Category Archives: diversity

Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) blog, blog, diversity, news, politics, race

Emil Guillermo: Donald Trump shows he’d really rather be Rush Limbaugh and not the president of the free world

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I wrote about Trump here.

And made the historical link for Trump.

This morning, Trump made the link himself.

On MSNBC Tuesday, Trump linked his immigration ban of Muslims to  Roosevelt’s classification of thousands of Japanese, Germans and Italians living in the United States during the war as “enemy aliens.”

“This is a president highly respected by all; he did the same thing,” Trump said. The nation was at war in the 1940s, he said, and it is now “at war with radical Islam.”

How’s that for an image: Trump holding up  one of FDR’s biggest miscues as some virtuous achievement.

It wasn’t.

Later, Trump clarified that he wasn’t necessarily advocating an internment camp situation, as he wouldn’t apply his harsh ban to U.S. Muslims living abroad.

“If a person is a Muslim, goes overseas and comes back, they can come back,” he said. “They’re a citizen. That’s different. But we have to figure things out.”

Well, the U.S. is still very harsh on Muslims. Just look at  Guantanamo. Trump could have called for an expanded Guantanamo approach, a lock’em up and throw away the key plan.

But that’s complicating things.

Trump’s  satisfied with just being as his critics are calling him, bigoted and racist.

And this is the man who wants to be the leader of the free world?

Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) blog, blog, diversity, news, race

Emil Guillermo: “Immigration Interruptus” kept Asian American numbers artificially low for 50 years–and then the racist quotas ended and we all came in.

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I often wondered why I was one of the few Asian Americans in my elementary school pre-1965.
There weren’t that many of us due to racist immigration quotas.
The flow of immigration was stopped cold.
The few of us Asian Americans in  school were really the lucky ones.  Our parents got through the political-socio-biological constraints and were able to start families.
But when that dammed up process finally changed, we now have places like my alma mater, Lowell High in San Francisco.
Whole lots of Asian Americans.
And Daly City.
Whole lot of Filipinos.
Asian Americans will be the No. 1 immigrant group by 2065, and we have  the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act to thank for that.
It was signed into law Oct. 3, 1965.
No more  “Immigration Interruptus.”
Happy 50th Anniversary. Let’s party like it isn’t 1964.
blog, diversity, Filipino, news

Emil Guillermo: L’Amande Bakery case–Filipino workers’ claims jump to more than $15 million.

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The case involving Analiza Moitinho de Almeida, her husband Goncalo, and her powerful father Juan B. Santos, the head of the Social Security System in the Philippines got more interesting late last week.

The court docs were filed last Friday in Los Angeles that ups the total damages and costs sought by workers to $15.2 million.

The court is presuming the bakery owner defendants, the Almeidas, have fled the country.   As a consequence, the court directed the plaintiffs to file for a default judgment.

Sources tell me that Almeidas have completed the sale of  their home in L.A. worth more than a million dollars this month.

Are they hiding assets? The Almeidas say no.

It’s unclear, however, if the profits are totally out of reach of the court if a judgment is awarded to  the 11 former employees suing the Almeidas

My story here in the Philippines’ top daily.

 

Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) blog, blog, diversity, news, politics, race

Emil Guillermo: Pope’s U.N. speech takeaways– misuse of environment leads to inequality and exploitation that leads to human trafficking, drugs, terrorism, international crime. “We need to ensure that our institutions are truly effective in the struggle against all these scourges.”

 

At the  UN,  the Pope linked misuse of environment to “process of exclusion” of weak and the disadvantaged. He called it part of our “growing culture of waste,”  a situation of “exclusion and inequality” with “baneful consequences: human trafficking, the marketing of human organs and tissues, the sexual exploitation of boys and girls, slave labor, including prostitution, the drug and weapons trade, terrorism, and international organized crime.”
Of course, directed at world leaders who give in to greedy corporate development initiatives.

But Pope made me feel guilty for being an infrequent recycler and a non-composter.

Appealed to leaders to “ensure that our institutions are truly effective in the struggle against all these scourges.”

To do that, people must be allowed to be “dignified agents of their own destiny.”  Education.  For girls too, he said. And at absolute minimum, social development to support a family required “lodging, labor, and land; and one spiritual name, spiritual freedom, which includes religious freedom, the right to education and other civil rights.”

And he linked it all back, to the ecological crisis which can threaten the human species.

Complex speech because of multiple audiences of varying means.

But the church isn’t t called catholic for nothing. The pope is delivering a universal message, that correcting the world’s ills is  going to take real action, and not just prayer.