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UCLA report reveals discrimination against AAPI communities in California laws

The UCLA School of Law is pictured. A recent policy report co-authored by UCLA researchers found systemic discrimination against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in some California state laws. (Daily Bruin file photo)

By Paula Zepeda

March 10, 2023 12:05 a.m.

A recent policy report co-authored by UCLA researchers revealed that systemic discrimination against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities persists in California state laws.

UCLA received a $1.4 million grant in 2021 to conduct research investigating the current state of AAPI communities and their struggles, said Hiroshi Motomura, co-author of the report and a faculty co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law.

The policy report, which was funded by the grant, is a collaboration between CILP and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. It called attention to the ties between immigration and criminal convictions and anti-AAPI racism, said Astghik Hairapetian, a law fellow at CILP and principal author of the report.

“Once you actually look into the history of it and see that the reason that these things were tied together was really because of racism,” Hairapetian said. “Specifically anti-Asian racism, specifically in California.”

The report was commissioned because of the occurrence of numerous anti-AAPI hate crimes both in California and across the United States following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Galyn Sumida-Ross, a CILP research assistant who assisted with the report.

Sumida-Ross said that as an Asian woman, she was interested in contributing to the legal response to the occurrence of anti-AAPI hate crimes in California and increasing awareness about the legal system’s connection to race.

The research consisted of investigating the history of the legislation and congressional statements regarding immigration, as well as looking at the racial history of these laws that expressed anti-AAPI sentiments, Motomura said.

A key finding of the report was that various laws are based on anti-Asian stereotypes, such as associating East Asian communities with drug use, especially opium. For instance, according to the report, San Francisco passed an ordinance in 1875 banning opium dens and claimed that the Chinese population in the city maintained the dens. The prohibition of opium dens made its way to state law after California passed it in 1881. The correlations between immigration status and criminal convictions have been noted while researching the historical laws targeting AAPI communities, Hairapetian said.

Many politicians across the U.S. and in Congress have made statements that express their support for laws that connect immigration to crimes, Hairapetian said. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee also held hearings in 1955 where it characterized Chinese immigrants as communists and drug traffickers, according to the report.

The federal and state immigration laws passed in the 19th and 20th centuries hurt AAPI communities because the negative perceptions expressed about them contribute to deportations and arrests being made, according to the report. The report said California continues to harm AAPI communities through recent laws, such as the exemption of certain agencies in the 2017 California Values Act, which limits local law enforcement’s ability to aid U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the deportation of people with criminal charges. The act leaves out the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, allowing it to still facilitate deportation, according to the report.

“(The report) closes the loop on what we’re actually talking about in terms of historical racism and its continued legacy,” Hairapetian said.

The report also highlighted potential California state policy changes that the authors said need to be made.

For example, local and state criminal authorities are permitted to transfer people with certain criminal convictions to ice, Hairapetian said, adding that this is problematic because local authorities are allowed by California law to work with federal authorities to deport people.

“This California law permitting this kind of cooperation actually plays a huge role and exacerbating its (deportation’s) impact,” Motomura said. “One thing that we can be thinking about, in terms of changing this policy, is that the root of this law is actually very racist.”

Motomura said these policies that involve deporting people with criminal convictions may disproportionately affect those without education and access to proper legal assistance, such as some immigrants in the AAPI community, potentially affecting the due process of their case, Motomura added.

Hairapetian said that by changing the policy, this cooperation can be removed as a step toward addressing the harms that result from the collaboration between local and federal authorities in regard to deportation, such as increased community separation.

Sumida-Ross said although the report was commissioned to discuss anti-AAPI racism in California, the research behind the laws unveiled systemic racism against Black and Latino communities as well. She said she hopes that state and national leaders adopt laws that do not harm marginalized communities when crafting new legislation.

“I hope they (politicians) see this report not as something that’s only about Asian people but … as something that is more universally applicable,” Sumida-Ross said. “They can sort of take that perspective into account in terms of how it (legislation) would impact different racial communities.”

Hairapetian said the UCLA community should be aware of the fact that the perception of criminality associated with lack of residency is primarily based on racial undertones and that people should not support laws that tie criminality and deportation together.

“It’s important for UCLA to be part of that conversation, especially because so much of the attention is on the federal level, where I think things are very dysfunctional,” Motomura said. “There’s an opportunity for California to step up, and UCLA can be part of that effort.”

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Paula Zepeda
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