PSN Op-Eds

Last fall, Rhode Island Health Department Director David Gifford missed a key press briefing about the state’s effort to combat the H1N1 flu pandemic. He wasn’t shirking his duty — in fact, Rhode Island received national praise for its H1N1 response, and ranked first among states in the rate of vaccination. On the contrary, Dr. Gifford was doing what he advised all Rhode Islanders to do: he stayed home that day because he was feeling sick.

Now more than ever, we need a rational and respectful dialogue about how to fix our country’s broken immigration system. But comments like Texas Representative Betty Brown’s recent assertion that legal Chinese American immigrants should adopt Anglophone names that are “easier for Americans to deal with” represents precisely the kind of divisive rhetoric that will keep us from such a levelheaded debate.

Brown’s callous suggestion that Chinese American citizens are not American is symptomatic of the veiled bigotry that underlies much of the immigration debate across the nation. It also begs the question of why state legislators across the country would want to associate with the organization that Brown helped found to propagate racially divisive policies.