New America Media - South Asian tag:newamericamedia.org,2009-04-06://19 2013-05-21T19:42:28Z New America Media is a nationwide association of over 3000 ethnic media organizations representing the development of a more inclusive journalism. Founded in 1996 by Pacific News Service, New America Media promotes ethnic media by strengthening the editorial and economic viability of this increasingly influential segment of America's communications industry. Better Language Interpretation Crucial for New Social Security Commissioner tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11466 2013-05-22T07:25:00Z 2013-05-21T19:42:28Z Paul Nathanson ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103 WASHINGTON, D.C.—As advocates for elders and people with disabilities anticipate President Obama’s choice of a new Social Security Commissioner, a group of us from the Strengthening Social Security Coalition presented our recommendations at a briefing on Capitol Hill last week calling for changes to improve the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) ability to serve large numbers of the program’s most vulnerable beneficiaries. That includes lower-income individuals, especially immigrants and those from ethnic groups.

The Social Security Coalition includes over 320 national and state organizations representing more than 50 million Americans. Our “Transition Report for a New Social Security Commissioner” covers a range of concerns from the agency’s overloaded staff to SSA’s need for enhanced research on retirement and disability.

Almost 2 Million Elders

One factor underlying all of these issues in our increasingly diverse population is the need for greater access to assistance for individuals with limited English proficiency. The organization I direct, the National Senior Citizens Law Center (NSCLC), whose staff helped coauthor the new report, has shown, that those struggling to understand English face serious obstacles in learning about and gaining access to government programs, such as Social Security.

The 2010 U.S. Census contains some startling statistics related to the number of older adults who are not proficient in English. More than one in seven (14.2 percent) of our nation’s 43 million adults 65-plus speak a language other than English at home. Among them, almost 2 million elders are considered Limited English Proficient (LEP), a term the federal government has standardized to refer to those who speak English less than “very well.”

The new report, developed with a range of organizations, such as the National Women’s Law Center, the Diverse Elders Coalition and Latinos for Secure Retirement, states, “It is essential that SSA communicate with individuals in a language in which they are proficient and that up-to-date informational material on benefits be provided in a variety of different languages.”

Among those applying for Supplemental Security Income (SSI)—people requesting a small boost in their benefits because they have extremely low-incomes, a third seek this additional income support based on old age. Previous analysis by SSA showed that almost four in 10 of those older adults asked the agency to receive assistance in a language other than English.

Early Language-Access Leader

Previously, SSA was an early leader in language access among federal government agencies. For example, after SSA installed point-of-entry kiosks in its local field offices some years ago, advocates pointed out that they were generally working in English only. SSA instructed local offices to make them available in several of the most commonly spoken languages.

In fact, SSA has a very good policy of providing interpreters. It requires its offices to provide an interpreter at no charge on request and prohibits the use of children as interpreters. And the agency requires the same policy for state agencies performing disability determinations (DDSs).

However, as our report states, “At present, implementation is spotty, with advocates reporting that in many SSA offices LEP individuals are still asked to bring their own interpreters.”

Simply put, it is crucial that SSA communicate with individuals in a language they understand. And it needs to do more to ensure that its offices apply these regulations uniformly.

That means the administration needs to require more resources for training SSA personnel on the interpreter policy—including the additional time necessary to interview an individual with an interpreter.

The report also calls on the new commissioner, when appointed, to implement a systems change to fully implement SSA’s interpreter policy. Currently, SSA asks people for their language preference when they apply for benefits. But if the person doesn’t answer or the reply isn’t clear, the program defaults to English. SSA needs to eliminate the English default option.

In addition, SSA has increasingly come to rely on the use of telephone interpreter services as a primary means of serving LEP individuals. Although these are useful for simpler requests, telephone interpreter services should not be permitted for handling more complex matters and certainly not for administrative hearings or conferences.

The report recommends, “The best and most economical means of serving LEP individuals is through the use of bilingual SSA employees.” We believe that before picking up the telephone to call a general interpreters’ service, agency offices should look for an interpretation-trained SSA employee, someone who knows the program, is more apt to be more sensitive to the person’s needs and understands the confidentiality requirements.

Serving Immigrant Communities

As we concluded in the report, “The new commissioner needs to make a concerted effort, as hiring opportunities arise, to hire more bilingual staff for assignment to field offices,” particularly where there is a high level of language access needs, such as newer immigrant communities.

Currently, SSA provides its notices in English. And it offers only some, but not all, in Spanish. The agency provides none of its notices in any other language. To address this, SSA needs to provide all notices in Spanish and in other major languages spoken by recipients of its programs. It also needs to do a better job of identifying the language spoken by each of the people it serves.

Even though SSA has a number of publications on its program benefits in 16 different languages, these are only available online and are no longer stocked in local Social Security offices. A majority of people over age 65, especially those with low-incomes and those with limited English proficient, still do not have consistent Internet access—in any language—including African-American households.

Clearly, SSA policy needs to be rethought and informational publications should be made available to those who visit local Social Security offices.

The ability for all those who receive Social Security or Supplemental Security Income benefits to understand their benefits and their rights is essential. With the appointment of a new Social Security commissioner, NSCLC and other advocates believe these and other fixes can and should happen.

Paul Nathanson directs the National Senior Citizens Law Center. He co-chairs the Strengthening Social Security Coalition’s Adequacy of Benefits Committee and NSCLC staff contributed to new report.



]]> New York Bangladeshis Mobilize to Aid Factory Victims tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11455 2013-05-20T08:25:00Z 2013-05-20T02:36:48Z NEW YORK -- On a Friday afternoon, nearly two weeks after a deadly factory collapse in Bangladesh, Kamil Ahmed went with his family to a mosque in Brooklyn. He grieved for those who perished and prayed for those who survived... Anthony Advincula ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=63 NEW YORK -- On a Friday afternoon, nearly two weeks after a deadly factory collapse in Bangladesh, Kamil Ahmed went with his family to a mosque in Brooklyn. He grieved for those who perished and prayed for those who survived the disaster.

And he made an urgent plea to his fellow Bangladeshis for donations.

One by one, he handed out empty letter-envelopes after the prayer meetings, telling those he knew that “small, big, or any amount matters.” Some immediately gave dollar bills, while others wrote a check. The money will go to Savar Victims Fund, a relief campaign that Bangladeshi Society, Inc. (BSI)— a national group of Bangladeshi immigrants based in Queens, N.Y. — established a few days after the April 24 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka.

The death toll from the disaster stands at 1,127. It is the deadliest industrial accident since the Bhopal disaster in India in 1984. Five factories were operating in the Rana Plaza, located in the town of Savar, about 20 miles outside Dhaka, when the structure fell.

Donations to Savar go directly to the Prime Minister Fund, a general relief fund that the Bangladesh Embassy in New York has created.

“We will go from one mosque to another to ask for help,” said Ahmed, 62, president of BSI. “Most of us are working-class people. We’re not wealthy, but everyone is supportive and willing to give something.”

That Friday alone, he and his friends were able to collect about $1,200, which he described as a significant step toward their ultimate goal of somewhere “between $20,000 and $25,000” before May ends. Similar efforts are underway in other Bangladeshi communities outside New York, says Ahmed.

A fundraiser has also been planned for May 28, with about 300 Bangladeshi business-owners expected to attend.

Ahmed notes that BSI’s social welfare secretary keeps track of the donation records and sends receipts to donors. To ensure that donations go to the victims and their families, some BSI members have even volunteered to fly to Bangladesh to help with the relief efforts.

“They’re offered to pay for their tickets out of their own pockets,” says Ahmed.

Mosque Attendance Up After Collapse

Muhibur Rahman, imam at Baitul Zannah Mosque in Brooklyn, says in the days following the garment factory collapse, mosque attendance rose dramatically. Many asked what they could do to help.

“Before our prayer meetings, I make an announcement about the donation drive,” says Rahman, 65, a native of Bangladesh. “This is a devastating calamity. It is important to stand beside them [victims] and those who are affected.”

Rahman also expressed support for greater efforts to pressure the government in Bangladesh to address the issue of building safety. Officials reportedly ignored safety violations issued just days before the collapse of Rana Plaza.

Says Rahman, “Some say that it’s the negligence of the building owners. I think the government needs to enforce strict laws and regulations.”

An Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, meanwhile, has been adopted by global clothing retailers, demanding a five-year commitment to safety inspection and $500,000 per year toward safety improvements. A number of major US retailers have declined to participate.

“We pray,” says Rahman, “that Bangladesh and its people are able to recover soon.”

Bangla Media

Abu Taher, editor of Bangla Patrika, says his publication, as well as other U.S.-based Bangladeshi news outlets, have served as a collective “bulletin board to inform and connect people in the community.”

Immediately after the rescue and as soon as victims were identified, media here began to print the names so readers would know whether they have friends or loved ones among the dead.

“It’s a long list. But that’s something that we didn’t see anywhere else,” notes Taher.

Bangla Patrika has also helped in spreading the word about fundraising efforts— telling readers how can they contribute, where they can send their donations and how they can volunteer their time.

Data from the 2010 U.S. Census show there are about 15,000 Bangladeshis in the New York area and about 148,000 across the United States.

“People are calling us and asking for information,” says Taher. “Our community has been responding really well.”

Closer to Home

Helal Uddin was born and raised in a neighboring village close to site of the Savar tragedy. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he says, when images of the collapse first flashed across his television screen.

He says poverty is a reality for most residents of the area, and that the garment factories were often the sole means of making a living. Reports note employees in the factory earned an average of $37 a month for their labors.

Friends and neighbors, meanwhile, have since shared more details with Uddin, a small business owner in Brooklyn. One neighbor told him he’d received a call from someone in a nearby village, with relatives who died in the accident.

“We’re glad someone was able to make the connection and has informed us what the victims need. Food and water are not a problem right now,” Uddin recounted from the conversation. “But many have lost limbs.”

Uddin and others have now joined in efforts to raise funds, hoping to help pay for medical treatment and, where needed, prosthetics.

“We come from the same area,” he notes of the victims. “In a way, we are a family.”
]]> Indian Named Youngest UCB University Medalist in a Century tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11430 2013-05-14T21:07:17Z 2013-05-14T21:11:35Z How does an undergraduate top off a whirlwind tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, highlighted by experiments with nanowires and biofuels, brainstorming sessions with corporate executives, poetry readings, and educational outreach to students?For Ritankar Das, the answer, of course,... India West ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103 How does an undergraduate top off a whirlwind tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, highlighted by experiments with nanowires and biofuels, brainstorming sessions with corporate executives, poetry readings, and educational outreach to students?

For Ritankar Das, the answer, of course, is to be named University Medalist, the prize given to the year's top graduating senior.

Not only is Das completing his studies at UC Berkeley with a double major in bioengineering and chemical biology and a minor in creative writing, he is doing so in only three years.

And at the age of 18, Das is the youngest University Medalist in at least a century, reports UC Berkeley in a press release.

The young Indian American is also the first student from the College of Chemistry in 58 years—and the first ever from the Department of Bioengineering—to earn the honor, which includes a $2,500 scholarship.

Read the rest at India West ]]> Daughter of an Arranged Marriage tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11416 2013-05-13T16:33:26Z 2013-05-13T16:46:54Z At the age of 19, my mother fastened a red bindi in the middle of her forehead, wrapped herself in a silk sari, and walked seven times around a sacred fire in Karamsad, India with a 26-year-old man she hardly... Monica Luhar ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103 At the age of 19, my mother fastened a red bindi in the middle of her forehead, wrapped herself in a silk sari, and walked seven times around a sacred fire in Karamsad, India with a 26-year-old man she hardly knew.

At 19, I was a single Indian American college sophomore who certainly did not have any plans to have an arranged marriage like my parents. And a relationship was not really an option, because my parents did not allow me to date. For years, they had one strict rule: I was to focus on school until I graduated from college. Meanwhile, most of my friends were in committed relationships and some were even engaged to their high school sweethearts. I resented the rule, and felt that they were limiting me from dating because they did not have any experience themselves.

Arranged marriages have been a common practice in India — and many other cultures — for centuries, but my parents never pressured me into one. The summer after I received my college degree, my mother casually told me I was allowed to date. My parents understand that since I was raised and brought up in a different culture, it may be hard for me to not marry for love. They told me that race or religion did not matter, as long as the man I dated respected me.

But even with this freedom, I have found it challenging to navigate the scene. I am now 23 and feel years behind my friends who started in high school, and I lack a dating model from my parents that resembles my own.

Intergenerational disagreements and gaps about relationships between second-generation young adults and their immigrant parents are common, according to a recent study in Marriage & Family Review authored by Olena Nesteruk and Alexandra Gramescu, from the Family and Child Studies Department at Montclair State University.

“Because immigrant parents did not experience growing up in the U.S., participants believe that their parents are not familiar with issues relevant to American teenagers,” the authors conclude in a study of 35 young adults who were interviewed about their experiences with mate selection and the influence their immigrant parents had on their dating preferences.

Like me, many young adults from immigrant families felt as though their parents were strict when it came to curfews and enforcing restrictions on when the appropriate age to date would be.

A young Peruvian woman told Nesteruk and Gramescu that when she would ask her parents what age she would be able to date, they replied, “Never, till you finish college. It’s always education first, and boys last.” With time, though, her parents’ attitude relaxed: “But now they have become more Americanized and the rules have changed a lot! My younger sister is allowed to date.”

The study also highlighted the issue of immigrant parents who resisted interracial or religious relationships. “It’s not ok for me to marry outside of my religion—I have to marry a Muslim. My parents would prefer someone Arabic because the culture is the same,” a Yemeni female participant said.

In conversations and a survey with young San Gabriel Valley residents with immigrant parents, I also heard many youth say that they were up against stiff parental restrictions on dating, uncomfortable conversations, and resistance to marrying outside of their racial or ethnic group.

George Molina, 17, told me that he dated “a couple of times,” but said his parents felt he was too young and preferred that he focus on his education. A female respondent to the survey wrote that her parents had rejected her choice of partners because they were not of her ethnic group. She said that despite the fact that she is in a relationship with a Caucasian male, her parents have been trying to fix her up with other partners, particularly from the same race.

“My parents tried to fix me up with boys they like when I was at my 20s and wouldn’t give any of the boys I picked a chance. They automatically assumed they were all bad,” she wrote. “Growing up, this kind of mentality is what I saw in most of traditional Asian parents around me.”

As much as I wanted to talk with my parents about relationships, it did not not happen until recently. When I was young, my parents did not really have the “birds and bees” talk with me, nor did we even talk about “crushes”. For many years, I struggled to talk to my parents about issues I wanted to discuss, mainly because I wasn’t sure if it was the right time, or was too embarrassed to bring up the issues with them. I’d assume they felt the same way, too - because they never experienced what many young adults face when dating.

My parents, whose families arranged their match, only had two hours alone together before getting married, just a few weeks before their wedding ceremony. Rather than a date, it was more of an awkward two-hour chat about each others’ likes, dislikes, and career goals. “It felt like a nerve-wracking interview,” my mother recently told me. “But it was probably the most important interview of my entire life.” They have been happily married for 26 years, though they have had their share of difficulties.

Recently I decided to start introducing guys to my parents. I was tired of hiding relationships from my parents, and felt relieved that they were okay with me dating. Getting comfortable talking about it, however, has meant adjustments on both sides. I was very nervous introducing one guy I met to my parents, but they were receptive and even let us spend a little time alone together. I did overhear them talking about whether it was “serious,” and realized that dating for them meant getting ready for marriage. For me, it was more of a dating journey and getting to know someone else. Nothing serious.

Through this new experience of discussing relationships with them, I feel much more connected with my parents. In college, I just could not understand why anyone would marry someone without falling in love first. But as I’ve seen their love grow over the years, I have had a deeper appreciation for their arranged marriage. While I do not think it is for me, I no longer think it is necessarily inferior to a love marriage. And I now realize that my parents were trying to protect their first-born female daughter from getting her heart broken. I would not do it to my daughter, but for that, I appreciate and respect them.


]]> Wikipedia’s Sexist Turn: Men Are Novelists, Women Are ‘Women Novelists’ tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11351 2013-05-01T07:05:00Z 2013-04-30T23:19:12Z Sandip Roy ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=54 At 5:44 PM on April 1, John Pack Lambert, a 32-year-old student of history at Wayne State University took a small step for one man which proved to be a giant leap for mankind.

And I mean MANkind, not humanity.

Lambert moved Patricia Aakhus, author of The Voyage of Mael Duin’s Curragh from American novelists to the category American women novelists.

Two minutes later, teen romance author Hailey Abbott suffered the same fate.

Then Megan Abbott.

At 8:51 PM Lambert, the one-man army to engender order in the universe, created a new category, Nigerian women novelists and put Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie there.

James Gleick’s account in the New York Review of Books of how Wikipedia fell into the great gender gap is a riveting read, a sort of detective story for category-geeks. (Read the full story here).

The next day Lambert was briefly sidetracked by a discussion of whether there should be a Category:Jeans enthusiasts (for “celebrities and famous people who are always wearing or frequently spotted wearing jeans”), but then he got back to work and A. L. Kennedy, till then a Scottish novelist, became a Scottish woman novelist. On April 3 he created a category for Greek women screenwriters; so far it has only one member.

The rest of the world cried “Sexism.” Leading the charge was Amanda Filipacci, one of the women writers who suddenly found herself banished to the ante-chamber while the men hogged the living room. (Sounds like an old-fashioned Indian wedding.)

Filipacci complained in a post on The New York Times:

People who go to Wikipedia to get ideas for whom to hire, or honor, or read, and look at that list of “American Novelists” for inspiration, might not even notice that the first page of it includes far more men than women. They might simply use that list without thinking twice about it. It’s probably small, easily fixable things like this that make it harder and slower for women to gain equality in the literary world.

Even Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales was gobsmacked. In a post titled WTH, he wrote:

My first instinct is that surely these stories are wrong in some important way. Can someone update me on where I can read the community conversation about this? Did it happen? How did it happen?

Lambert stoutly defended himself to Gleick. “This whole hullabaloo is really missing the point,” he said. “The people who are making a big deal about this are not being up-front about what happens if we do not diffuse categories.”

Diffuse is geek-speak for moving things from a parent category to a sub-category. American novelist, said Lambert was just too big to be useful. “It is really a holding ground for people who have yet to be categorized into a more specific sub-cat,” said a user called Obi-Wan Kenobi. “It’s not some sort of club that you have to be a part of.”

May the force be with Obi-Wan Kenobi but really? If that’s the case why not move the men out to Male American novelists? There was a proposal to do that. It got shot down fast. That is our problem in a nutshell. We categorize by minority and therefore it’s hard to escape bias.

So after The New York Review of Books (again!) scooped all the big pubs by tracking down the mysterious Misha, the so-called Svengali alleged to have “radicalized” the brothers Tsarnaev, many commenters complained that he was described as half-Armenian. Why not describe him as half-Ukrainian complained angry readers, probably Armenians.

On the flip side, Indian American publications routinely complain that Kamala Harris is described as California’s first African American Attorney General when she is also its first Indian-American Attorney General.

But Wikipedia’s women problem is different. It’s not about the clumsiness of describing Kamala Harris as California’s first female African American Indian American attorney general. Like much of the online world Wikipedia has a gender gap. But as it has become the default go-to site for information, its gender gap is showing in embarrassing ways.

In 2011, Noam Cohen wrote in The New York Times that the contributor base was barely 13 percent women. That means there’s gender bias that shows up in the very act of deciding what topic is worthy of meriting a wiki entry and how long it is.

A topic generally restricted to teenage girls, like friendship bracelets, can seem short at four paragraphs when compared with lengthy articles on something boys might favor, like, toy soldiers or baseball cards, whose voluminous entry includes a detailed chronological history of the subject.

For example, during the royal wedding in 2011, Wikipedia members debated furiously about whether Kate Middleton’s dress deserved an entry. Wiki founder Wales thought it did because it had more social and cultural interest than “100 articles on different Linux distributions, some of them quite obscure… and (they have) virtually no impact on the broader culture.”

Well intentioned, I am sure. But a problematic example to use to try and fix a real gender problem. As one reader said at that time:

“I really see this idea that keeping this article does something to remedy the gender imbalance here to be facile at best and insulting at worst.”

Pardon me, Wiki, but your slip is showing.

It’s a knotty problem that goes beyond one OCD history student. How do you create categories without creating hierarchies? Especially given the fact that a “gay writer” is happy to claim a Lambda award given out for LGBT writing and a woman politician is grateful for support that comes her way thanks to a group like Emily’s List which wants to encourage women in politics. But neither want those honours to disqualify them from being “writer” or “politician.”

The problem is not one of the categories you belong to but the ones you don’t – this idea that somehow a woman American writer is not an American writer as well.

So in the world according to Wikipedia Maya Angelou belongs to 20th century women writers, African-American memoirists, African-American women poets, African American writers, American Activists, American dramatists and playwrights, American people of Sierre Leonean descent – everything but 20th century writer.

But the first categories Salman Rushdie belongs to are 20th century novelists and 21st century novelists.

Until Wikipedia understands that the difference between the two entries is not just one of ordering but of perspective, it’s doomed to keep falling face first into the gender gap.
]]> Extended Families Would Fare Poorly in New Immigration Law tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11333 2013-04-28T21:20:27Z 2013-04-28T22:24:14Z Sunita Sohrabji ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103 As business leaders roundly cheered a sweeping immigration proposal released last week by the Senate’s “Gang of Eight,” civil rights organizations voiced concerns about the limitations the new bill would impose on extended family reunification.

The broad-reaching bill — termed “clearly a compromise” by President Barack Obama, who nevertheless expressed his support for the proposal – would significantly increase the numbers of all employment-based visas, whilst narrowing the availability of family-based visas by tightening the definition of who is eligible. Significantly, the measure also creates a long pathway to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million undocumented residents.

The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus praised the bill, but also objected to the elimination of the two family-based visa categories, which currently allow U.S. citizens to sponsor the brothers and sisters and married children over 30.

Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., co-chair of CAPAC’s immigration task force, praised the measure for adding more visas in employment-based visa categories — including higher caps on H-1B visas and foreign students with advanced U.S. degrees in STEM fields – but noted that families must remain at the cornerstone of new immigration legislation.

“The family is the basic unit of our society, and strong immigrant families start businesses, create jobs, and contribute to our nation’s social and economic fabric,” said Honda, who introduced the “Reuniting Families Act” in the House earlier this year.

"In recent weeks, I have spoken with members of the Senate and House bipartisan working groups, and I will continue working with them to ensure that siblings and married adult children of U.S. citizens will have the ability to reunite with their loved ones in the new and improved merit-based system proposed by the Senate Gang of Eight,” Honda told India-West in an e-mail.

The “Gang of Eight” senators who created the proposed measure include Republican Sens. John McCain from Arizona; Jeff Flake from Arizona; Lindsey Graham from North Carolina; and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the Republicans’ shepherd on immigration issues. Democrats include Michael Bennet from Colorado; Dick Durbin from Illinois; Chuck Schumer from New York; and Robert Menendez from New Jersey.

Graham hinted last month that extended families of U.S. citizens might lose out in the new immigration proposal. “Green cards are economic engines for the country," said Graham, as reported by the Associated Press. "This is not a family court we're dealing with here. We're dealing about an economic need."

“Right now you get green cards to adult children, to grandparents. What I want to do is reserve green cards based on the economic needs of the country, and we’ll do something for families. But the goal for me is to replace a chained migration immigration system with an economic-based immigration system,” he stated.

The National Council for Asian Pacific Americans, a coalition of 30 Asian American organizations chaired by Indian American Deepa Iyer, praised the proposed measure for its attempts to clear backlogs in the visa processing system, but denounced the elimination of the F-3 and F-4 visa categories.

NCAPA noted that the F-4 category – which allows U.S. citizens to sponsor their brothers and sisters – would be eliminated. U.S. citizens would also not be allowed to sponsor their married children over 30, with the elimination of the F-3 visa category. However, the definition of “immediate family relative” would be expanded to clear the backlog in the current visa system, which has created wait times of more than 15 years from certain applicants from India and the Philippines.

Parents of U.S. citizens will also be classified as immediate family members, eliminating long wait times for the elderly to be reunited with their children and grandchildren.

Approximately 1.8 million Asians are trapped in the family visa backlog, noted NCAPA in a press statement.

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund also criticized the measure for eliminating the F-3 and F-4 visa categories.

“The bill actively undermines the family-based immigration system by stripping U.S. citizens of their ability to sponsor their siblings and children over 30 years old,” said Margaret Fung, executive director of AALDEF, in a press statement.

“This unjustifiable and purely political compromise divides families. These categories must be restored and this bill must immediately provide additional visas to clear the entire backlog that has separated families, including same-sex couples, for years,” stated Fung.

AALDEF praised the measure for creating a landmark pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people. However, it took aim at the 13 year wait-time for citizenship.

The proposed legislation creates a quick path to legalization for undocumented immigrants, who would immediately become “registered provisional immigrants” 180 days after a bill is passed. RPIs would be allowed to work and travel abroad, and could apply for a green card after 10 years. Undocumented children who were brought to the U.S. would be fast-tracked through the system and would be eligible for a green card in five years.

RPIs could become eligible for citizenship after 13 years, provided that the government had met Congress-mandated goals on border control and employer verification.

AALDEF described this portion of the measure as “a very long and narrow process for those who have already long been subject to the abuses of a broken immigration system,” and added that with stricter border control, provisions must be added to include humane treatment for unlawful detainees.

"In the coming months, we are committed to working together to make sure that just and humane immigration reform protects the rights of all Americans, both native born and immigrants," said Bethany Li, staff attorney at AALDEF.

Business advocates, however, hailed the legislation for its aim to add highly-skilled employees to the American workforce. “To lead the world in this new economy, we need the most talented and hardest-working people,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post. “We need to train and attract the best,” he said.

“Why do we kick out more than 40 percent of math and science graduate students who are not U.S. citizens after paying to educate them?” Zuckerberg queried. “Why do we offer so few H-1B visas for talented specialists that the supply runs out within days of becoming available each year, even though we know each of these jobs will create two or three more American jobs in return?”

“Why don't we let entrepreneurs move here even when they have what it takes to start new companies that will create even more jobs?” stated Zuckerberg, who along with several Silicon Valley-based business leaders, has launched the immigration Web site Fwd.us.
]]> Student Wrongly Linked to Boston Attack Found Dead tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11324 2013-04-25T19:22:17Z 2013-04-25T19:31:33Z The body found in a river in Providence two days ago has been positively identified by the Rhode Island State Health Department on Thursday as Brown University student Sunil Tripathi, who had been missing since March.The medical examiner reportedly used... First Post ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103 The body found in a river in Providence two days ago has been positively identified by the Rhode Island State Health Department on Thursday as Brown University student Sunil Tripathi, who had been missing since March.

The medical examiner reportedly used dental records to identify the 22-year-old Indian American Ivy League student mistakenly linked with the Boston bombings last week. A cause of death is still to be determined but the medical examiner said no foul play was suspected.

The close-knit Tripathi family posted a message on the Facebook page they’d been using to search for Sunil for the last 38 days:

Read the full story at First Post
]]> Bay Area Man On a Mission to Supply North Korea With Wheelchairs tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11286 2013-04-18T08:35:00Z 2013-04-18T19:47:46Z Peter Schurmann and Aruna Lee ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103
SAN FRANCISCO – Despite a mountain of international sanctions and grinding poverty, North Korea’s leaders have proven adept at procuring everything from the latest in digital toys to nuclear technology. But for the country’s disabled population, there is one item that remains in constant short supply.

Just outside San Francisco, in the East Bay city of San Leandro, Hee Dal Park has spent the past five years collecting donated wheelchairs and shipping them to the communist nation.

“Regardless of nationality, ethnic background, religion or ideology, I want to offer my help as best I can,” says the 67-year-old Seoul native who for the past 12 years has spent his weekends serving the homeless. “I haven’t missed a day,” he says proudly.

That calling led Park in 2007 to launch the non-profit Jageun Nanum, a term akin to the English phrase “every little bit counts.” To date the group has shipped upwards of 1400 wheelchairs to countries across Asia, including North Korea. Park himself has made four visits to the North since 2007.

“I was surprised to find that people I met in North Korea think and talk like people in South Korea,” recalls Park, who noted the distinctly Korean obsession with education. “Some of the officials who showed us around were very much concerned about their children’s education, wanting to send them to this or that university.”

Other sights were more troubling, such as the disparity in available care for the disabled between the relatively affluent North Korean capital, Pyongyang, and outlying cities and towns.

“Conditions at hospital facilities in Pyongyang aren’t bad, but outside of the capital it’s a different picture,” Park eplains. “I visited hospitals in Chongjin and Nasun, in northern Hamkyung province, last year. A four-story hospital [there] had no elevators and [so patients] had to rely on the staircase.”

Park says that relatives or other patients would often help carry one another up and down flights of stairs.

Infrastructure is indeed an issue, considering the country’s moribund economy. North Korea ranks 129 in per capita GDP, with about half the population living in “extreme poverty,” according to the CIA World Factbook. The World Food Program says about a third of North Korean children are stunted due to malnutrition, with reports warning of another growing food crisis.

With scarce resources and the ruling class more intent on enriching itself through the inflow of illicit goods smuggled in via China, improving conditions for the nation’s disabled are likely not much of a priority.

There are some 1.8 million disabled people in North Korea, about 7.5 percent of the population, according to the Green Tree Charity Foundation in South Korea, which based the figures on information provided by the North Korean government.

Discrimination against them is widespread, and often brutal, according to reports. In 2006, the Associated Press quoted a North Korean doctor who defected to the South. He alleged that babies born with physical defects are rapidly put to death and buried. A United Nations report from 2007 noted that disabled people are allegedly rounded up and placed in “special camps.”

Experts contend that in their eagerness to obscure any sign of potential weakness, North Korean leaders have long prohibited disabled persons from living in the capital, where they might be noticed by visiting foreigners.

Still, there are signs emerging that attitudes in the country may be shifting. North Korea’s state-run Korean Federation for the Protection of Disabled People has been working with the NGO Handicap International since 1999. In 2008, the United Nations noted the government had also considered providing welfare to the disabled.

More recently, North Korea participated for the first time in the 2012 Summer Paralympics, fielding one athlete in the freestyle swimming competition. Yahoo News reported that same year that Pyongyang had opened a Paralympic culture center in the city.

Heung-duk Kim, head of the Joy Center for the Disabled in Southern California, was in North Korea last year as part of a program that, like Park’s, works to assist the country’s disabled residents. While he admits there have been improvements in attitudes, Kim says discrimination remains a problem.

In an interview with the Korea Daily, Kim said disabled North Koreans are still seen in a negative light. He recalled a North Korean drama he’d seen while in the country, in which an injured soldier is “brought out of his wheelchair” thanks to the ministrations of a patriotic female friend.

The message: being disabled is unpatriotic.

He also noted that while centers for the disabled have opened in recent years, their scope remains limited. “The reality is that there are eight special facilities for the blind and three for the deaf but not many services for people with other disabilities,” said Kim, who added it is still very rare to see someone with a disability in the capital.

Park began his work with the disabled in South Korea, where he would send wheelchairs donated by members of his local church and community in the Bay Area. “Despite South Korea’s booming economy, there are still many disabled people there in need of assistance,” he says.

South Korea last year signed the U.N. Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, first adopted by U.N. member states in 2006. April 20 also marks the country’s National Disabled Person’s Day.

Park started sending wheelchairs to North Korea in 2007 on the urging of a pastor with the Doorae Missionary Church in South Korea, which for the past 40 years has worked to improve the lives of rural farmers in that country.

Once they arrive, the wheelchairs are handled by the Korean Federation for the Protection of the Disabled, explains Park, which then distributes them to local hospitals around the country that “need them the most.” He notes ha has been able to verify that wheelchairs are going to their intended recipients, though he did not go into detail.

Park, who was honored for his work last year by the northern California chapter of the Federation of Korean American Journalists, says he plans to return to the North in May, where he is scheduled to meet with officials from the agency in charge of distributing the wheelchairs. He adds “there are about 200 wheelchairs now on their way to the country.”
]]> Trial Scheduled for Controversial EUSD Yoga Lawsuit tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11283 2013-04-17T00:15:00Z 2013-04-17T00:06:52Z A trial date for a civil rights case involving the hotly-contested yoga curriculum offered to students at the Encinitas Union School District has been scheduled for May 20. The existing lawsuit, Sedlock vs. Baird, was filed by concerned parents of... India-West ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103
The existing lawsuit, Sedlock vs. Baird, was filed by concerned parents of EUSD on behalf of attorney Dean Broyles from the National Center for Law and Policy. The suit alleges that the district had incorporated Ashtanga yoga into the school’s curriculum, which “unlawfully promotes religious beliefs” and violates the U.S. Constitution, it says (I-W, March 8).

UT San Diego recently reported that San Diego Superior Court Judge John Meyer admitted in court that he also practices yoga. Broyles explained that he would not have an issue with the judge presiding over the case, as long as he would be able to “keep an open mind about the plaintiff’s argument regarding spiritual connections to yoga,” reported the paper

The yoga curriculum was implemented last year as part of a larger health and wellness initiative after EUSD received a $533,000 grant from the K.P. Jois Foundation.

David A. Peck, an attorney from Coast Law Group representing the association “Yes! Yoga for Encinitas Students,” recently filed an ex parte application March 28 to intervene in the case. Over 100 students from nine of the schools at EUSD and their parents are represented by the association, and support the school district’s decision to uphold the yoga curriculum.



]]> The Boston Marathon: An Indian American Runner Remembers… tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11277 2013-04-16T21:30:00Z 2013-04-16T20:51:42Z Sandip Roy ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=54
This year he was not running it. But ever since the bombs went off at America’s oldest and most iconic marathon, his phone and Facebook wall have been flooded with anxious messages.

Khatu once set himself a goal of 12 marathons in 12 months. His marathons have taken him all over the world – London, Berlin, New York, Mumbai. But Boston, he says, is special.

“You have to qualify to be able to run in it,” says Khatu who lives in San Francisco. “Running it is considered an accomplishment. It’s like, say, getting into Harvard Business School. Even non-runners know about it.”

That’s what makes the attack on the marathon so heart-rending. That’s what Taslima Nasreen does not get when she sneers on Twitter “Hey Americans! Don’t cry like 9/11, #BostonMarathon is not like 9/11. Come live in South Asia, bombs are like everyday fireworks.”

There’s no point getting into a race-to-the-bottom competition of death tolls. The fact that many more were killed in Iraq on the same day as the bombs went off in Boston (and indeed on the day before and probably the day after) does not mitigate the tragedy of what happened in Boston any more than the daily gun violence in America’s inner cities diminishes the horror of the Newtown elementary school shooting. This is not the time to discuss blowback, what America deserves or does not deserve or speculate about who might have done it. “People shouldn’t jump to conclusions before we have all the facts,” Obama rightly said. “But, make no mistake, we will get to the bottom of this.”

Leave aside the iconic nature of the Boston Marathon, that it happens on a state holiday known as Patriots Day marking the battles of Lexington and Concord and is thus imbued with a sense of American-ness despite the runners who come from all over the world. There is just something “particularly devastating” about an attack on a marathon writes Nicholas Thompson in the New Yorker.

It’s an epic event in which men and women appear almost superhuman. The winning men run for hours at a pace even normal fit people can only hold in a sprint. But it’s also so ordinary. It’s not held in a stadium or on a track. It’s held in the same streets everyone drives on and walks down. An attack on a marathon is, in some ways, more devastating than an attack on a stadium; you’re hitting something special but also something very quotidian.

That’s why the choice of a marathon as a bomber’s target is so baffling. It’s not a symbol of a country’s pomp, military might or financial wealth. It’s always been about the endurance of the human spirit. And it’s been open to all in a way few sports are.

Khatu says he started running marathons in 2005 because he was very unathletic during school and college in India. His focus had always been on excelling in academia. But marathons seemed like a challenge he could take on. So many different kinds of people, many who had shown no aptitude for other sports, run the marathon.

“Few things compare to the sense of accomplishment that you feel after running the 26.2 miles to finish a marathon,” he says.

That’s pretty much what Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon said about it as well.

“If you are losing faith in human nature, go out and watch a marathon,” she said.

Dave Zirin tells her story in a moving blog for The Nation about the Boston marathon. He mourns that now “(l)ike a scar across someone’s face, the bombing will now be a part of the Boston Marathon.”

But he writes that while you cannot ignore the scar, you have to remember it’s “only a part.” Kathrine Switzer is also a part of that same story, disfigured as it might be now. In 1967 she snuck into the marathon by registered under the gender-neutral name of KV Switzer. But five miles into the race, an irate marathon director jumped off a truck and tried to force her to “get the hell out of (his) race.” The men running with her fought him off.

That story is moving because it shows that race does not belong to anyone. It was not the marathon director’s property and it’s not the bombers’ who tried to put their deadly stamp on it.

Zirin writes the bombing now “marks us” like a scar. “But like a scar, we may need to wear it proudly.”

Khatu has changed his profile picture on Facebook to his runner’s tag from the 2009 Boston marathon – runner number 8130. “I vow to requalify and run Boston again,” he says. Otherwise as Switzer implies you might as well lose faith in human nature.

]]> An African American Writer Finds Her Roots in Bengal tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11253 2013-04-13T08:00:00Z 2013-04-12T23:12:08Z Sandip Roy ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=54 In 1896, almost a century before Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala caused a stir by daring to show a romance between a black man and an Indian woman in the American South, a Muslim Bengali peddler from Hooghly married a black Catholic woman from New Orleans and settled down in that city. There’s no record of how they met or what the neighbours made of them. Shaik Mohammad Musa died in 1919, a few months before his son was born. His widow Tinnie raised their three children as black and Catholic. Their Indian heritage was lost in history.

“We had a hookah, and we had a picture, and then we had family stories – that was all we had,” says Fatima Shaik, his granddaughter. And their names. They were the only Shaiks in the phone book. Her classmates teased her, singing Shake, Baby, Shake in the school yard. Sometimes lonely Indians landing up in New Orleans would find them in the phonebook and call them on the off chance they were from the subcontinent. Her father, she says, was always wistful after those conversations. “Perhaps he would think maybe he had family too somewhere in India and some day they would call up.”

This year, Fatima Shaik came to India for the first time to try and solve the mystery in her family tree. Jeffrey Reneau, the director of the American Center in Kolkata which hosted her says “her story brings home this international issue of belonging and who am I. When you start deconstructing identity you find pieces and threads of who you are. The only thing bringing all the pieces together is you.”

Who is Fatima Shaik?

It’s like a detective story, says Kolkata-born filmmaker and Fulbright-Nehru fellow Kavery Kaul who is filming Fatima’s journey – but one with “no footprints, no contemporary clues.” Even the name of the ancestral village was lost in transliteration. “We had to unscramble the English,” laughs Kaul. An academic reminded her there were many villages in Bengal with similar names. But an old letter from Shaik Musa with the name of the post office helped them finally track it down to Khori village in Hooghly.

“What will surprise many people in America and Kolkata, is that there were many villagers whose grandfathers had left about the time Fatima’s grandfather did. Some went to America, some to Panama. Some came back, some didn’t,” says Kaul.

Vivek Bald has just written a book about these forgotten migrants – Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. Bald writes that at the turn of the 20th century there was a flourishing network of peddlers from places like Hooghly in America. They sold chikan embroidery – shawls, handkerchiefs, bedspreads. Women in their villages hand-embroidered them. Once they used to take them to cities like Calcutta but when the British flooded the market with cheap factory-made goods, they needed to find other markets.

Eat Pray Love – Circa 1900

America was going through an “Oriental” fascination at that time. The Indian nautch dancer was part of American burlesque. There were tobacco brands with names like Hindoo and Mogul. In New Orleans the Mardi Gras parade had floats with themes like Hindoo Heaven and Light of Asia. These peddlers worked the boardwalks of resort towns like Atlantic City and carnival cities like New Orleans selling a bit of that exotic Oriental fantasy to Americans even as the country’s borders started to close on Asian immigrants.

“These men came to the United States on a thin edge between Indophilia and xenophobia,” writes Bald.

The 1900 federal census found twelve men from “Hindoostan” living in New Orleans. There were stories in newspapers about men as “wise as Solomon”, with “black skull caps” and “long tailed frock coats.” One newspaper wrote a long account about being transfixed by amazement watching a “Hindoo” wobbling on a bicycle – “humped over like a camel trying to keep his balance”. By 1910, the number of peddlers had increased five fold. Bald estimates between the 1880s and 1920s, approximately 300 to 500 men from Hoogly/Calcutta moved through the peddler network in America — a small number but crucial in establishing the continuity of the South Asian migration story.

Fitting Between Black and White

Many of these peddlers returned to their villages. But some, like Fatima’s grandfather, did not. Some even became American citizens throwing courts into a quandary because only whites and persons of African ancestry could become US citizens. “Abba Dolla”, an Afghan silk peddler from Calcutta, for example, applied as a “white person”. The district court judge made him roll up his sleeve and was satisfied that though his face and hands were tanned by the sun, his unexposed skin “was sufficiently transparent for the blue colour of the veins to show very clearly.”

But even if these men slipped through the cracks of immigration law, the colour codes in society were stricter. That determined where they slept at night and the women they married. Indian immigrants today do not realise they owe a historical debt of gratitude to the black community. At a time when lawmakers viewed them as part of the “Asiatic horde” says Bald, “African American neighborhoods and communities provided them with shelter and the possibility to build lives.”

“In New Orleans the African American community was welcoming and I’d like to think Shaik Mohammad fell in love with Fatima’s grandmother, Tinnie,” says Kaul.

The Men in the Middle

But this was not just a story of the odd romance of Bengali Muslim men and their Catholic wives and whether it made the gumbo spicier. Men like Shaik Musa were really the men in the middle of a story that was being stitched by women at both ends. Bald writes “(A)s much as the Hoogly peddler network relied upon the work of Indian women in home villages, it functioned in North America because of the labour of US women of color.” These women made New Orleans a home, not just a boarding house.

“I don’t know if the men wrote at length about their wives, the race and religion of their wives,” says Kaul. “The men did what they had to do, I am sure the women embroidering chikan missed them. I have no doubt about that.”

Unlike the Punjabi farmers of the west coast and their Mexican wives who left behind gurdwaras, the chikan peddlers of New Orleans left few physical traces of their American lives. There are no records of mosques or ethnic enclaves. Within a generation, their children had been absorbed into the black community although Bald says we should remember in New Orleans “‘blackness’ was incredibly expansive and mixed — it had room to incorporate the Bengalis and their descendants.”

He says he has heard there is an African American family in New Orleans descended from the Bengali peddlers who still get together every Sunday to make a big pot of biryani.

And There Were Mosquitos

Fatima Shaik says before her trip she wanted specific answers about the grandfather she had never known – “What were the similarities to me physically, what did he like to eat?” But as she traveled through Kolkata and up the Hooghly to the village he was from she just started imagining him walking to the main road, taking a cart to the city, and then boarding a ship for the New World. Kaul says as much as her film is about Shaik Musa and his journey from India, it’s also about Fatima Shaik, the African American writer’s journey to Kolkata.

“When I got off the plane I was struck that Calcutta was very much like New Orleans,” laughs Fatima. “So hot, so humid at night. And there were mosquitos. In that sense I felt I was home.”

Then she says with a smile that she likes to think her grandfather felt the same as well when he got off his ship in New Orleans.

“When he encountered the same heat and the same humidity and the same mosquitoes – he must have felt like he was home too.”
]]> Twin Papers Prove Power of Print for DC-Area South Asians tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11237 2013-04-09T07:45:00Z 2013-04-09T01:00:12Z Jessamine Price ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103 Photo: Editor Rajan George in the India This Week and Express India office.

Editor’ Note: New America Media is partnering with American University and other journalism schools to present profiles of ethnic media in their regions. The following story profiles India This Week and Express India, bringing news to South Asians in the Washington, D.C. area.

WALDORF, Md.--Rajan George, editor-in-chief of India This Week and Express India, runs a one-person show these days.

“I used to have five people in the office once upon a time,” he said, thinking back over the papers’ 23-year history. Today he alone serves as editor-in-chief, local correspondent, layout staff and business manager. He also operates the printing press, a 100-foot long machine dominating his headquarters in an industrial park in Waldorf, Md., near Washington, D.C.

Two part-timers help out: A freelancer compiles community announcements, and a delivery person distributes the final products to South Asian stores, Hindu temples and gurdwaras (Sikh temples) around the Washington-Baltimore corridor.

Since 1990, India This Week and Express India have weathered the arrival of the Internet and the decline of print newspapers relatively smoothly, but the recent recession hurt business.

Demand for Print Newspapers

Sometimes, the future looks bleak, George said. But he is convinced that reader demand can sustain print newspapers, especially in immigrant communities. He notes that his papers are the D.C. metropolitan area’s only Indian ethnic publications.

The two free, tabloid-size papers primarily cover news from India and other parts of South Asia. In addition, a small percentage of pages are devoted to announcements of local events and news about D.C.-area ethnic celebrations.

George aims at a readership that might be described as “pan-South Asian.” He chooses articles that will interest immigrants from not only India, but also from Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The papers obtain most of their international content from the wire service, Asian News International. George and a couple freelancers generate local coverage.

The two papers function together like a single semi-weekly publication. Express India began coming out every Tuesday in 1990, and India This Week started publication each Friday in 1995.

The two papers share the same masthead, editorial goals and visual appearance, but they do not duplicate content, George stressed. Together the papers have a circulation of 10,000 and reach immigrants in the District of Columbia, the city of Baltimore and a half-dozen counties in Virginia and Maryland. The region is home to the third largest South Asian population in the United States, one that has grown rapidly in the past decade.

George publishes a wider range of news items on South Asia than mainstream media, which focuses its coverage of the region on U.S. interests. He described Indian Americans as “far from home” and in need of news about their country of origin. George noted that not everyone has access to the Internet.

“This is what puts people together,” he said, turning the pages of the latest issue of Express India. “It’s a unifying factor when you have a community event and publicize it through the local ethnic media.”

English – Indians’ Unifying Language

Express India and India This Week are published entirely in English. According to George, “Even though the national language is Hindi, the only thing that unifies the Indian people is English.”

George shakes his head as he recalls that a friend started a D.C.-area paper in Hindi, but it didn’t succeed. Actually, George is from Kerala, and Hindi is not his native language. India has over a dozen languages designated “official” and English has become the lingua franca of educated Indians. English has the added advantage of reaching South Asian immigrants who aren’t from India.

George isn’t sure what the future holds. He no longer gets advertising dollars from large mainstream corporations, such as Verizon or Citibank.

A decade ago, real estate agents and mortgage brokers were his most reliable advertisers, but most of them have gone out of business since the housing market collapsed in 2008. Today, many of the papers’ largest ads are aimed directly at the ethnic audience, such as placements for local concerts of Indian pop idols on tour.

He Won’t Give Up

But George isn’t giving up. He admits that in the past he did not seek out advertisers because they approached him. Now he thinks more carefully about revenue and expenses.

To reduce costs, he recently moved his office from Takoma Park, Md., to a cheaper space adjoining his printing press in Waldorf. He recently acquired new capacity to print in color. George is in the process of developing a website, which will eventually be at www.indiathisweek.us.

George did not start out in journalism. He earned a master’s degree in theology before coming to the U.S. in 1990, and he remains closely involved with a local church he helped to start. Publishing and religion are equal, simultaneous “passions” for him. Perhaps this unusual background helps him maintain the two papers through what he describes as “a tough time.”

“For me it takes one day at a time,” he said, “We are not thriving, but we are sustaining ourselves. If I don’t have advertisers coming in for a certain time, I’ll close up. I won’t run a losing business. But so far,” he added, “I don’t have a losing business.”

Jessamine Price is an American University student. Assistant professor of journalism Angie Chuang assigned Price and other students to profile ethnic media outlets for her Race and Community Reporting class. American University’s School of Communication is the only professional school in Washington, D.C., that brings journalism, film and public relations together, with an international perspective and a focus on new media -- digital, interactive and social media.




]]> Is Ro Khanna the Next Star of the Democratic Party? tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11228 2013-04-07T07:30:00Z 2013-04-06T00:57:23Z Sunita Sohrabji ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103
Editor's Note: Ro Khanna, who has been called by the New York Times “a rising star in the Democratic Party,” says he wants to bring the innovative spirit of Silicon Valley to Washington.

FREMONT, Calif. -- Ro Khanna, formerly a high-ranking trade official in the Obama administration, announced this week his bid for California’s 17th District congressional seat, which is currently being held by the venerable Mike Honda.

Khanna and Honda are both Democrats likely to be pitted against each other in 2014, due to new state mandates which allow two opponents from the same party to run against each other in the general election. The district – from which Honda received 73 percent of the vote against Republican challenger Evelyn Li in 2012 – stretches from Cupertino to South Fremont and covers huge swaths of the Silicon Valley. Almost half of District 17’s residents are Asian American; Fremont is home to one of the largest concentrations of South Asians in the United States.

Both candidates have aggressively begun campaigning, 20 months before the general election. Khanna has already amassed $1.2 million for his congressional bid, according to his Dec. 31, 2012 Federal Elections Commission report. He has also recruited several key members of President Obama’s re-election campaign team, including Steve Spinner, who will serve as Khanna’s campaign chair. 

Jeremy Bird, who served as the Obama campaign’s national field director, will serve as a general consultant to Khanna’s campaign. Leah Cowan, formerly a field director with the Obama re-election campaign, will serve as Khanna’s campaign manager.

Honda, who has served in Congress since 2001 and co-chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, has already received endorsements from President Barack Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Howard Dean, former chair of the Democratic National Committee.

But Khanna characterized Honda as a politician who did not understand the economic dynamism of his community. “This district at this time needs a voice who understands the global economy, and what policies will foster entrepreneurship and growth,” the 36-year-old Indian American told India-West shortly before announcing his congressional bid. “We need real solutions about how we will compete in a global economy, and someone who can work across the aisle to find common ground between business and labor.”

“Congress has simply not focused on an economic growth agenda or supporting entrepreneurs. We need to have the right tax and trade policies that will encourage companies to stay in the United States and invest here,” he said.

“We need to figure out how to encourage more small- and medium-size businesses to take advantage of overseas markets and export. And we need to foster entrepreneurship,” said Khanna, the author of “Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing Is Still Key to America's Future,” which was released by McGraw Hill last August.

Khanna, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for the U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service in the Commerce Department, said he will push aggressively to make the Silicon Valley’s advanced electronics, semiconductors, and also clean technology products available to markets overseas without unfair tariffs or restrictions. He also hopes to aid small and medium businesses to gain access to capital to be able to export their products abroad.

To keep up with a global economy, Khanna opined that children need to learn to code as a “second language” and to be “exposed to entrepreneurship from an early age.”

In support of Khanna’s congressional bid, Kamil Hasan, founder of Hi-Tek Ventures, told India-West, “Ro represents the values and aspirations of our community very well. He also has a clear understanding of the issues important to the high tech community, and can strongly and pro-actively represent Silicon Valley in Congress.”

An at-large member of the Democratic National Committee, Hasan added, “Silicon Valley needs to get actively involved in helping strengthen our country's competitiveness, and in creating jobs. Ro is capable of achieving this. While we have a lot of respect and regard for Congressman Honda, and appreciate his contributions to the causes of Asian Americans, the time has come for a young and dynamic professional to represent this district.”

Anil Godhwani, co-founder of the India Community Center in Milpitas, said he is also supportive of Khanna’s run. “Given what Silicon Valley needs, Ro is the better choice to represent the tech community,” Godhwani told India-West.

Godhwani, who said he has known Khanna for about a decade, characterized the candidate as an entrepreneur who would bring fresh ideas and new energy to the 17th district.

Barbara O’Connor, former director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at California State University, Sacramento, told India-West that Khanna will have to appeal to the large Asian American bloc which makes up almost 50 percent of the residents of his district. “Mike is well connected with the Asian American community and there’s a huge amount of support there for him,” she said.

“Ethnic groups love incumbents, and they are circumspect of challengers,” noted O’ Connor. “You’re not going to get them to give up an incumbent unless there’s a very compelling reason,” added O’Connor, emeritus professor of communications at CSUS.

“To win this race, Khanna must focus on independent voters and young people, who tend to be less partisan in their voting patterns. Both candidates will have to build large social media campaigns in addition to the shoe leather, door-knocking tradition of campaigns," said O'Connor.


]]> The New Rape Whistle: Electric Bras and Condoms With Teeth tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11221 2013-04-04T18:05:00Z 2013-04-05T02:43:58Z Viji Sundaram ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=68
Editor’s Note: Modern technology has brought us a new kind of rape whistle – an electrified bra that shocks anyone who touches it and sends out a GPS signal to police. But the invention is just as ludicrous as its predecessor -- and once again puts the impetus of preventing rape on women, instead of where it belongs: the education of men and boys.

A group of female engineering students in India has unveiled a new electrified bra to protect women from getting raped. The bra, according to reports, not only shocks the attacker the moment its pressure sensors get activated; its built-in GPS also alerts police and the victim’s parents to the location where the attack is taking place. The designers of the bra, which is called Society Harnessing Equipment, or SHE for short, eventually hope to connect it with smart phones via Bluetooth and infrared technology.

I am sure the female engineering students in Chennai who designed this piece of lingerie did it with the best of intentions, following the national uproar that was generated by the rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in Delhi last December, and several other well-publicized rapes that have occurred in the country since then. (Not to mention around the world -- just this week in Brazil, an American tourist was gang raped for six hours on a mini bus in Rio de Janeiro.)

The fact that the engineers felt it necessary to design such a bra shows that Indian women have little faith in the sweeping rape law the Indian government passed last month to protect women against sexual violence. India has never had trouble enacting laws, just enforcing them. And as every Indian knows, any law can be bypassed by greasing the right person’s palm. Why should the rape law be any different?

And how can you blame women for not expecting much from the law? The practice of dowry (money or property brought by a bride to her husband at marriage) is still almost endemic in India, despite the fact that an anti-dowry law was passed in 1961. In 2010, there were 8,391 reported cases of dowry deaths – young women who were murdered or driven to suicide by their husbands or their in-laws for not bringing in an adequate dowry -- according to the National Crime Records Bureau. Women’s rights activists say that for every dowry death reported, there are dozens that go unreported. Of the reported cases in 2010, only one-third of the perpetrators were convicted.

The majority of rapists, too, get off scot-free. And not just in India.

In most African countries, rape convictions are not common. Worse, affected women don't get immediate access to medical care, and DNA tests to provide evidence are unaffordable. Which is perhaps why two years ago in South Africa, Dr. Sonnet Ehlers designed a female condom with “teeth” to it. Jagged rows of teeth-like hooks line the inside of the latex condom and attach to a man’s penis during penetration. Once Rape-aXe, -- as the condom is called – lodges in the penis, only a doctor can surgically remove it. While doing it, the doctor can summon law officials to arrest the man.

But if the electrified bra and the condom with “teeth” are meant to empower women, these inventions only show the state of women’s powerlessness -- and their lack of faith in laws meant to protect them.

India’s new rape law, which, in addition to harsher sentences for rape and acid attacks, criminalizes “eve-teasing” which, as Lavanya Sankaran points out in a column in The Guardian, is a “coy and euphemistic name for the sexual harassment – the stalking, groping and lewd comments – that every Indian woman is forced to navigate every time she walks out of her home.”

The law also expands the definition of rape and clearly states that the absence of physical struggle doesn’t equal consent. And no longer will misogynist police officers be able to not register complaints and compromise survivors’ rights during investigations.

All of that sounds wonderful, but is the law really going to protect women? Not until there is a change in culture, beginning with the way mothers and fathers teach their sons to be men. After all, as Sankaran notes, social pressure in India is far more powerful than any law.

The solution is not to get women to buy a new high-tech kind of rape whistle. The mindset of men must change, and the change has to begin at home.

]]> Patients Teach Doctor How to Heal at the End of Life tag:newamericamedia.org,2013://19.11214 2013-04-03T08:45:00Z 2013-04-03T23:54:43Z Photo: Dr. V.J. Periyakoil is shown with one of her patients, Daniel Shaine. (Courtesy of the VA Palo Alto Health Care System) PALO ALTO, Calif. -- How does a doctor specializing in saving lives turn into one of the... Paul Kleyman ]]> http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103 Photo: Dr. V.J. Periyakoil is shown with one of her patients, Daniel Shaine. (Courtesy of the VA Palo Alto Health Care System)

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- How does a doctor specializing in saving lives turn into one of the nation's leading experts -- and medical educators -- on end-of-life care?

Dr. Vyjeyanthi "V.J." Periyakoil says her 25-year journey from medical school in her native India to directing Stanford University's palliative-care fellowship program taught her that the art of healing lies in listening to her patients. What she heard wasn't always in the medical textbooks.

What they told her led Periyakoil to becoming a leading voice in the movement to reconceptualize end-of-life care from limited hospice treatment in the last six months of life to comprehensive treatment for profoundly ill people .

"Much of my work had been on the importance of dignity in health care," Periyakoil recalls.

What People Want
at Life’s End


Stanford University palliative care expert, Dr. Vyjeyanthi “V.J.” Periyakoil believes that contrary to conventional wisdom, most patients don’t simply want every medical intervention that may or may not prolong their lives.

Overall people want appropriate care sensitive to their quality of life and, enabling them to experience their final days as fully as possible with minimal stress for their families.

In fact, a 2012 report by the California Health Care Foundation affirmed Periyakoil’s understanding of what patients hope for. First and foremost, Californians in the study said they didn’t want their families burdened by the cost of their care, or by having to struggle with troubling decisions about their treatment.

Also, participants in the poll said they wanted to be comfortable without pain and hoped to be “at peace spiritually.” On the survey’s list of 12 “Most Important Factors at End of Life,” people placed the desire “to live as long as possible” down at number 10.

The survey does show difference among ethnic groups. Although more than half of Latinos (56 percent) rated prolonging life as their top choice, only 18 percent of Asians did so, followed by 25 percent of whites and 43 percent of African Americans.

Palliative care is such a growing national concern that the federal Institute of Medicine launched its new Committee on Transforming End-of-Life Care in February.

--Paul Kleyman

She found that patients "cared more about concrete things -- 'Treat my pain first, take care of me first -- then you can treat me with respect.' For patients, that meant good pain care and symptom management, which is good palliative care."

Periyakoil began her practice in the United States as a resident in the crowded wards of Stockton's San Joaquin General Hospital. Her patients were mainly "migrant farmworkers, people with no insurance, people who didn't want to give you too much information" because of their immigration status or their fear they couldn't afford the treatment being prescribed.

She felt especially awkward when the medical advice she offered proved irrelevant to her patients' lives. "There was a mother of young children who had two jobs. I would tell her, 'Why don't you put your feet up? Why don't you eat more protein?' She'd try to answer, 'Well, I have to get back to work,' and I'd just continue to give the same silly advice."

Sensing her frustration, it was the patients who tried to reassure her. "'Oh, yes, I'll do that, doctor...Don't worry about me,' they'd say."

Struck by how many of her Stockton patients were immigrants, like herself, Periyakoil worked hard to make herself understood while also sensitizing herself to cross-cultural issues.

"When I first came to the U.S., I could read and write English very well, but because of my accent, my patients couldn't understand what I was saying," she recalls. She focused on enunciating every English word clearly, and came to appreciate nonverbal forms of expression -- like a worried look that exposed a patient's unspoken concern. The better she was able to communicate, the more likely her patients were to follow her medical recommendations.

Later at Stanford Medical School, where Periyakoil studied geriatric medicine, shediscovered another gap in her knowledge from patients who were deemed to have only six months or less left to live. Admitted to hospice care, their cure-oriented medical treatment would often be stopped in favor of "comfort" care.

"I had a hard time giving up on these patients," she admits.

Her determination to improve the quality of their lives, no matter how much time they had left, led her to realize that palliative treatment should begin as soon as a patient is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease. Care provided only when someone becomes eligible for terminal hospice coverage comes too late to fully help them.

So, for example, the average hospice stay in the United States is now only 19 days. But palliative medicine begun much earlier reduces the agony and stress of disease so well that many patients actually survive longer. And family caregivers, relieved of constant stress, have been shown to live longer following a loved one's death.

"Palliative care should be woven seamlessly into treatment," noted Periyakoil, who is also associate director of Palliative Care Services at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. "Patients shouldn't have to know the word 'palliative care.' It should be something that is given to you when and where you need it because it is the standard practice."

Periyakoil also discovered that patients who come from cultures that discourage, even prohibit, open acknowledgement of death and dying typically wind up having their referrals to hospice treatment delayed until it's too late for them to benefit from broader palliative care.

At Cultural Boundaries of Death

She learned that cultural boundaries around death could be violated in other ways. She recalls a home visit she made to see a young Chinese woman with late-stage cancer. "The husband opened the door silently, did not respond to my greeting and went into his wife's bedroom. She must have died moments earlier. When I squatted down next to her body to check her pulse and prepare an official death pronouncement, her husband gently shook his head."

Sensing she was intruding in a sacred moment, Periyakoil withdrew. At the door she wanted to offer her condolences but the husband once again shook his head and her words froze in her mouth.

"Later I learned that Chinese Buddhists believe the soul lingers in the body for some time after death. So they do not touch the body nor vocally express grief as this might disrupt the passage of the dying person's soul and prevent them from being reborn into a better life."

To help doctors become culturally fluent, Periyakoil is producing a free, online text series addressing the sensitivities of 13 distinct ethnic groups, among them African Americans, American Indians, South Asians and East Asians.

Also she is developing videos for an online series on the need for doctors and the public to share decision making, titled "Can We Talk: Conversations with multi-cultural Americans about end-of-life care." In the segments, professional actors depict scenes from common patient situations drawn from doctors' real-life experiences.

At Stanford's Palliative Care Education and Training Program, Periyakoil's fellows embrace her holistic approach. "Palliative care is one of the few fields of medicine where you deal with the whole person," says Thui Pham, an internist. "There are so many factors that impact life, not just the medical issues."

"Palliative care is not about the end of life," Periyakoil concurs. "It's about how a patient can get the most out of every day."





]]>