Perpetual Foreigners: The Asian American Fight for Civil Rights

Date: Friday, September 13, 2024

Time: 11:30 AM- 12:45 PM (ET)

Furman Hall 212 and on Zoom

About the event:

The U.S.-Asia Law Institute kicked off its 2024-2025 programs by taking a close look at a problem right here at home: racial profiling of Asian Americans, including at universities. During the Trump administration, the Department of Justice created the China Initiative, a program presented as safeguarding universities and businesses from economic espionage. In practice, it raised widespread concerns of racial profiling of Chinese American and immigrant academics and researchers, many of whom were accused of failing to disclose routine academic activities – but not of espionage or national security breaches. Although the program ended in 2022, there are ongoing efforts to revive it. The Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF), a new civil rights advocacy organization created in response to the China Initiative, reports that Asian American and Asian researchers and scholars continue to face bias and heightened scrutiny in their working and living environments. AASF Executive Director Gisela Perez Kusakawa discussed the current challenges faced by Asian American and Asian researchers, scholars, and students, the chilling effect this has, and the need for legal scholars to help develop innovative solutions to the tensions between national security and American values.

In addition, Temple University physics Professor Xiaoxing Xi shared his experience of being arrested by the FBI in 2015 on unfounded charges of providing China with sensitive technology. The FBI dropped all charges a few months later.

About the speakers:

Gisela Perez Kusakawa has been executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum since 2022. Before that, she was the founding director and supervising attorney for the Anti-Profiling, Civil Rights, & National Security Program at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, one of the largest and leading national Asian American civil rights organization in the country. She has worked with asylum seekers and detained immigrants, and is an expert on policy and advocacy on anti-profiling, national security and civil rights. She spearheaded a successful coalition effort to end the China Initiative, a program created in the US Justice Department during the Trump administration that aimed to safeguard universities and businesses from espionage but resulted in racial profiling of ethnic Chinese researchers. Ms. Kusakawa has served on the boards of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association Education Fund, the Conference on Asian Pacific American Leadership, and the National Filipino American Lawyers Association. She is admitted to practice law at the District of Columbia and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and received her J.D. from The George Washington University Law School.

Xiaoxing Xi is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Physics at Temple University. Prior to joining Temple in 2009, he was a professor of Physics and Materials Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. He received his PhD degree in physics from Peking University and the Institute of Physics, at the Chinese Academy of Science, in 1987. After several years of research at the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center in Germany, Bell Communication Research/Rutgers University, and University of Maryland, he joined the physics faculty at Penn State in 1995.

Click here to read a recent interview with Dr. Xi published in the MIT Science Policy Review, “Dr. Xiaoxing Xi on false science espionage accusations, .advocacy, and Oppenheimer.”

About the discussant:

Jessica Bissett is a senior director of the Government Engagement Project of the National Committee on US-China Relations. She works on the Committee’s congressional engagement and manages its subnational initiatives. She previously ran many of the Committee’s Next Generation Leadership programs, including its Schwarzman Scholars Partnership, Young China Professionals program, and Diplomat Orientation Program. Ms. Bissett received her master’s in global affairs from New York University (2011). Prior to beginning graduate studies, she attended Middlebury College’s Chinese Language School as a recipient of the Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace. She studied Chinese language and history as a part of her double major in international relations and East Asian studies at Bucknell University. She graduated summa cum laude and received the Bucknell Prize for Women and the Bucknell Prize in East Asian Studies (2005).