge advertisers to pull their support. 
    Once again, radio has tried to gain ratings to the detriment of Asian Americans, said John Tandana, OCA-Long Island chapter vice president, The segment lasted over six minutes, the entire time casting Asian Americans and women in a demeaning manner.   Asian Americans have and will continue to contribute immensely to this countrys economy, intellect and culture.  We will not allow talk radio to spread stereotypes that hurt our community. 
    If the executives of CBS, CBS Radio and 92.3FreeFM do not fire the DJs and their producer, they are sending a very strong message to the Asian American community that they do not care, said Jeannette Wang, OCA-Westchester/ Hudson Valley chapter president, A strong signal must be sent that this type of broadcasting is unacceptable.
    Founded in 1973 as the Organization of Chinese Americans, OCA, a national organization with over 80 chapters and affiliates across the country, is dedicated to advancing the social, economic, and political well-being of Asian Pacific Americans in the United States .



4/22/07 press release: OCA Expresses Outrage over 92.3Free FM Racist and Sexist Radio Segment
    Today, the New York metropolitan area chapters of the Organization of Chinese Americans New York , New Jersey , Long Island and Westchester/Hudson Valley  expressed their outrage over a recent segment aired on WFNY 92.3Free FM that involved a prank call to a Chinese restaurant. In a letter to Thomas Chiusano, the station's President and General Manager, OCA called for an immediate apology by the hosts of the racist, vulgar and sexist segment, JV & Elvis, their producer and the station. In addition, OCA demanded for the immediate firing of JV and Elvis and their show's producer.
    In the segment, the caller begins by telling the first restaurant employee, "I would like some Asian food, son of a bitch" as well as to the second employee, "I would love to have lots of Asian food, son of a bitch." The caller then tells a the restaurant's female employee, "Should I come to your restaurant so I can see you naked? " and continues, "That way, I can see your hot Asian spicy ass." As the caller goes on, he tells yet another employee that he would like some "flied lice," but not "some old dung" and indicates that "I am training in Kung Fu, bitch" before ending with "Tell that hot Asian girl answering the telephone, I'd like to tap her ass."
    OCA-NY President, Vicki Shu Smolin, citing the letter, reiterates, "What is especially disturbing to the Asian American community is that the segment first aired on April 5 - just a day after Don Imus referred to the Scarlet Knights, the Rutgers University women's basketball team, as 'nappy-headed hos.' Even more infuriating is that after CBS rightly fired Don Imus on April 12, JV & Elvis aired the segment AGAIN on April 19. It is apparent that not only did JV & Elvis not learn anything from the Don Imus scandal, but CBS and CBSRadio decided that Asian Americans are easy prey for racist radio broadcast."
    Ms. Florence Chen, President, OCA- New Jersey adds, " New Jersey is home to numerous technology, manufacturing and telecommunication firms and home to nearly three-quarters of a million Asian Pacific Americans. Until we are satisfied with the actions of 92.3FreeFM, we will be calling on the strength of the Asian American market to urge advertisers to pull their support."
    Mr. John Tandana, Executive Vice President, OCA- Long Island continues, "Once again, radio has tried to gain ratings to the detriment of Asian Americans. The segment lasted over six minutes, the entire time, casting Asian Americans and women in a demeaning manner. Asian Americans have and will continue to contribute immensely to this country's economy, intellect and culture. We will not allow talk radio to spread stereotypes that hurt our community."
    Ms. Jeannette Wang, President, OCA-Westchester/ Hudson Valley affirms that "If the executives of CBS, CBSRadio and 92.3FreeFM do not fire the DJs and their producer, they are sending a very strong message to the Asian American community that they do not care. A strong signal must be sent that this type of broadcasting is unacceptable."
    The OCA Chapters are urging its members and colleagues contact the following individuals to demand the apology from and firing of JV & Elvis and their producer:
Thomas Chiusano
President and General Manager
WFNY 92.3 Free FM
tchiusano@923freefm.com
40 W 57th St , Fl 14
New York , NY 10019-4001
(212) 314-9231

Leslie Moonves, President & CEO
CBS
51 West 52nd Street
New York , NY 10019-6188

John Mainelli
Program Director
WFNY, 92.3 Free FM 
john.mainelli@cbsradio.com
WFNY-FM
40 W 57th St, Fl 14
New York, NY 10019-4001
(212) 314-9230

Karen Mateo
CBS Vice President of Communications
1515 Broadway
New York, NY 10036
(212) 846-7638
karen.mateo@cbsradio.com

4/11/07 press release from aaichicago.org: Asian American Institute Secures Victory for Asian American contractors,
    Chicago , April 11, 2007 The Asian American Institute ( AAI ) announces that, following a vote by Chicago City Council earlier today, the City has repaired its public contracting minority- and women-owned business enterprise (M/WBE) ordinance to include Asian Americans as a minority group.
    After nearly three years of confusion that has harmed Asian American contractors, the City Council has finally recognized the anecdotal and numerical evidence that Asian Americans face ongoing discrimination and exclusion from the old boys network, said AAI Legal Director Myron Dean Quon. 
    This is the fair outcome that ensures that Asian American have equal footing in the public contracting arena, he added.
    After a federal court decision in 2003, the City redrafted the M/WBE ordinance, and Asian Americans were removed as a presumptive minority group based on the assertion that there was insufficient statistical evidence that Asian Americans suffered from discrimination. AAI has worked with the Association of Asian Construction Enterprises, since before the redrafting stage to the present, to regain the inclusion of Asian American contractors, attempting to dispel the model minority myth of Asian Americans.
    We are glad that the City of Chicago has fixed the harm and confusion caused by different treatment of Asian American contractors versus other minority contractors, said Eric Mah , Association of Asian Construction Enterprises member. 
    While we are very pleased with the City Councils vote today, our work is not done, said Tuyet Le, AAI Executive Director. Before the ordinance sunsets in 2009, another comprehensive study of minority contractors must be completed. We must have researchers who study and understand minority communities.  

4/10/07 San Francisco Chronicle: State favors path to legality for illegals; Majority supports Bush proposals for immigration reform,
by Tyche Hendricks
    More than four in five California voters support giving legal residence to illegal immigrants, according to a statewide public opinion poll to be released today. 
    By wide margins, the state's voters also favor creating a temporary worker program to allow future immigrants to enter legally, increasing the border patrol and imposing stiff penalties on employers who hire unauthorized immigrants, the Field Poll found. 
    Those proposals are elements of a plan outlined by President Bush in the border city of Yuma , Ariz. , on Monday, as he revived his call for comprehensive immigration overhaul. 
    Some analysts doubt any such legislation out of Washington , D.C. , will go that far, however, because they think Bush lacks the political clout to rally divided Republicans behind his proposals. 
    Couching his hope for legalization and an expanded temporary worker status in the context of a "tough on security" message, Bush made his pitch at a Border Patrol station in the desert, where a new fence and increased staffing and high-tech surveillance have helped reduce illegal crossings 68 percent over the past year. 
    California voters increasingly oppose a federal plan for 700 more miles of border fence -- with just 37 percent favoring it this year, down from 47 percent last April, the Field Poll found. And just 53 percent of those polled voiced support the current policy of federal agents rounding up, detaining and deporting illegal immigrants. 
    Support among California voters for legalizing undocumented immigrants rose to 83 percent from 75 percent last April, while 67 percent of respondents backed a guest worker plan, up from 60 percent a year ago. 
    "The public is very open to providing a path to citizenship and giving temporary workers some kind of legal status, rather than having to do it on the sly," said Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo. "The issue now is, can Congress and the president agree on a package?" 
    "It's important that we get a bill done," Bush said Monday. "We deserve a system that secures our borders, and honors our proud history as a nation of immigrants." 
    Bush's plan also would include a workplace enforcement system based on a tamper-proof identification card for legal foreign workers and a means of allowing at least some of the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants to earn legal status by paying a fine and waiting in line behind other applicants for permanent residence. 
    A similar immigration reform bill won bipartisan support in the U.S. Senate last year but the House of Representatives passed a conflicting bill that focused solely on enforcement, including the 700-mile border wall, which is the only recent change signed into law.
    Both houses of Congress have shifted from Republican to Democratic control since then, but there is disagreement within each party on immigration. 
    "I'm a little dubious Congress will do anything this year because there are too many conflicting voices, particularly in the Republican caucus," said UC Irvine political scientist Louis DiSipio. "Some of the staunchest anti-immigrant voices in the House are Californians, despite the fact that the California electorate is clearly more tolerant." 
    Nationally, the coalition supporting comprehensive immigration overhaul includes "a collection of odd bedfellows: business and labor, ethnic pressure groups and ideological libertarians," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington , D.C. , which favors tightening restrictions. 
    For example, business groups favor a guest worker program to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor, but don't care about offering citizenship. Labor unions, by contrast, want to give undocumented workers already in the country a path to citizenship and will only support a future worker program if it includes wage guarantees, he said. 
    "The internal contradictions among supporters of this idea have made it very difficult to get anything done, which is fine by me," said Krikorian. "I'm very confident this isn't going to happen." 
    Angela Kelley, associate director of the National Immigration Forum, a Washington , D.C. , group lobbying for a liberal immigration policy, was more optimistic, citing Senate majority leader Harry Reid's promise to set aside the last two weeks in May to debate immigration. 
    "I think they can do it, but they have to do it soon, before we get into the 'silly season' of the 2008 election," she said. "This is not an easy issue for either party to either embrace or walk away from." 
    Kelley said she was not surprised by the Field Poll's finding that California voters endorse a combination of tougher enforcement, a legal foreign worker plan and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here. 
    "You guys are the most informed because you live and breathe this," she said of California , a state with an estimated 2.5 million illegal immigrants, where more than one in four residents is foreign-born. 
    The Field Poll's findings confirm that California is more moderate on immigration policy than much of the rest of the country. Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of political science at UC Riverside, said this is because the state leans Democratic and has a long history with immigration and a significant and growing Latino electorate. 
    Californians' sense that illegal immigration is an urgent problem has declined slightly compared to a similar survey last July, and residents of the Bay Area were the least concerned, the poll found. 
    The poll results were based on a random survey of 570 registered voters statewide, interviewed by telephone in English and Spanish, March 20-31. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

4/10/07 Gannett.com: Asian American history documentary begins airing Tuesday April 9, 2007
By Alexandyr Kent
    On Tuesday, Red River Radio will begin airing a multi-part documentary about the history of Asian immigration to America .
    "Crossing East" is hosted by George Takei, who played Mr. Sulu in "Star Trek," and actor-comedian Margaret Cho. Unique hour-long programs will air at 6 p.m. on Tuesdays through May 29.
    The series is produced by Peabody Award-winning Dmae Roberts and MediaRites Productions.
    More information about the series can be found by logging on to www.crossingeast.org or www.redriverradio.org. Red River Radio's toll-free phone number is (800) 552-8502.
    Red River Radio, a public radio station for the Ark-La-Tex, is broadcast on KDAQ 89.9 FM in Shreveport ; KLSA 90.7 FM in Alexandria ; KBSA 90.9 FM in El Dorado , Ark. ; KLDN 88.9 FM in Lufkin , Texas ; and 90.7 FM in Lincoln Parish on the Grambling State University translator.

4/6/07 New America Media (http://news.ncmonline.com): Asian American Activists Call White House Immigration Paper Anti-Family
by Eugenia Chien
    Editor's Note: A newly leaked White House immigration draft could be as devastating as the Chinese Exclusion Act, according to Asian American community leaders. Eugenia Chien writes and monitors Chinese media for New America Media.
    San Francisco -- Asian American community leaders called a newly leaked White House immigration draft inhumane and un-American because it calls taking away the right of legal immigrants to sponsor their relatives to join them and breaking up families as a result.
    The document containing a set of principles for immigration reform drafted by key Republican Congressional representatives was circulated in Washington last week. The plan creates temporary visas for undocumented immigrants and new workers, but it also puts more limits on American citizens ability to bring their parents, children over age 21 and siblings to the United States . 
    This plan attacks families and offers false hope for those seeking to legalize, says to Karen K. Narasaki, executive director of the Washington-based Asian American Justice Center . 
    The Asian American community is the second largest group of immigrants who enter the United States through family sponsorship or by being immediate relatives of American citizens. China , Vietnam and India are among the top ten countries whose immigrants arrive through family sponsorship, according to the Office of Immigration Statistics at the Department of Homeland Security. 
    In 2005 about 17,000 Chinese obtained legal status in the United States through family sponsorship; 26,800 became legal residents because they were immediate relatives of U.S. citizens. Because so many Asians enter the United States through family quotas, the result of the White House draft could be nearly the same as the Chinese Exclusion Act, says Michael Lin, executive director of the Organization of Chinese Americans. 
    We cannot allow this injustice to happen again. Family is the foundation of American society, Lin says at a teleconference hosted by the Asian American Justice Center .
    Joren Lyons, staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus says the White House proposal would have an immediate impact on the Asian American community and is quite shocking and devastating for many families who have been looking forward to the day they can reunite. The wait to become legal United States residents can take decades, Lyons says.
    Advocates also criticize the penalty fees proposed by the draft White House plan, which would require undocumented immigrants to pay $3,500 fines and other fees every three years in order to stay in the United States .
    The fees are exorbitant, says Eun Sook Lee, executive director of the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium in Los Angeles . 
    Many Asian American immigrant advocates support the STRIVE ACT of 2007, a new comprehensive immigration reform bill introduced by Representatives Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) on March 23. Advocates say that the STRIVE ACT could eliminate the backlog of family-based immigrants and help reunite children of Filipino World War II veterans. 
    The White House has minimized the importance of the document, describing it as only discussion points. So far no bill has been based on the document.

4/6/07 http://www.discriminations.us/: Surprise! Holistic Review Helps Blacks & Hispanics, Hurts Whites & Asians
by John Rosenberg
     UCLA has just announced, with great pride and relief, that its new, holistic admissions procedures have resulted in an increase in the percentage of formerly preferred minorities admitted to the next freshman class.
    Prior to the universitys adoption of the new admissions policy last year, two application readers reviewed each prospective students academic records while a third took into account the applicants outside achievements and any challenges he or she might have overcome. Under the holistic approach, every application is read and considered in its entirety by two readers, and the readers give more consideration to the opportunities that had or had not been available to applicants.
    Whether or not increasing the number of blacks and Hispanics was the purpose underlying the new policy, it was the effect.
    The new admissions policy appears to have increased black and Hispanic students' chances of being accepted, while making it more likely that white and Asian-American applicants would be turned away.
    The percentage of whites (33% of those admitted) who were admitted fell from 26.2% last year to 24.6%, but, as usually happens when factors others than academic qualifications are given more emphasis, the biggest losers were Asians. Last year Asians made up 45.6% of the admitted students; this year they are 43.1%, with almost all of the decline taking place among two subsets whose numbers had been growing most rapidly on the campus: Chinese-Americans and Vietnamese-Americans.
    Although the applicant pools from both populations grew only slightly, the share of Chinese-American applicants who were admitted declined from 35.8 percent to 31.6 percent, while the share of Vietnamese-American applicants who were admitted declined from 28.6 percent to 21.2 percent.
    As the above numbers indicate, the percentage of Chinese-Americans who were admitted fell by over 11% from last year, and the percentage of Vietnamese who were admitted fell by over 25%.
    It seems to me that the UCLA admissions reviewers have made a dramatic, even breathtaking, discovery that they should publish and share with the world: the nature of the heretofore unknown opportunities enjoyed by Vietnamese-Americans, opportunities that have obviously expanded exponentially in the space of one generation and that equally obviously served as a burden and handicap on their applications to UCLA.

[What are you hiding, Bigot for the Left Jeff Brenzel?  Are Asian Americans 40% of the applicants while you are admitting only 20%?]
4/6/07 Yale Daily News: Minority admit data not released,
by Kimberly Chow
    Harvard recently touted its admitted class as the most diverse in the universitys history, but the ethnic makeup of Yales accepted students remains a mystery. 
    Yale releases just a single percentage the proportion of its admitted students who self-identify as minorities while other schools, such as Harvard University , specifically state the percentage of admits who describe themselves as Asian American, African American, Latino or Native American. Dean of Admissions Jeff Brenzel said Yale only publishes a racial breakdown for students who choose to enroll because releasing statistics at an earlier stage can be misleading. But Harvard maintains that while the data should not lead to meaningful conclusions, it is a point of interest for many observers of the admissions process. 
    This year, 41 percent of the American students admitted to the class of 2011 self-identified as minorities, which Brenzel said was identical to last years proportion. 
    He also said an increasing number of minorities have applied over the past few years. 
    Minority applicants were up by five percent over those for the class of 2009, which had about the same number of total applications as the class of 2011, he said. 
    The number of applications to Yale declined 9.7 percent from the class of 2010 to the class of 2011, while the number of minority applications declined 7 percent. 
    He said Yale has not historically published the numbers of applicants from each minority group because the best point at which to analyze minority admissions is when the freshman class is finalized in May. 
    We do not publish breakdowns of minority admission numbers because we think they can be misleading relative to matriculation numbers, Brenzel said. That is, various groups yield at somewhat different rates, and we think the best measure of diversity in admissions practices is the final makeup of a class. 
    But administrators at Harvard, which boasted the most racially-diverse admitted class in its history this year, said they think it is worthwhile to publish more statistics. 
    People see it as a matter of interest, Harvard Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath-Lewis said. Its not precise for something, and it doesnt characterize an incoming class very well its just a piece of information. This reflects, more than anything else, institutional conventions on reporting statistics. 
    This year, the pool of Harvard admitted students is 10.7 percent African American, 19.6 percent Asian American, 10.1 percent Latino and 1.5 percent Native American. McGrath-Lewis attributed the record-high percentages to long-running efforts to reach out to a diverse group of students. 
    Weve worked hard to recruit excellent students from many backgrounds for many years, and this is a sign of continued progress, she said. 
    Princeton University , which also does not publish statistics on minority applicants, agrees that the final stage is the most relevant at which to examine the numbers, spokeswoman Cass Cliatt said. The university does believe that racial diversity is an important educational objective, she said, and thus Princeton releases statistical breakdowns for the matriculating class. 
    When theres a reason to break down enrollment numbers by racial or ethnic group were happy to do that, Cliatt said in an e-mail. We dont break down application and acceptance data because we dont want anyone to believe mistakenly that we make admission decisions in categories. 
    Of Princeton s admitted students for the Class of 2011, 44 percent self-identified as minorities. 
    Some leaders of minority student groups on campus said they were not bothered by Yales decision not to publish the racial breakdown for the admitted class, although they said it would be interesting to see the data. 
    Tarana Shivdasani 08, president of the South Asian Society, said that while releasing more statistics would make the admissions process more transparent, Yales commitment to minority students is clear enough. 
    I think that over the past few years, the Yale College administration has been putting a lot of emphasis on diversity, she said. The sort of activities they support on campus and the opportunities for you to come up with your own projects are pretty much the same for everyone. Yale undoubtedly attracts a diverse audience, so I dont think its a cause for concern. 
    But Wilma Bainbridge 09, publicity chair for the Japanese American Students Union, said she thinks Yale should publish the racial breakdown data so that current and prospective students can compare the numbers to those of Harvard and other schools. Yale might be reluctant to release this information because it portray the school in a negative light, she said. 
    If Yale seems to not be as racially diverse, then people might get pretty angry, so that may be why Yale doesnt want to publish this information, Bainbridge said. 
    Richard Shieh 09, a co-moderator for the Taiwanese American Society, said he did not find Yales decision not to release statistics troubling and he does not think Yale is deliberately concealing the yield for minority students. Shieh participated in an admissions office campaign to reach out to Asian-American admitted students, he said.

4/5/07 Yale Daily News: Koh considered likely candidate for Court,
This is the second part of a two-part profile.
by Andrew Mangino 
    The first-ever Asian-American Supreme Court justice still several years away from his nomination may be sitting today in the deans office of Yale Law School . 
    At Washington, D.C., cocktail hours, on the pages of the New York Times, in the minds of his students and colleagues, Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh is perhaps more well-positioned than most other legal-minded liberals to one day sit on the highest court in the land. And if he is nominated come a Democratic victory in 2008, as he put it himself, you dont say no. 
    Koh, after all, is no stranger to the Beltway one of his colleagues described him as much more of a political being than past deans and as leader of Yale Law School , he has hardly been able to restrain himself from engaging in national debate. It is part of the job, he says. 
    As a professor in the early 1990s, after the U.S. government sent about 300 immigrants to Guantanamo Bay and told them they had no legal right to challenge their detention, Koh took up their case. Soon, he will be a movie star for it. 
    Hollywood has decided to make a film version of Storming the Court, a book by Brandt Goldstein LAW 92 that details how a band of Yale Law students sued the president and won under Kohs leadership. 
In the process, Kohs team did not fight only one president. They battled two: George H. W. Bush 40, a Republican, and Bill Clinton LAW 73, a Democrat.
    Koh says this is why he was shocked when Madeleine Albright called to offer him a job in 1998. He reminded her that he had sued the Clinton Administration, but she said, Dont worry, we are not looking for a yes-man. 
    As Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Koh worked particularly closely on North Korean policy, but later expressed some concern that in government, people with ideas have no influence, and people with influence have no ideas, according to a 2003 interview. Always eager to examine the intersection of personality and popular culture with politics and law, Koh was able to provide one of the few glimpses into the life of Kim Jong-Il known in the United States . 
    He drinks hard scotch. He loves American videos. He talked about his three computers on which he surfed the Internet, Koh told 60 Minutes in an interview after a trip. Everything that he deprives to his people, access to the outside, are things that he himself personally craves. 
    Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state under Clinton, says Koh understood intuitively the workings of the U.S. government and diplomacy, and was nothing less than brilliantly effective in the way that he did a very, very difficult job of ensuring that the issues of democracy promotion and human rights didnt get swept aside or obscured in some way. 
    Koh now serves on the board of the Brookings Institution, where Talbott is president. Talbott says the dean has helped to refocus the board on international law and foreign policy, while helping to underscore the growing importance of the courts, the law and the judicial system in shaping the public domestically. 
    Koh says he learned some lessons at the State Department that would later prove useful in the different environment of the Law School . Ones staff, he says, should view their leader as someone who merely fills the responsibilities of the position and does not impose too much of his or her own personality. Also, he says, the experience helped him grasp the all-important lesson, if it aint broke, dont fix it, but that one must change to stay the same. 
    But it is that emphasis on change that Koh takes particularly to heart in determining his policy positions and which issues to weigh in on as dean. He has been outspoken in championing transgender and gay rights and has publicly fought the Bush Administration nearly half a dozen times. 
    Last year, for example, he took the train to Washington , D.C. in the middle of an otherwise action-packed week at Yale Law School to testify that the National Security Agenas wiretapping, unsanctioned by the courts, was blatantly unconstitutional. 
    The question, though, is whether a nominee to the court so gifted at rocking both sides of the boat would pass muster in a climate in which justices are, in essence, subject to litmus tests in order to ensure that they will rule on the side of the administration that appointed them. 
    At cocktail parties featuring elite Washington insiders, Koh is not seen as an underdog. Former Solicitor General Drew S. Days says Kohs name has been tossed around at such gatherings as a likely future justice, regardless of his outspoken views. And Talbott, likely to have influence in any future Democratic administration, says its all but a done deal that Koh will one day be appointed to a higher office. 
    I have no doubt that he will serve the nation and, indeed, the world in other capacities as a public servant, Talbott says. 
    Specifically, insiders say that Sen. Hillary Clinton LAW 73 has been eyeing Koh for as long as she has been eyeing the White House. And given his past experience in the her husbands administration and her ties to Yale Law School Koh seems to be a more than obvious choice. 
    Although several professors say they think Koh would be a positive transformational force on the court, other commentators have said he would urge the Court to overstep its proper role by relying too heavily on international law or favoring arguments rooted in policy rather than the letter of the law. 
    Hes got drive, intellectual ability, personal charm, and he has political capabilities that lots of faculty members dont have, Law School professor Lea Brilmayer says. 
    But in a December 2006 controversy, David Lat, a blogger, claimed to unearth evidence that Koh had strong-armed a committee into awarding the schools 2006 Merit Award to Linda Greenhouse, the New York Times Supreme Court reporter and the recipient of a masters degree from the Law School , over Justice Samuel Alito LAW 75. Koh and Greenhouse have worked together in the past, but Lat suggested that Greenhouse would also be a helpful ally for Koh if he were ever named to the Supreme Court since her words carry significant power to frame the public elements of Court debates. 
    Koh was angered by the story it included a fictionalized account of deliberations surrounding the award but he stopped short of denying it. Before Koh awarded her the prize, Greenhouse said in an e-mail that Koh would make a fabulous Supreme Court justice. 
    Some blogs on Wednesday, entertaining the possibility of a Koh nomination, urged supporters to exercise caution. 
    Kohs appointment to the [Supreme Court] would be an unmitigated disaster, wrote UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge. There can be no doubt but that Koh would be a liberal activist of a stripe we havent seen since Brennan and Marshall. The personal policy preferences of elite left-liberal salons would rule, rather than the rule of law. Conservatives need to get ready to turn Koh into a verb synonymous with Bork. 
    Koh still has to make it to the hearings before he can become an entry in the historical dictionary, and some of his ardent supporters express concern that he would not survive the scrutiny modern nominees face. Unlike other current justices, he is not an appeals court judge. He also has an extensive litigation record, including condemnations of executive power, that may scare off moderate or conservative presidents and legislators. 
    But if nominated at any point in time Koh suggests he would accept, as nearly anyone would. 
    Still, if he never had the opportunity to join the high court or if his career ended today, Koh says he would be content: He says he has experienced all he dreamed of in this lifetime and relishes being a father of two teenagers. He has a command of culture and, most recently, of alternative rock music. 
    Koh still can hardly get over the fact that he is the dean of Yale Law School , filling the shoes of the same man whom he once thought of as a magician, or even a god. 
    The idea that one generation later I would be in that position is really sort of amazing, Koh says. Unthinkable.

4/4/07 Organization of Chinese Americans Press Release: OCA Criticizes White House Proposal for Immigration Reform,
    Washington DC - OCA, a national organization dedicated to advocacy on behalf of Asian Pacific Americans, strongly condemned the recently leaked the White House plan for immigration reform.  The proposal would make it nearly impossible for U.S. citizens and permanent residents to sponsor family members for lawful immigration.  It has the potential to completely eliminate visas for parents, siblings, and adult children of citizens and legal residents. 
    Many Asian Americans enter the country through family-based quotas, and if the White House proposal becomes reality, the results could be nearly the same as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which specifically excluded Chinese from entering the U.S. , said Ginny Gong, National President, Many families were ruined because of that unjust law.  It is unbelievable that the White House is contemplating such anti-family measures as a part of immigration reform.     
    Family is the foundation of a strong society, and a strong family provides a nurturing and productive environment for every family member.  Any measure that impedes family unification would create an unstable family, said Michael Lin, Executive Director, We will continue to advocate for the elimination of the backlog which delays the family unification.  Many people in the Asian Pacific American community have been waiting legally for as long as 10 or 20 years to reunite with their immediate family members.  We also believe that a pathway for legalizing the residency of undocumented Asian Pacific American immigrants should be provided. Most importantly, we will fight to prevent anti-family measure becoming law.

4/4/07 Yale Daily News: At Law School, Koh is liberal lion,
by Andrew Mangino
This is the first part of a two-part profile.
    Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh is balancing the dual roles of academic administrator and political advocate.
    Fate brought Harold Hongju Koh to the