When I first saw the reports of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I believed that four, maybe five Asian Americans, tops, lived in all of the Gulf area. But it seems that according to the 2000 census, approximately 36,000 Vietnamese Americans resided in the impacted areas at the time of Hurricane Katrina, constituting the largest ethnic group of the over 50,000 Asian Americans victims.
Where are the stories on the devastation wreaked upon many of these small Vietnamese fishing villages in Texas and Louisiana? Where are the faces of the Asian American victims in the media? They seem to be notably missing from the records.
Even more so than non-immigrant residents, these individuals were in a position of severe vulnerability from the very beginning of the disaster. A Vietnamese man who spent five days in a wrecked fishing boat before being rescued said he did not understand the evacuation orders issued before Hurricane Katrina, which were broadcast only in English. The American Red Cross and FEMA do not provide translating services so that Asian immigrants can learn how to obtain, or go through the process of obtaining, assistance easily.
An attorney, who is working with the Vietnamese community in the affected areas, noted that there are a number of gatekeepers preventing evacuees from appealing FEMA rejections of applications for hurricane relief, and that many evacuees are giving up and settling with no assistance from FEMA. There is fear that without translated information, the non-English speaking communities will also be more at risk than their English-speaking neighbors to the litany of health problems that will result from carbon-monoxide poisoning to drinking water.
The National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, National Federation of Filipino Americans and Boat People SOS all expressed concern with the barrier of language and cultural connections, and called upon FEMA and the Red Cross to pay equal attention to the victims regardless of race, ethnicity and level of income.
Vietnamese churches and community organizations have been forced to play the largest role in providing relief to evacuees, and have been fast running out of patience and what scant resources they had to begin with.
The National Alliance of Vietnamese American Service Agencies, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and National Council of Asian Pacific Americans held a congressional briefing at the Capitol where leaders of the Vietnamese faith-based and community-based organizations and evacuees from the hurricane-impacted areas testified and called upon government and mainstream relief agencies to provide more effective responses towards the Asian American evacuees of Hurricane Katrina.
Lobbying should never be required in order to procure equal and adequate relief from one's own government in the event of natural disaster. Dependency upon personal contacts as the sole means of spreading word of the harm suffered by one's community and of procuring aid (and only at the local level at that) is a disgrace to the name of government response and government agencies.
As if this sector of the population does not already face enough problems with mere survival after Katrina, USCIS (the successor agency to INS) officials have conducted sweeps in the past few weeks to round up immigrants for deportation procedures. This is based purely on suspicion since none of the authorities have legal right to demand documents - although many Vietnamese are suddenly finding themselves "legally undocumented and illegal" because they lost their immigration papers in the flooding, and are going to detention and through deportation proceedings as a result. The Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance witnessed the raid of a Red Cross Center this week by Immigrations Customs Enforcement (ICE) and observed police brutality of immigrants, deportation of hurricane survivors and undocumented clean-up workers (who were enticed with housing and good pay to do the work, only to be left high and dry afterwards), evictions of victims who are now living on the streets, and raids and roundups at Chinese restaurants and workplaces.
These victims, already devastated by the loss of family members, of years of hard work, their homes, their possessions, the vestiges of whatever success they may have assiduously garnered in this "land of opportunity," now face banishment from the country they call home on top it all. This is the only reward for their sufferings. How many more will be cast aside by a government that believes it can ignore the presence of Asians in America and continue to treat the community as foreign? Never mind aiding these people in their recovery from this traumatic catastrophe. Forget helping those in need; let's just ship them elsewhere.
And why not? In truth, it may be less costly to deport needy Americans than to house, clothe and feed them, or justify their exclusion from the recovery process.
