Thread: ALIPAC: Amendment 1 fails and Florida's anti-Asian legacy li

Amendment 1 fails and Florida's anti-Asian legacy lives on

By Alex Pickett
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University Of Massachusetts-dartmouth
ALIEN NATION: Rising immigration of Asians in California during the early 1900s prompted states to pass "Alien Land Laws," including Florida.

In all the post-election hoopla — from President-elect Barack Obama carrying Florida to our own local vote-counting morass in Hillsborough — the news of one failed amendment to the state Constitution has faded away quietly. And yet, the failure of Amendment 1 says just as much about the state's electorate as the passage of Amendment 2, which banned gay marriage.

Amendment 1 was an initiative aimed at removing 80-year-old language from the state Constitution that permitted the Legislature to "regulate or prohibit the ownership, inheritance, disposition and possession of real property by aliens ineligible for citizenship."

Given the current state of federal anti-discrimination laws and court rulings, the Florida provision is moot. And yet more than half of the state's voters don't want to give up the vestige of anti-Asian bigotry.

When the state passed the provision in 1926, "aliens ineligible for citizenship" translated as Asian immigrants. (Under immigration laws at the time, only Europeans and Africans could become citizens.) The Constitutional provision was a response to a large number of Chinese, Japanese and Korean immigrants settling in the western United States. California and seven other states had already passed their own "alien land laws" to ensure the Asian immigrants, who worked for less money, couldn't buy up American farmland. So Florida lawmakers, worried the dispossessed Asians might move east, passed their own law, modeled after California's.

The Florida Legislature never used its authority to enforce the alien land law.

In 1952, California repealed its version. Over the years, courts in the other states declared their laws unconstitutional. Florida remains the last state to keep such language on the books.

"It's still not right," says Winnie Tang, president of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Six years ago, Tang came across a small blurb in a Chinese newspaper about the law. She began studying the issue and reaching out to other Asian organizations.

"I learned about more history than when I went to school," says Tang, who emigrated from Macao (now part of China) about 30 years ago.

Soon after, a state senator contacted her. Former Democratic minority leader Steve Geller had also read a blurb about the buried clause in a legislative magazine.

"He asked, 'Why don't we work on this together,'" Tang says.

While she rallied the Asian-American community and sought help from other organizations, including the Miami-Dade NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union, Geller worked with state senators to pass a resolution that would push the issue to a voter referendum.

They both ran into roadblocks.

"We tried very hard to educate the public regarding this issue," Tang says, "but since it's old history … [the public] does not really understand what this is about."

Geller first brought a bill to the Senate in 2002, but in the post-9/11 climate, legislators were hesitant. A few years later, the fervor against illegal immigration stymied his efforts again. Geller explains some legislators didn't understand the dark history behind the clause and that it was ultimately unenforceable due to current equal protection laws.

"I believe we should not have institutionalized racism in the Constitution," Geller says. "It's kind of similar to having a state Constitution that still says slavery should be allowed."

Finally, in 2007, his bill passed unanimously in the Senate and by a large margin in the House. Amendment No. 1 was put on the ballot this year. Last week, the provision failed with 52 percent of the electorate voting against it. (Amendments require a 60 percent majority to pass.)

Why didn't Amendment 1 pass? A mix of ignorance and xenophobia, supporters say.

"I kind of thought it would fail," Geller admits. "The problem is the way it was written. … a tremendous number of people thought we were talking about illegal immigrants."

In polls, Floridians overwhelmingly do not want to give rights to illegal immigrants. And some anti-immigration groups exploited that sentiment.

"Our opposition, the illegal immigrant supporters, tried to make a move to sneak that [provision] out of [the Constitution]," says William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration, which sent out e-mail blasts to its members to oppose Amendment 1. "They feel that this is a political threat, not because of alleged or perceived transgressions against Asians."

Other detractors of the amendment claimed the constitutional provision could be used to prevent terrorists from owning Florida real estate. Geller rejects that argument, charging that U.S. law already restricts such ownership.

Florida voters might get another chance at overturning the law. Tang says she'll try for another referendum in 2010. This time, she says, there will be more of an effort to go beyond South Florida's civil rights organizations to raise more awareness of the issue.

"We learn from the mistakes," Tang says. "We learned that we didn't do enough."

It took New Mexico voters a second try to pass a similar Constitutional amendment in 2006. Tang hopes Floridians can repeat that state's success.


http://tampa.creativeloafing.com/gyroba ... oid=558112

Say William, you should make a suggestion to the press on how this impasse can be resolved. If the OCA would actively oppose any attempts to legalize illegal aliens and instead supported immigration law enforcement, then ALIPAC would stop opposing Amendment 1.

There's no language about Asians in Amendment 1 or in the Florida Constitution. That is just the radical left crying racism again.

Luckily, the people of Florida had the wisdom to shoot that amendment down.

W

Originally Posted by ALIPAC

There's no language about Asians in Amendment 1 or in the Florida Constitution. That is just the radical left crying racism again.
W

Yes I know but the Organization of Chinese Americans are the ones pushing it, and it sounds like they want to try again. I guess "to remove all vestiges of past discrimination" is why they are doing it?

Whatever their reason they need to know if there were not 1 million illegal aliens in Florida they could have their way, until then the law needs to stay on the books to help stop the current discrimination against law abiding Americans and legal residents!!

What the OCA should do first is lobby for an Oklahoma style foreign criminal enforcement bill in Florida.