Executive orders on the fate of immigrants

Twenty-eight years ago, a six-year-old was bundled onto a jet plane in Beijing and conducted by kind stewardesses to her parents in New York. It was 1990, bare months after thousands of student demonstrators were cut down and hosed off the city square for petitioning the Chinese government for democracy.

After President George HW Bush vetoed a Congressional bill to protect Chinese international students, pressure from Congress and the press led him to issue an executive order extending a hold on deportation of Chinese students, allowing students with expired or revoked passports to apply for temporary worker status, and extending work authorization to Chinese nationals here at the time of the massacre. This provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for my parents to stay here after completing their degrees, so they sent for me and eventually had my brother, a second child who would have been barred by Chinese law.

I'll never know the extent to which any of my family might have been persecuted for pro-democracy views. The topic is still actively suppressed in Beijing in a cyber arms race bottomlined by thuggish intimidation and imprisonment. I do know that it's far from the minds of most Americans, including Chinese and other Asian Americans, when considering the nation's immigration policy.

And why should it be foremost? We mustn't wait for atrocities to open our hearts to those in need: the influx of Jews and other refugees during WWII were primarily opposed by the American public at the time. How do we regard that hatred and alienation now, with our incomplete immigration system spiked with reluctant executive orders, loomed over by an activist Supreme Court?

Facing political polarization, I turn to the ultimate lesson of Mahayana Buddhism: we are interconnected. Over the next weeks, I will share interviews with other immigrants on this blog on subjects including racism and social conservatism. In the meantime, take care of yourselves and reach out to those whose views seem offensive and difficult. Our sense of separation is but a seductive delusion.

May all be safe and protected from inner and outer harm.