I wasn’t always a an activist in the South Asian community. I got my grounding in environmental organizing and it took the events around September 11th, 2001 to really catapult me into trying to figure out how to create that political voice for this community. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, since the capture/death of Osama Bin Laden on Sunday night.

One of the first, if not the first, forms of advocacy I partook in for the South Asian community was around “Special Registration” otherwise known as National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS). I was living Washington D.C. at the time, and we would go around to Pakistani and Indian restaurants and grocery stores and drop off 3-fold flyers at the front counter informing the community of the new and xenophobic law. It wasn’t much, but at the time it was so important that we let the South Asian community know what their changed rights were in light of the then newly created Department of Homeland Security.

Special Registration required boys and men, ages 16 to 45 from a list of 25 countries with large Muslim populations to register at immigration offices or ports of entry. As a result, 84,000 males were fingerprinted, photographed, and questioned in long interviews based on their countries of origin, more than 13,000 were put into deportation proceedings, and 2,800 were detained. [san]

There were so many stories I heard of where South Asian boys and men in the community had to flee and some scary stories where people simply disappeared. Only later were they found to have been detained.

The impact was felt especially by working-class South Asian, Arab, Sikh and Muslim communities in New York City; the economic impact of losing fathers, sons, and husbands meant that many families suddenly faced homelessness. The Muslim community in Coney Island is said to have lost a full third of its population almost overnight. In its later phases, NSEERS focused on U.S. ports of entry, with the same haphazard scrutiny and interrogations. [illume]

On April 28th 2011, after nine years of “Special Registration”, the government has quietly suspended the law.While the requirements to register based on a particular religion or nationality have now been removed, NSEERS as a regulation will remain in place. [san]

I wonder what the motivation is to suspend the law without removing it. It was a targeted and horribly xenophobic law, echoing elements of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the interning of Japanese Americans. By keeping the laws in the books it gives the government permission to go back to it as it sees fit. Selective legislating. Another theory from Monami Maulik of Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM):

So why drop NSEERS now? Maulik thinks it’s a political calculation by a tarnished DHS, “in a moment where they’ve really gotten worse in two years under the Obama administration in terms of general racial profiling.” As Seth Freed Wessler reported here last week, despite the federal government’s disavowing of SB 1070, the deportation pipeline still begins in Washington. It could also be a gesture of goodwill towards the Middle East’s new post-revolutionary governments. Or maybe it’s just the extra paperwork created by the program’s overlap with more-automated, less-racist US-VISIT. [illume]

A bittersweet victory. I won’t feel completely comfortable with this until it is taken out of the books completely.