Asian American roles in American Politics

I'd love for there to be a 2016 Presidential election thread stickied for AA to discuss this election.

As immigrant minorities, our role is that of survival when it comes to national politics. We live in a democracy that categorizes topics and people into sections which are debated.

It's hard enough for the average white person to get their view represented, but because we're so small, our issue is that of survival. There is no topic more important that immigration for us. For us minorities, it's critical to realize that all other policies are a luxury, resting on the foundation of immigration.

So any proposed policy attacking other groups like Hispanics or Muslims to keep them out of the country is no different than attacking us. The main reason we've in the position we're in is because of this sentiment that caused all the anti-immigration laws that began passing in the late 19th century, which took until 1965 to barely reverse.

We still don't have real immigration for Asians. It's easiest to notice when you realize that Canada is 4% Indian and 4% Chinese, while the US is only 1% each. This is by design. Even after re-opening immigration in 1965, US lawmakers still limited immigration to an allocated number per country, preventing Chinese and Indians, and even other larger midsize countries like Pakistan, Japan, and Indonesia from entering the US in desired numbers as European immigrants did before them.

So when you have Trump and Sanders, who each have anti-immigrant position, that becomes a priority for survival of our identities. [It's no coincidence that both their bases are predominantly the angry white males of their respective parties.](www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/us/bernie-sanders-and-donald-trump-voters-share-anger-but-direct-it-differently.html) They're reluctant to adapt to a world, where the playing field is finally beginning to even out for women and non-whites, and they are no longer entitled to receive 10 or 100 times the salary for doing the same job that a poor foreigner did as their ancestors in post WW2 America did.

/r/asianamerican Thread