 The Nation of Immigrants begins today. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Tank Tech. It's a Monday morning at 10 with our old friend Cheng Wang and Alexander Marawa. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us for this discussion. We're going to talk about the new Chinese-American reader. And we're going to talk about this show going forward, what we're doing today and what you have in mind for the future. This is America. This is America. May I say it again? Give me your tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Very important. So Cheng, can you tell us the scope of the new show and of this particular episode? Thank you so much, Jay. Of course, good morning and a happy new year, Jay. Happy new year, Alexander. It's great to be back on the show. And we renamed our show from the middle way to a Nation of Immigrants. So this year, Alexander, Russell, and I will invite some interesting immigrants come to the show. And I believe Jay will have hundreds of questions for those immigrants. We want those immigrants to share their life stories, their immigration adventure, and their knowledge and expertise. And most importantly, how do they contribute to the United States? So this show will be a show featuring immigration stories, diversity, and inclusion, and knowledge. So that today is an opener or preview. We're going to talk about what the show will look like. And then we're going to also comment on some recent news, some anti-Asian comments from a law professor and from a congressional candidate. But also, we will talk about a little book we just published for New Immigrants for Chinese Americans. It's called The New Chinese American Reader. And we want to share with you why we think it's important for new immigrants to understand America, to understand US history, law, and culture. So can you also introduce, or shall I say, reintroduce Alexander Morava? We need to know him yet again. Alexander is our frequent guest on this show. He's a law professor. And he's an international counsel. And he has multiple hats. He's a dual citizen of the United States and Austria. He received his legal education in Salzburg, Vienna, and Washington, DC with an SJD, what we call a real doctor in law, SJD, from American University of Washington College of Law. And Alexander has been working with me for many years on multiple projects. We're co-teaching different classes. He's a world traveler and also a renowned lecturer in law, has been lectured in the United States, in Paulo, Brazil, Vienna, and China as well. So welcome back, Alexander. Good. I have to tell you that my family is an immigrant family too. Oh. So I know a few things about this. It wasn't my personal experience, but certainly it was theirs and their parents. And of course, I come from New York, which is, may I say, a city of immigrants. I mean, it's a melting pot. So let's talk about the common denominators we are likely to find in this examination. I'll throw some thoughts at you. Number one is an immigrant who comes to the United States, generally speaking, not always, but generally speaking, is going to be motivated to assimilate. He's going to be motivated to get his kids into school. He's going to be motivated to have them learn the language. He's going to be motivated not to let the baggage of the old country hold them back. He is not going to tell them all that much about the trials and tribulations that he and his immediate family had in coming to this country. He wants them to be American as soon as possible, step off the boat, and get started in living the American dream, which motivates him and them, his kids, to do better than the next person, to be competitive in school, to be competitive in business. And you find that over and over again. But I'd like to know your thoughts, Alexander, about that. Is that a true fact? Is that your situation? Is it the situation of immigrants that you know? Am I right to say that there's a special motivating feature about immigrants in general? I couldn't agree more, Jaya. I think there's multiple different motivations, really. One very basic motivation is to live. That's the refugee. Refugees, if they wouldn't be able to live here, they wouldn't be able to live in many cases at all. So that's a very primal instinct to come and be safe. But I think this refugee population as well very quickly turns into enthusiastic immigrants. And they bring a lot as well. Many times those refugees themselves, and we don't think that way, but many times they're highly trained, highly qualified individuals, who then run into major problems, including reintegration into the workforce. And this experience in my wife's history as well, where a family member who was a trained lawyer never got to actually practice in his discipline and ended up doing the thing that Asians many times do, namely run a laundry shop. Of course, not an easy solution, but a solution that these immigrants are willing to embrace if there's no other option. I think they bring enthusiasm also to do stuff that we sometimes don't want to do, to contribute to society by doing that. But this really, really strong intention, strong will to become better, to become not just like everybody else, but to show that they have qualifications that at least equal hours, if not surpassed them, is really, really driven. I always think that when we view migrants specifically, we say those are lazy people and when I escape different situations that they could change where they're coming from. My impression generally is, and I've worked in the field of immigration refugees for literally decades now in different continents, that is most of the times not true. Many times it also is true, we shouldn't deny that too, it's also not every immigrant is a future superstar, we have to be aware of that as well. But the vast majority of people who migrate to another country, including this one here, are extremely eager to show that they can excel and to bring in what they have to offer. At the same time, Alexander, every immigrant, I'm looking for common denominators finds resistance. Although my family wound up in New York, a lot of Jewish families from Eastern Europe wound up in all over the country. And credit goes to them because they entered into communities that didn't really know about immigrants that weren't particularly friendly and they had to work especially hard to get by that. But what about that? I mean, would you say in this country, I mean, I don't necessarily mean in recent years, we can talk about that in a minute, but in this country in general, in our lifetimes, there's been resistance to immigrants. There's been, I don't wanna call it racism, anti-immigrantism in this country and every immigrant has to deal with that. So did your family, can you tell your family's story, please? And can you talk about that as a part of it? Chairman, my family's story is kind of not so interesting. My wife's family's story is much more interesting. I'm Caucasian, Austrian, still dual citizen who ultimately ended up in the US for professional reasons. I had an immigrant family before that who came to Brooklyn, New York and Queens, New York, the usual place in the 1950s after World War. Immigrants, German speaking immigrants from what is now, former U.S. Laugia really a part of what was then U.S. Laugia. My wife's story is much more interesting. Her family, she has 19 aunts and uncles. They all hopped on the board, a ship in Vietnam at some point in the 1970s, late 1970s to flee. One of the siblings was chosen to stay behind and be sort of the fallback option in a way. And then they made it to Malaysia and other initial ports of entry and then were reallocated to countries of destination by non-profit organizations, basically faith-based actually in most of their cases. Half of them ended up in Canada and half of them ended up in the United States and still are. My wife's story is a little unusual because ultimately she became a Canadian citizen. She still is a very proud Canadian citizen and then ultimately immigrated to the United States as well with me for professional reasons. So there is in these stories, and this is just one example, you can see millions of them. I think none of these stories are identical but there is common denominators, common factors to all of them. I think if you look at this family specific, the making things better motivation is very, very strong. The willingness to work is very, very present. And the willingness not to rely on the government but rather to contribute to society is very present. Yeah. Well, our country under Trump, we have realized that there are those in this country that don't care for immigrants. They feel that immigrants are gonna replace them in some way. It's a supremacy thing but it's also deeply ingrained and I thought we got by that myself. I thought we got by that but we didn't get by that, it's still around. And I was watching, Chang, I was watching a program about Angela Merkel the other day. She's a physicist and she's very tolerant and very inviting and she personally accepted a million migrants from the Middle East into Germany. It was a very nice thing she did, a very humanitarian thing. And she paid a price politically and some people think that the increase in migrants over her tenure actually activated the right wing of Germany. But the odd thing is that under Angela Merkel, Germany became a welcoming country. And it's so interesting that as the United States may be suffering as a welcoming country, Germany became a more welcoming country. And one wonders if the United States continues, for example, to engage in anti-Semitism, which I care about, then the odd and ironic high irony is that Germany would be a place at least under Angela Merkel, it would have been a place for Jews to return to. How do you like that, Alexander? Is that high irony? Anyway, I wanna know about the resistance that you've experienced, Chang. There have been Chinese exclusion, legislation in this country, there have been people to win recently, anti-Asian sentiments in various places around the country. And how does a Chinese immigrant find that? And how does he deal with that? Let me answer your question by providing you with three quotes. I found it very interesting. I would like to share with you and the audience. The first is from a University of Pennsylvania law professor. And it's a female law professor and she just blatantly published an article and argued that this country, United States, will be better off with less Asian immigrants. As you can imagine, the dean was not very happy about it, and the article was quite controversial, but she is pretty insistent on her stance. So that's what, that's pretty recent. And then the second quote I want to share with you is a very interesting quote is because it involved my favorite immigrant author, or my favorite author of all time, Viet Thanh Nguyen. So there was a congressional candidate and who tweeted that a multi-third world refugee cannot assimilate into our society, prove me wrong. Viet Thanh Nguyen and answered third world refugee here from Vietnam, she was from Vietnam. I have a PhD in English and I won a police surprise in fiction. What have you done? So that's your second interesting quote I want to share with you to see that there is obviously, there is a strong anti-immigrant and anti-Asian Pacific immigrants, you know, Americans, there's a trend there. And there are some very smart people joining that camp now we have a law professor, we have congressional candidate. On the other hand, the last quote I want to share with you is Andrew Yang, the Democratic presidential candidate. And in early 2020, he published an article and I quote, we Asian Americans need to embrace and show our Americanness in ways we never have before. So basically he argued that the Asian Americans are not American enough. So we need to be more American. So he gave some examples, you can judge on that whether or not those are truly what American are supposed to do. So help our neighbors donate gear, vote, wear red, white and the blue, volunteer, fund aid organizations and do everything our power to accelerate the end of this crisis, the pandemic, obviously. I think this article you can imagine was a huge backlash and a very controversial. I kind of disagree with almost everything he says, you know, on many, many topics, but I do understand why he said that. He said that because the immigrants, we bring diversity to this country, but fundamentally we need to understand the country we are in. We need to understand the history, politics, law and the culture of everything, try to be more intellectually curious about what's around us. Don't live in every power and close yourself in isolated self-quarantine kind of situation but be open minded and be susceptible to something ready to go beyond your comfort zone. That's why if I can argue for Andrew Yang to defend him in any way, I don't want to, but I would say that probably he had some good intention. So that finally I want to say that in the booklet we published for Chinese Americans. And so we started, if you look at the table of contents, we started with a citizen almanac. So everything as a new immigrants, you need to know about American politics, a law and the history. Then we have these translated all the naturalization questions, 100 naturalization questions into Chinese language for these new immigrants. And then the third section is more than 100 books, 100 journals, 100 websites, 100 TV and films to understand American history. And from Mactoon and to everything, you know, earning the hymen way. So by law and to politics and to history and the law. And then the next section is understand Asian American history. So you then we want to read a Vietnam news, police are winning novel sympathizer and many very good peer as bug on China and the Chinese American history in the United States. And finally, we devoted one section on Chinese Exclusion Act. Never forget Chinese as an ethnic group was the only, the first and the only ethnic minority group being identified by federal law to be discriminated against. Later, many years later, the law was repealed. Then 10 years ago, the Congress, the House of Representatives Senate issued an apology. But there's always, there's a strong sentiment there, you know, because we are so easy to identify. Look at you, look at me, look at the Dr. Morava. You two look not alike, but you two, you can easily, even three of us put together on a screen, we said to pick one different from the others. I think I will be the first one to be picked up as a different. So this, but so long story short, and the part of my long speech is we understand the need to understand more about the history of this country and including the immigrant history. That's why we want to encourage our fellow Chinese Americans, Asian Americans and other European Americans to learn more about the United States, to learn, to understand the spirit and the soul of this country. So Alexander, you know, at the end of the day, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress. And a lot of other legislation was, you know, not particularly friendly to immigrants over the years. And even now the immigration law hasn't been reformed in decades, several decades. And so if you say, if you conclude, and I think we do, that immigrants, this is a nation of immigrants and with the vitality, the intensity of immigrants, immigrant people and cultures and the like, this nation could be greater yet, greater still. Those things made this nation great in the first place, but it could be greater still. And, you know, thanks to Trump, he's revealed, generated, brought forth, you know, a negative racism and that means anti-immigration as well. So my question to you is, if we conclude together that bringing immigrants in, making them equal partners in the society and the economy will be better for the country, how do we do that in the face of, let me call it the base, who opposes, who wants isolationism? How do we do that? We've got to get there because, you know, in my view, that's our future. Isn't it true? It is our future. How do we get there? Well, it certainly is our past and it's also the past of what you call the base. I mean, there's very few people living in this country that are originals, right? They live in reservations and some in assimilated situations, native Americans, everybody else is basically an immigrant. Everybody else would fall in the category of others when it comes to the original historical backgrounds which young shouldn't feel too bad. I think he's one of us. I think there's still hope. I'm trying to say that there's two ways of going about it. One is the very formal way, the other one is the personal way. I believe many people who are anti-immigrant don't know a single immigrant. I think there's, they probably have excluded from their social circles and even from their distant social circles, all those who look different, active and don't match their own particular understandings. Apart from going to a restaurant or a service provider where they encounter individuals who are the others and that encounter is limited enough so that they can tolerate. But I don't think they have friends that are different necessarily. They have probably not even as many colleagues that are different. They seclude themselves in a way. So we shouldn't blame them for that. We should say, try it. Try to get past your comfort zones a little bit, right? Personal interaction is probably the best source for getting people out of their hard shell of me better you not, right? Getting into the understanding and maybe somebody else also has qualities to bring. Then from the bigger political scheme and I know Congress adopts laws and Congress is not necessarily devises body of humans getting together to make decisions like that. But that's what it is. It's democracy, right? Democracy has representation of just about everybody including in those bodies. Once we sort out for people to understand that immigration really has basically two and a half components, one is protection as refugees, right? Where we have an obligation which is set out in the law and the United States has laws saying that in accordance with international law. There are some people who are being persecuted and are at risk of very, very severe suffering if they are not protected against that. So we need to take them in and protect them. They might not bring much beyond that with them. Many times they do, but they might not other than we have to protect them. That's an obligation. And I think if you tackle this from the moral point of view or from the faith-based point of view, I think everybody can agree that that protection is actually something good and acceptable, right? We need to screen, we need to make sure the protection is afforded to those who actually need the protection. And we also need to exclude those who wanna jump on the bandwagon and not actually need that protection. A little bit in the same category, false family reunification. I mean, if you have people who come here legitimately integrating to society, they also have the interest of protecting their family abroad and having them come to join them at some point in time. That's a conditional process. And that also I think if you ask people very large would probably be understood as something that is good and decent and the right thing to do. And then the other aspect is where we under international law as a government have the right to select regular immigration. We can say who comes and who doesn't, right? We can pick the ones who actually we know, we understand we hope will contribute to society. If you go back to what we now have in international human rights, we're dealing in many, many cases with international migration and the prediction levels here. The first thing that these human rights judges say at the very beginning of their judgements is every state retains the right to admit or not admit people to become new residents or citizens, right? So we have a large part where we can really and Congress can do that in a wise fashion or not so wise, we can make those rules and we can have people follow those rules. And we also have the right to prevent immigration that is illegal and possibly dangerous to our community, right? Is a discussion that is usually done on a very emotional level, very, very personal and very, very superficially. What about easing up Alexander? I mean, for example, you say that we wouldn't be sure they're productive citizens. So unless they are, we reserve the right to exclude them. And then you have the migrant issue as Germany has been very open about it. And I remember talking to a young woman here in Hawaii who was in school and she was Swedish from Sweden. And I said, what do you think about the migrants? This is like five years ago. What do you think about the migrants? She said, I'm so ticked off at my country, Sweden. Why can't we be as open as Germany? Some really interesting comment. But why can't the US be more open? Why does the US have to have this struggle with the migrants on the southern border? Why can't all countries move to the kind of standard where unless this person is a threat, we're gonna let them in. We're gonna balance out the populations of the world. We're gonna let it flow freely. Life in this planet would be so much better if we did that. Do you agree? Only partly. I mean, I'm ultimately still a lawyer and I do love some rules. I'm not a population geographer, but I do believe if we open all the floodgates, then we probably have a depopulation in certain areas and a massive overpopulation. Whereas if we just move freely, that might be a dangerous experiment in many ways. And to be honest, the European Union tried that. They have free migration, basically for employment studies and many times personal choices as well. And that didn't always work out so well in that people trans across the internal border, but it's an internal border now from one part of the EU to the other and then started offering their services for dumping prices and cost friction that wasn't so helpful as well. So even in a fairly integrated system, just tearing down all national borders is very risky. And I think people believe sometimes that immigration advocates who I would belong to, it's certainly a group that I will support, are advocating for those tearing down the boundaries. We're not. I think we're definitely, at least most of us are definitely speaking for an orderly process of immigration because that's the only way of having an orderly process of democracy ultimately that doesn't lead to the kind of friction and infighting and ultimately conflict. Like Janet- We have that, we have the control, but we also, we have the friction. Let me go to you, Chang, it's a question of a meeting to ask you for this entire discussion. And that is the media. And I say the media, I include the entertainment media because year after year, back when immigrants were painted as caricatures, not only Asians, but other groups too. They were classified as scapegoats. They were painted as caricatures and there were negative caricatures. And so the media seems to be changing. The media seems to be showing multiracial families, multiracial cultures, multiracial stories. I mean, if you just watch television for a while, it's extraordinary how many different groups are living in the same household are involved in the same social experiences. They say, well, gee whiz, is that really happening? And the answer is, well, maybe not as much as the media would portray it. However, the media seems to me to be a leading, a leadership factor here. If they say that we all get along, if they say that immigrants are to be accepted in your business or your home, then maybe people will do that. Maybe it has a positive effect. What are your thoughts about this? Well, I mostly agree with what you have said, but don't forget the multi-viewed network is still Fox News. And there's some ladies on the Fox News, I believe her name is Laura Ingram and she commented before, they look at what our country has become. Nobody want these people here, as she referred to immigrants. The Supreme Court of the United States have decided that diversity in education is a compelling state interest. So the international students here, international scholars here and the immigrants are here. Some of them are not actively participant in the community affairs. Some of them are just focused on their own study and work, but most of them are thrilled to be here. And I love a few quotes about the United States. One of my favorite quotes is, United States is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. Every single immigrant, every single international student I encountered, they are happy, at least relatively happy. And because the United States have this ability to make almost everybody happy for where they are and what they have. And I cherish that. And I want to keep saying this kind of thing, but I also sense a strong need for immigrant to be not really more Americanist, but to contribute more and to understand, to learn more. And don't think that simply to be here, we are contributing to the diversity. No, no, not that simple. We are here, we still need to work, to learn and constantly learning, to learn more about our neighbor, to learn more about the United States. And to learn more about the Chinese Curitin Act, to be more effectively a responsible member of this community. Well, and to be part of this great fantastic experiment. An experiment that is noble, but also facile. An experiment that changes while you watch. It must be very exciting for somebody who comes from what amounts to a static community where there's not much mobility, to a community where mobility is everything or at least theoretically everything, and to be part of that. So we're out of time, but I like to get your final thoughts about this new show we're doing A Nation of Immigrants about the book and about the common denominators and what you see, this is a long final statement, and what you see going forward here in terms of the guests and discussions you will have. Alexander, you first. I think that the book is a marvelous little example of something that needs to happen, namely information, as much information as possible for everybody who is involved. We should write a second book explaining to non-Chinese immigrants what Chinese immigrants are and what their background is. Maybe that would be helpful too, but we need at least 170 million copies of that to spread them more. The discussions I think will be fascinating simply because we, with our legal background, look at everything through that lens to a certain extent. We'll bring guests who absolutely look at it through a different lens, namely the practical, I have experienced this kind of lens, and your questions will probably trigger them to give us insights that would otherwise not be explored. I mean, every story will be very fascinating in itself, but the thoughts of those experienced immigrants, if you want to call it that, about what the future should bring, will be really enlightening to the audience. So I'm looking forward to every single contribution. Yeah, same here. Give me your tired, huddled masses. So your final comments, Chang, how do you see all of this? Where's the kernel of it for you and where do you want to take it? Thank you, Gage. Thank you, Alexander. And we are very excited about this new show and the new format, which will bring immigrants, prominent immigrants, interesting immigrants to this show and at the top of their life stories and a cultural diversity they can contribute to the United States. A little preview, a little teaser here, two weeks from now, January 24th, the honorable Judge Tony Liang, the first Asian American judge in the state of Minnesota, form a previously a state court judge, now a federal magistrate judge, will be our special guest and to share his life stories and his immigration adventure and his legal career. Four weeks from now on February 7th, we have Mr. David Maida, the director of elections in the state of Minnesota, a Japanese American to share his life stories with us. And don't be surprised if I bring Italian Americans and Dr. Marava bring Korea Americans into this show. And we very much look forward to this very exciting in the conversation with you, Jay. I assure you, Chang, I assure you, Alexander, nothing you guys do will surprise us, nothing. We want it all. Thank you so much, Chang, Alexander, you take care. Talk to you. Thank you, I've been here. Hello.