Almost 65 years to the day after then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law Executive Order #9066, Vietnamese journalist and activist Tram Nguyen spoke last night about the injustices and prejudices that immigrants have faced in a post Sept. 11, 2001 society.
The Executive Order was used to justify the internment without conviction of well over 100,000 people, nearly all of whom were of Japanese ancestry and a large number of whom were born in the United States.
Nguyen's talk was titled "We Are All Suspects: Race, migration and the war on terror." In 2005 she published a book called "We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities After 9/11."
Ultimately, she said, injustices violate civil liberties and undermine the national security debate.
"I think five or six years from now, we will see that the national security debate has been discredited," she said. "People are fed up with national security rhetoric."
Nguyen said that she decided to write the book to "make a contribution and document the post 9/11 environment as far as immigrants were affected."
Much of her speech was drawn from personal experience. Nguyen said that she has tried to stay on top of the changing political and social environment through talks with her activist friends and members of South Asian communities about their post-Sept. 11 experience.
Many of the people she talked to told her that loved ones would go to work one day, not come back, and that days later the people would receive a call saying that their loved ones had been detained.
Particularly harmful, she said, was a visitor-registration program authorized by the Department of Justice.
The law required certain men from 25 Muslim countries to register with the government and to be fingerprinted and photographed, among other things.
Many of the people who showed up to follow the law and register were then detained and became subject to deportation.
"Nearly 14,000 foreign nationals who showed up to be fingerprinted and photographed for the registration were placed in deportation proceedings," according to an article in the Washington Post in 2003, when controversy surrounding the program was running high.
"Men were getting detained for turning themselves in," Nguyen said.
While writing her book, Nguyen traveled to the U.S. prisons and corrections facilities where various detainees were being sent. She describes the experience of waiting alongside family members to speak with a detainee as "dehumanizing."
"The little kids would rush up to the phone, the only way they could speak to their dad," she said. "The visits only lasted a half hour and then they would flick the lights and turn the phones off."
She also spoke in-depth about a man who she said "symbolizes the extreme of what you have to do to belong in this country."
A Muslim immigrant, he has hosted a radio show, acted as a translator to help fellow immigrants and financed meetings to help immigrants understand their rights and how to follow the law, Nguyen said.
One of these meetings dealt with the registration law. She said that he pushed members of his community to register and be law abiders, an action which she said that he later realized ruined lives because some of the people he helped were forced to pay fines or face deportation.
Nguyen later followed up on his case and found out that he was being investigated by federal agents for fraud during the purchase of his home.
She said that such injustices have profound consequences for the national security debate. In response to a question from a student, she said that immigration and national security belong in separate spheres.
"Is immigration a national security issue? No. Immigration is immigration. Security is security," she said.
Junior Maureen Farrell said that the event helped her put things in perspective. "Hearing personal accounts of prejudiced minorities really affected me and forced me to contemplate about our nation and its policies as a whole," she said.
