Yellow Peril by Tze Ming Mok

Blogs are great for bitching and moaning, aren't they? Well, if you're tired of that, here's your chance to cross the line to that strange realm of 'doing something about it.' And you don't even have to take your hand off the mouse.

As promised in - yikes - April, I've prepared and attached under the 'play audio' button at the top and bottom of this post, a Word document that people can use as a template submission for the Immigration Act Review. Which I've bitched and moaned about once before on Public Address, three times in the Sunday Star Times, and - Jesus - even once in iBall! I must be really, really angry.

I've looked through the online submission form for the Immigration Act Review. Scroll down slightly and it's a pretty straightforward set-up for registering your email, then accessing a submission form. My only quibble is that there is only one 'comment' box per page, rather than per question (where ticking 'comment' is an option - it just doesn't give you anywhere to comment). Judicious coding is therefore required if you want to make a whole lot of comments online. (Update) and yes, you can email your submission to actreview@dol.govt.nz.

After some general comments at the beginning, my document follows the same format as the online submission form, listing all the key questions in the discussion paper in order and responding to them. The 'Yes/No' tick boxes are kind of fun - like voting.

The deadline for submissions is now 1 July, and lot of the draft submissions being prepared by various organisations will not be ready until the end of the month. So I thought it would be useful to collect a lot of the ideas floating around into one document. The template is a collation of a variety of opinions which were not so readily insertable into the online format, including the Human Rights Commission submission, the draft Human Rights Foundation submission, the draft Asia:NZ Foundation submission, idiot/savant's collected comments, and my own perspectives.

As a whole, I've taken a fairly hardline rejectionist stance - hey, someone has to - and in a couple of circumstances have voted 'no' on minor-scale proposals because of their parcelling within a broader objectionable package. My document is an unprotected Word document, so you are free to fiddle, replace, or reverse any of the sentiments within it. Ultimately, if you think I'm full of crap, you can delete all my suggested answers in the right hand columns, but still use this document to help you make a comprehensive submission. It isolates all the questions that need to be answered in the same format as the online submission form. It's fairly time consuming to go through the full discussion paper searching for the important parts you need to actually answer, and while the summary document lists the proposals couched in terms of how great they're going to be, it doesn't actually provide a list of the specific questions asked.

There are also some gaps where I have not included a direct answer or any comment. In these cases I either have not formed an opinion, haven't the expertise to comment, and/or am waiting for a more informed party to complete their submission and make it available. These include Section 8 and some of Section 14, which will be most definitively answered by the refugee law geeks of the Human Rights Foundation, and Section 13 on Third Parties, which immigration consultants and actual migrant community advocates can and should answer with more authority.

Hot-button Sections for the whitish liberal crowd that most Public Address readers undoubtedly are:
Section 9 - use of classified information that can neither be revealed nor challenged;
Section 10, which proposes increased powers of search, entry and detention for immigration officials;
Section 11 on gathering biometric information and;
Section 12 on detention (basic thrust: let's detain more people for longer!)

Sections which should be of serious concern to migrant and refugee communities include all the above and... well... basically all the rest:
Section 5 on immigration decision-making which proposes the use of withholding prejudicial information for offshore applicants, the use of secret classified information, and extending the decision-making powers of immigration officials
Section 6 on exclusion and expulsion, including proposed insertion of health and character requirements into legislation, using wording such as "glorification" of terrorism
Section 7 on reducing avenues for review and appeal
Section 13 on the role of third parties in - basically - catching and snitching, such as service providers and employers

Sections that people in specific industries should definitely submit on, and undoubtedly are submitting on, are:
Section 8 for Immigration consultants/lawyers and Refugee lawyers
Section 13 for immigration consultants and employers who employ a lot of migrant workers

Sheesh! Wasn't that incredibly boring/important? If you're in need of inspiration, go read David Haywood's interview on Speaker with Iranian intellectual and refugee Shahzad Ghahreman to hype yo'self up to submit to the Man.

The problem with S'porean PM Lee Hsien Loong, or as certain of us like to call him, Hsiao Lee (Small Lee), son of Lao Lee (Old Lee), is that - well - he's full of crap. His dad Lee Kuan Yew used to freely admit that Singapore wasn't democratic. Under Small Lee, nothing has actually changed except the rhetoric.

It didn't always seem as though it would turn out thus: Small Lee's freaky political Tourettes on the subject of Opposition leader Chee Soon Juan yesterday is a far cry from the promises of Lee's inauguration speech, where he spoke of the need for diverse opinions and robust debate. Then the actual debates started, and same old vicious defamation suits, bankruptcy proceedings, gerrymanders and plain old arrests and intimidation rolled on as usual.

Old Lee was at least honest enough to say 'screw your culturally imperialist Western standards! I am a Chinese dictator! No-one fucks with me and gets away with it!' But caught between the comfortable inheritance of Singaporean political repression and the attractiveness of a democratic moral high ground, Small Lee is incompetently working the doublespeak.

Fresh from the PAP's poorest election result in its history, where even a 'suicide squad' of six Worker's Party first-time election 'virgin' campaigners took an unprecedented third of the vote in his own electorate, Lee's defamatory ranting against SDP leader Chee Soon Juan appears the sign of a rattled man.

norightturn has a good summary of the pitiful response from Helen Clark on her failure to address Singapore's human rights record. Meanwhile, must run off to investigate the whereabouts of Small Lee, who is in town today. Tip-offs welcome.

Asian pop-cultural high point of the week: screenshots of Volcano High in fellow 'Asian' ethnicity-geek Dr Kumanan Rasanathan's powerpoint presentation for the launch of his Youth2000 secondary school health survey report A Health Profile of Young Asian New Zealanders.

Yeah, these are the young Asians we wish we were...

And here's the Herald article by a Young-Looking Asian New Zealander.

So basically: the kids are alright. Kind of. They're healthy because they don't get up to much that's dangerous (smoking, drinking, speeding etc). They're also incipiently unhealthy because they also don't get up to much that's healthy - you know, like moving around at speed using only their bodies for propulsion (exercise). Having sex might fit into both of those categories - there's hardly any of that.

So the kids are kind of passively not un-alright. Oh yes, except for the comparatively high experiences of traumatic bullying, anxiety, feelings of being unsafe at school, depression and suicidality, with anxiety and lack of safety particularly marked among Chinese and suicidality particularly high for Indian girls. Moreover, far too many recent migrant Chinese students receive zero primary healthcare. (Note that the report doesn't include international students.)

From a New Zealand-born perspective, it's an interesting - or troubling - finding that no matter how long they'd been here, young Asians of school age experience the same elevated level of anxiety, depression, and traumatic bullying as each other. That is, it seems that it doesn't matter how long we've been around happily assimilating or acculturating, dumbass bullies are equal opportunity racists - they can't tell the difference between Old Generation and new migrant Asians.

Neither did New Zealand-born Asians get any more exercise than recent migrant kids. Geeky Asians of all diaspora generations experience the same pull of the PS2, and perhaps the same exclusion from sport teams for being geeky and Asian.

So is it really always going to be this bad? As you'd expect, all 'risky behaviours' (Dr Rasanathan pointed out that 'risky behaviours' are also known as "'fun' - but Public Health doctors don't believe in fun.") increased the longer the 'Asian' schoolkids had been in New Zealand - with the exception of getting laid!

Sadly enough, everything above pretty much coheres with my personal New Zealand-born Chinese experience of high school.

What this worryingly shows is that Asian kids will really be screwed when the pandemic hits or when powerlines go down, as they will be shut off from the traditional indoor emergency activities of playing board games (having long abandoned their scrabble sets for game consoles), recreational drug use, and having sex to keep warm - and will be just sitting around getting depressed and anxious. Time to join the Kendo team, I would say. It would take care of that bullying problem anyway.

Three quick links for your light Friday political anger break: Awesome geeky furious legal discussion on norightturn on Tim Selwyn's motherfucking SEDITION conviction; new Harpers' editor Ben Metcalf brilliantly tests America's legal limits by threatening at length to kill George W Bush with his bare hands (I do not terribly mourn the passing of Lewis Lapham) and on an optimistic note, Google decides a few days after the Tiananmen Square Massacre anniversary, that maybe it won't be evil after all. I cheered.

Check out the new DC Comics Chinese Government superhero team 'the Great Ten', featuring such wacky stereotype fantasies as a mother who constantly produces litters of 25 warriors, a guy permanently clouded in noxious pandemic-like vapours, and a Socialist Red Guardsman. (hat tip: angryasianman)

Sociopolitical...overload... too... many... critical references...

All that's really missing 'Mao-Man', the embalmed body of Mao returned as a staggering killer zombie. Apart from the gibbering geopolitical Neo-yellow peril subtleties, I don't understand why they're not very sci-fi at all. Although I quite like how the Socialist Red Guardsman is in a 'special containment suit' seemingly protecting him from the march of history. He "uses his solar powers to carry out the Cultural Revolution"? Shouldn't he have retired thirty years ago?

Still, for Chinese stereotype superheros they sure kick Jubilee's ass (coloured balls of light anyone?).

Meanwhile, Jeff Yang has an extensive historical analysis of Asian American comic superheros, including the new crop who, unsurprisingly are far less weird than those employed by the Chinese government. 'Cos you know, they're Americans and all.

Great Jeff lines:

Superman has always appealed to Asian Americans. He has dark hair, his public identity is a meek guy with glasses, he's from a faraway place -- why not? ("Sure there are parallels," says Hama. "But remember he was created by [Jerry] Siegel and [Joe] Shuster. He's a Jewish immigrant fantasy." Jewish, Asian -- same difference.)

What's with every superhero with size-reducing powers suddenly becoming Asian? Is shrinking the new martial art?

In other news, I am still a geeky Asian kid. For my own Chinese stereotype superhero character, when I was ten and wanted to be one of the X-Men, I thought I could be a mutant who had initially only had rudimentary control over electron charge and movement, but also had immense special powers of studying really really hard with Beast in the library and science lab, thus allowing me to develop, with a lot of intellectual effort, the ability to wage thermonuclear war. My character wouldn't have to go out and fight evil mutants much, she'd just stay at the Xavier school and study a lot, which would be just as effective. Thermonuclear war = way cooler than fireworks displays of exploding balls of light, although neither of course are as iconic within the imagined Chinese super world than studying really hard.