Image of the Black Criminal
Poverty and Deportation Struggles
Kil Ja Kim
February 7, 2003
of 2002, the US signed a secret repatriation agreement with
Cambodia. Repatriation is the forced return, or deportation, of an immigrant
back to their country of origin.
The US government repatriates any non-citizen (of any
status) who is convicted of an “aggravated felony” in the US
or who overstay their visas.
When someone is repatriated, they cannot return back to
the US, even to see loved ones.
Over 200,000 Cambodian refugees live in the US.
Approximately 1,500 Cambodians have orders of
June 22, 2002, the first six Cambodians were deported to
Cambodia; in September another eleven followed.
More have been deported since, including an elderly man
in his eighties.
the Cambodians at risk of deportation had received bad advice
from lawyers and judges. They
were told that there was little chance a repatriation agreement
would be signed between Cambodia and the US.
Because of this, many Cambodians waived their claim to
relief from deportation. Since
there was no repatriation agreement between Cambodia and the US,
Cambodians convicted of aggravated felonies became “lifers”
– those who serve indefinite sentences in INS prisons because
they cannot be deported. This
means that they first served time in US prisons for their
original conviction, then in an INS detention center.
Many immigrants are deported when they are “released”
from INS detention. Unlike
those immigrants who were “deportable,” Cambodians were kept
in INS prisons without knowing if, or when they would be
In June of
2001, the US Supreme Court decision Ma v. Reno ruled that
“lifers” should be granted custody reviews.
This allowed many indefinite detainees to temporarily
return back to their communities.
Yet this repatriation agreement places Cambodians at risk
Activists organizing to stop Cambodian
deportation face some major obstacles.
The post-9-11 backlash has made organizing immigrant
communities extremely difficult and riskier than usual.
G. W. Bush’s “War on Terrorism” and investment in
“Homeland Security” is helping build up what is being called
the “Security Industrial Complex.” Non-white
immigrants are being terrorized, rounded up, locked down, and
deported by the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization
Services (INS). Anti-immigrant
laws are getting easily passed in the post-9-11 hysteria.
International students at colleges and universities are
being put into a national database that tracks their class
schedules and extra-curricular college activities.
Males 18 and older from different non-European countries
are being required to register with the INS.
In Los Angeles recently, many Middle Eastern and African
immigrants were rounded up when they attempted to comply with
these special registrations.
risk of deportation is not a result of 9-11.
Before 9-11, INS detention centers and deportation were a
reality for immigrant communities.
Any non-citizen who overstays a visa or is convicted of
an “aggravated felony” in the US is subject to deportation.
A racist and anti-immigrant law passed in 1996 called the
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA)
expanded the definition of “aggravated felony” to include
minor offenses like shoplifting and marijuana possession.
state has never had a problem criminalizing immigrants, the
passage of the IIRIRA helped cement the relationship between the
police, the Department of Justice (DOJ), the INS (which is
housed under the DOJ), and big business. The IIRIRA beefed up police presence in immigrant communities
by increasing the number of armed INS agents, especially border
patrol in the Southwest. This
move made the INS the largest armed Federal agency of the US
1996 and 2000, the number of defendants in federal courts facing
immigration offenses increased from 6605 to 15,613. Between 1986 and 2000, the average length of prison sentences
for immigration offenses increased by almost 400%.
In the past, over $600 million was spent on INS detention
INS budget keeps increasing.
State and county jails vie to place INS detainees in
empty prison beds in order to pump Federal dollars into local
government loses money if people are detained too long, making
deportations economically necessary.
Yet deportations are about more than financial
is one way the US socially defines who is part of the nation,
and who, if necessary, is to be sent away. Like prisons, deportation is one important way the US
government decides who, racially, is a “real American” and
who is not.
activists organizing to end Cambodian deportations make the link
between the US’ criminalization of non-whites and INS
detentions and deportations. Although this connection is made, there are still two
challenges facing Southeast Asian activists.
challenge is that before the Cambodian repatriation agreement
was signed, practically every other ethnic community was
experiencing deportations. This is especially the case for Mexicans and Central
Americans who have been particularly targeted by border patrol
and state police. After
9-11, South Asian, Middle Eastern and African immigrants have
experienced increased moments of “crisis” through racial
profiling, special registrations and violence. This raises the question, how do folks get sympathy for
Cambodian deportation from other immigrant groups if they have
been experiencing deportation all along?
How do people strategize around Cambodian deportation in
a way that does not say to other immigrant communities that
their detentions and deportations never mattered?
challenge for Cambodian activists is to figure out how to frame
the deportation of immigrants in a way that does not exploit
racist images of other groups.
For example, despite the obvious connections between INS
systems and the larger Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), there is
a difference between how the imprisonment of Asian immigrants
versus that of other groups, namely Blacks, gets framed.
Generally, Asian immigrants are viewed as “good,”
whereas Blacks are viewed as “bad.”
Progressives depict Asian immigrants as hard workers who
sometimes fall on bad times that make them commit crimes to
(and explicitly), Blacks are viewed as lazy, unwilling to work
hard, and therefore criminal by nature.
The result is that when Asian immigrants get locked up,
they get some sympathy that Blacks (and to a certain extent,
after 9-11—often frame immigrants as victims of injustice or
xenophobia (fear of foreigners) who do not deserve to be in the
prison system. The
process of which immigrants get sympathy is highly racialized,
as noted by how many post-9-11 activists have been relatively
silent on border patrol’s violence towards Mexican and Central
Americans that has no doubt contributed to the fact that along
with Blacks, Brown people make up two thirds of the US prison
implicit message is that some groups “deserve” to be in
prison, and others do not.
Some experienced injustice, and others did not.
Some are worth fighting for, and others are not.
Subsequently, the state violence against certain bodies,
particularly those of Black, Brown and Native, is considered
necessary, whereas that against other groups is not.
case of Cambodians, they tend to get sympathy because they are
refugees who were often pushed by the US government into Black
neighborhoods when they got to the US.
Because they live near Blacks in poor urban
neighborhoods, Cambodians have somewhat been pitied by different
activists and academics. This,
however, is a somewhat strategic sympathy, because it seems to
serve ulterior motives. For
one, Asian American politics tends to fetishize poor Southeast
Asians because they are considered “dark” and “poor.”
That is, Asian American activists often draw attention to
Southeast Asians to challenge the model minority myth and
“prove” to other people that not all Asian Americans are
does not necessarily mean that Asian America as a political
project is necessarily committed to “darker” and
“poorer” Asians, a point that many Southeast Asians have
pointed out. It
just means that when one wants to refute the idea of Asian
American success and homogenization, Asian American activists of
all types quickly pull out the Southeast Asian as a way to
deflect these critiques.
not to suggest that Asian American activists—or anyone for
that matter— do not have a reason to be concerned about poor
Southeast Asians. Anyone
who is structurally mistreated and subject to state violence
should garner sympathy. Yet
many Asian American activists, including Southeast Asians,
generally do not bring up Southeast Asian poverty in a manner
that is sympathetic to all those who are pushed into urban
poverty. In other
words, many Asian American activists point out that Cambodians
are living in similar conditions with many of the Black people
(who, like anyone living in urban poverty, have been
structurally forced into their situation).
This analysis tends to bring a certain aspect of sympathy
for the existence of poor Southeast Asians.
Yet this pity does not necessarily sympathize with Black
people living in the same conditions of urban poverty.
Instead, it is the type of pity that says, “These poor
Asians, how did they end up there?”
In this case, “there” means living near, and
precisely their proximity to Blacks that sometimes make
Cambodians more sympathetic “victims.”
Cambodian poverty and incarceration is
“understandable” and even “expected” because they live
in “urban” (read: Black) areas.
In this way, what is taken as Cambodian “criminality”
is viewed as a “learned” behavior and unwittingly linked to
Black people. This
helps perpetuate the racist image of the Black criminal that has
substantiated the US’ violent containment and killing of Black
these ideas about Cambodian “criminality” tend to ignore
critical questions: What is crime?
How does it get socially defined?
Who defines what a crime is?
Who gets labeled a criminal (even before an arrest)?
Whose bodies and existence are considered criminal, no
matter what one does or does not do?
Who benefits from how crime is defined?
Who gets sympathy when they go to jail?
Who does not?
Southeast Asian activists have some major immediate challenges
facing them in their campaign to end Cambodian deportations.
The most obvious is stopping deportation in a post 9-11
era. But there are two other important immediate challenges.
First, figuring out how to sympathetically frame
Cambodian deportation in a way that does not minimize the
experience of deportation in other immigrant communities.
Second, figuring out how to talk about immigrant
detainees/deportees without reproducing racist stereotypes of
Blacks and other non-white groups who are forced into urban
poverty and who have been incarcerated at alarming rates.
These might not seem crucial issues in the campaign to
end Cambodian deportation. But if they are not considered, there are serious
consequences for non-Cambodians and an overall movement for
Kil Ja Kim is a
writer, educator and activist currently living and working in
Philadelphia. Her intellectual and political interests are
Asian American politics, immigrant politics, and Black-Asian
American relations. Kil Ja is currently working on
working on a research project that examines the role of global racial politics
in shaping the disproportionate presence of Korean immigrant
business owners in Black neighborhoods in the US.
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update 27 December 2011