Turning Anti-Asian Hate into Law

My dad, an immigrant from Iran, bought our childhood home before he was a citizen of the United States. My parents still own this home where their four kids grew up, and where their grandkids now splash in the pool and ride their bikes around the driveway. When I read the text of SB 147, a xenophobic bill seeking to prohibit the right to own property based on national origin, I immediately thought of that house and everything it took to get there. 

The bill, authored by state Senator Lois Kolkhorst (R-District 18), and co-authored by state Senators Juan Hinojosa (D-District 20), Mayes Middleton (R-District 11), and Drew Springer (R-District 30) targets individuals who are citizens of China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Kolkhurst offered revisions to the Senate Committee on State Affairs but they were weak attempts to ameliorate the explicit discrimination against citizens of these countries, conflating their birthplace with their political allegiance and ties. More than 100 people, including myself, coalesced in the committee’s Senate chambers to give testimony against SB 147 and the similar SB 711 on March 2. A little over a month later, on April 13, SB 147 was voted out of the Senate committee on State Affairs with an 8-2 vote, where it now sits on the intent calendar.

According to Mohsen Mostafavi Mobasher’s Iranians in Texas, “Texas became the fourth-largest settlement area” for Iranians that fled during the revolution and relocated to the United States. My dad was one of them. 

He emigrated from Iran in his 20s, after the CIA overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and before the Islamic Revolution took hold of the country. He boarded a KLM flight and landed in New Orleans on January 11, 1976, with a student visa to attend Louisiana State University, $400, and a small rug his mother wove. Seeds from his homeland. I grew up on stories of how he sold two pairs of elaborately patched Lee jeans in a boutique to help pay for his flight, and how he worked on his English by guiding American tourists. 

Within a year or two of arriving, he made his first purchase of property, a trailer home in Lafayette, Louisiana. He did not have enough cash to purchase it outright, so the owner, frustrated his children did not want to inherit the trailer, offered to take my dad to the bank and cosign for the credit. The seller was true to his word, and my dad made a $200 down payment and purchased the trailer home, which he financed with a mortgage. 

My dad graduated and began to work as a mechanical engineer, continuing to live in the United States under a work visa. He used owner financing to purchase 3 acres of land in Jackson, Mississippi. About a year after he married my mom, a blonde Midwesterner, and four months after I was born, he purchased their first home in Jackson. Near my first birthday my parents relocated our family to the suburbs of Houston. Shortly after arriving, my dad, still working on getting his green card, purchased a home in Friendswood. 

My dad’s cousins, a handful of whom had also emigrated from Iran to Louisiana, would come over from Lafayette on the weekends. My dad would grill pounds of kebab koobideh on our tiny Weber, which we’d eat right off the grill. There was a giant sunroom in the back of our house. During the day it was too hot, but at night my dad and his cousins set up a speaker with a microphone, blasting popular Persian music, taking turns singing along and accompanying the recordings with a tombak. Even now, my dad’s best friend will smile recalling how my 2-year-old brother perfectly imitated Gole Sangam, My Stone Flower, in Hayedeh’s soulful and emotive voice.

On Sundays throughout my childhood we would drive around and look at homes. My dad was able to make various real estate investments over the years. By the time I was 6, my dad purchased a bigger home on the other side of Friendswood that was in foreclosure. He reimagined the bones of the abandoned structure into our family home. While under construction, before concrete for the driveway was poured, my brother and I would slosh around in the clay-filled dirt of Gulf Coast Texas. Our house did not look like the homes around us. The walls were stucco with green Moroccan roof tiles in lieu of traditional brown shingles. Instead of wall-to-wall carpet, my dad insisted the floors were tiled. When we moved in, my dad put hand-knotted Persian rugs in every room and hung some on the walls. Over the fireplace in the center of the house is a pastoral pictorial rug, woven with such intricate detail it looks like a painting. We always take off our shoes, and we ask our guests to do the same. 

In the spring of 1992 my dad became a U.S. citizen, and we celebrated with a party that included hot dogs and apple pie. A year later he had the opportunity to buy the company he worked at for the past 10 years. Ninety percent of the equity he leveraged for the purchase came from his previous real estate investments. This possibility of realizing the American dream of upward mobility was directly predicated on his ability to make a series of these investments, from that first purchase of a trailer home. 

At the Legislature, Nabila Mansoor, executive director of Rise AAPI sits two seats away from me in our group of five called up for testimony. I resonate with her words, “…but the ability to actually expand a business, buy business property, all of those things that we promise refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants that come to this state are barred still under this bill. Slightly less discrimination is still discrimination.”

Except for the modest acquiescence to “residence homestead property” (5.252), SB 147 still has a “prohibition on purchase of or acquisition of title to real property” to “an individual that is a citizen of China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia.” A punishing bill with more coded discrimination was referred to State Affairs on the House side. HB 2788 is a broad bill that appears to offer more potential breadth of discrimination by leaving an individual’s compliance, or lack thereof, to the determination of “United States intelligence or law enforcement.” A disarming prospect considering the extensive profiling and targeting of Muslim-American communities by the FBI and local law enforcement.

Testimony after testimony brought up the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Japanese-Americans came to testify and remind the committee of the atrocities of Japanese internment camps. 

As Gloria Shinkawa, member of Japanese American Citizens League, testified, “When I first heard about Senate Bill 147, I had … nightmares because of World War II.  … I fear the same for this bill, that even though they say that it is under national security, it was under national security that the 120,000 Japanese-Americans were moved and put into camps. We even have one here in Texas to remember, and that was Crystal City.” She shared about how her father, in order to avoid internment, served for 6 years in the U.S. Army, only to return and be unable to purchase a home. 

Sitting to the left of me was Wei Li, a father and professor, who shared his 17-year journey to eligibility for U.S. citizenship. His testimony made me both laugh and tear up, “But deep down I know I’m already a Texan. I can cook perfect, moist brisket. I even understand how to use ‘Bless your heart’ properly. But SB 147 and SB 711 are a slap on my face. It scoffs at me, ‘Sorry, you’re not Texan.’” 

As his voice cracked at that moment, I struggled to keep my composure. SB 147 codifies that having a particular heritage negates your ability to be Texan.

To quote the Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, “If signed into law, this bill would make anti-Asian hate state policy.”

Although I am shielded by my ambiguous olive skin, I am aware of all of the myriad consequences, unintended or otherwise, that would plague an immigrant from these countries regardless. The spirit of a law is strong. With SB 147 and SB 711, so is the letter of the law. 

Almost two decades ago, with his children grown, my dad purchased acres of land in Bastrop for his retirement. He transformed the untouched landscape into a microcosm of his memory of his homeland. My dad orchestrated the building of steps leading up from the base near the Colorado River to a lookout above, similar to the Baba Koohi Tomb, and an ornate garden with a central water feature like the famous Narenjestan Garden. 

“It reminds me of Shiraz,” my dad said. 

I ask why, and he tells me it is because of the topography of the land and the way when he first drove in from the darkness of I-71 into the bright lights of the valley, it reminded him of where he was raised.

The connection feels thin, but I also relate to finding meaning in slim, almost transparent, layers.

My oldest daughter builds out elaborate homes from recycled materials and legos, envisioning perfect details. I wonder if my dad was doing the same. Building out a home. Is it something you can create, or recreate? It is the promise immigrants are given. 

SB 147 and SB 711 are set to dismantle that promise.