Panel Discusses Civil RIghts, National Security

Discrimination against Asian-Americans in the name of national security has been a long-lasting problem, panelists told an audience of 150 at the ARCO Forum last night.

"Throughout our country's history, security agencies have taken actions which, in retrospect, are seen as huge violations of civil rights," said panelist Norm Mineta, who was detained in an internment camp for Japanese residents during the Second World War.

On the panel along with Mineta, a former member of Congress, were L. Ling-Chi Wang, chair of the ethnic studies department at the University of California, Berkeley, and Alan K. Simpson, director of the Institute of Politics and a longtime friend of Mineta.

The event was sponsored by several Asian-American student groups who wanted to discuss racial issues surrounding the case of Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-American scientist in jail on 59 counts of violating national security procedures.

But Wei Zhou '01, co-president of the Chinese Students Association (CSA), said IOP officials refused to include Lee's name on posters and publicity for the event because they considered the case too controversial.

Students handed out yellow armbands stating "Asian-Americans are not foreigners." About half the audience members wore the armbands.

Both Wang and Mineta mentioned the Lee case, but only at the end of their remarks.

During the panel, Wang traced the history of discrimination against Asian-Americans from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the present.

He said that people of Asian ancestry have always been regarded as foreigners rather than as American citizens since they began emigrating to the United States.

"As soon as they ceased to be useful to us, we were going to send them back," Wang said, summarizing U.S. attitudes toward Asians in the late 1800s.

Wang said the perception of Asian people as foreign threats continued past Japanese interment through the Cold War, and is currently evident in the Lee case.

"Suddenly every Asian-American engineer working in [government] labs has become either a spy or a thief," Wang said.

Responding to an audience question, Wang said that although racism happens throughout the world, U.S. citizens should focus on it in their own country.

"The Chinese are some of the most racist people in the world," he said. "But because we're a democracy, we should judge ourselves by our own standards."

The tension between national security and civil rights is one of the toughest any government can face, Mineta said.

"How do you protect from threats to freedom without compromising that very freedom?" he said.

Mineta said that national security often takes precedence over rights concerns, noting that the public almost universally accepts airport security procedures and federal monitoring of hate groups.

He added that the U.S. government sometimes goes too far. He cited the example of FBI agents who conducted invasive personal probes of Arab-American citizens in Michigan during the Persian Gulf War.

Audience questions focused on a variety of specifically Asian-American issues, from the Lee case to the situation of 2,500 Peruvian Japanese imported into the U.S. and detained during the Second World War.

Some audience members said a Forum event focusing on Asian-Americans was long overdue.

"We really had to fight to have this forum on Asian-American issues," said Jessica A. Eng '01, co-president of the CSA.

Another audience member said that this was the first Asian-focused IOP event she had heard about in her five years at Harvard.

Zhou said that Asian-American groups from various schools at Harvard and MIT decided to form a yet-unnamed coalition in a meeting before the forum.

"The Wen Ho Lee case has really [brought us together]," Eng said.