Dangerous Ideas

When I went to the immigrants right march, I marched with the Asian contingent. We had a fair-sized group, but it came far short of representing the proportion of Asians who are affected by the current immigration debate.

There’s a pretty good article on the SF Gate about Asian undocumented immigrants, who are the second largest group of undocumented immigrants. According to the article, there are as many as 180,000 Asian undocumented immigrants in the Bay Area.

The article mentions a some reasons why Asians haven’t taken as visible a role in the debate. One of the reasons is there isn’t the same kind of support from media outlets:

Also important is that, unlike Spanish-language radio stations, the Bay Area’s Asian media – which include a multitude of newspapers, radio stations, magazines and television shows – has not tried to mobilize its diverse readership and viewership, which does not share even a common language.

It would be great if the media could take a role in getting the word out on marches. They wouldn’t even need to be advocates; if they just provided more coverage, more Asians would be aware of what’s at stake. Right now, there’s a perception it’s someone else’s issue:

But Asians’ interest in the issue is driven in part by how the debate has been framed, said Luna Yasui, policy director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a civil rights group.

“People have deemed it a Latino issue. That has created a misperception among Asian Pacific communities that somehow nothing is at stake,” she said.

Of course, those of us who don’t have major media outlets can help, too, by spreading the word to people we meet. And who visit our blogs. ;-)