CHINESE AMERICAN ALLIANCE (CAA) POSITION ON
LEGISLATION CONCERNING ASIAN DISAGGREGATION
In recent years, quite a few bills and laws have been introduced throughout the nation that further disaggregates the Asian American community. We refer them as Asian American Disaggregation Bills or Asian American Ancestry Registration Bills. We regard these bills as unconstitutional and racially discriminating against Asian Americans, because they exclusively mandate Asian Americans to report their ancestral national origins and no other racial group is required to do so. The major legislation includes AB-1726 in California, S0439 in Rhode Island, H.3361 in Massachusetts, SF2597 in Minnesota, and HB1541 in Washington. There is also similar legislation proposed in New York.
These Asian American Disaggregation Bills, pushed by such advocates as Ted Lieu, Judy May Chu, and Mike Eng, are usually disguised under the pretense of facilitating “racial preferential treatment" policies. While these bills claim to promote medical research, education, etc., their nature is to isolate Asian Americans, which account for only 5.6% of the American population, and to further label and divide them by their ancestral countries.
Asian Americans are not the first victims of using identity to promote racial policies. Historically, each racial segregation policy and their worse forms started from racial identification registries. Notorious examples are Nazi Germany’s racial discrimination and persecution of Jews, apartheid in South Africa, internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. These historical events of racial hatred, abuse and genocide all started with the identification of specific ethnic groups. They later evolved into massive abuse of government power and cruel deprivation of life, property and political rights. It is scary to think of these Asian Disaggregation Acts as history repeating itself. These legislations are nothing but attempts to use government power to violate personal privacy.
In fact, Asian American Disaggregation Bills have intensified in recent years and are becoming a social and political trend. They have been promoting a racial quota system across the board in college admissions, job recruiting, and other areas as well. The racial quota approach fails to exclude the interference of ethnic-sex-age-related factors in competition and judicial processes. Instead, such an approach even emphasizes these factors in the distribution of resources. Asian American Disaggregation Bills specifically target and further divide Asian-Americans.
