Saturday, December 14, 2019

Weekend Reading: Undocumented Asians, Filipino cuisine & fighting for Chinatown



Some 350,000 travelers arrive by air in the United States each day. From Asia, South America and Africa, they come mostly with visas allowing them to tour, study, do business or attend a conference for an authorized period of time. 

But when they stay beyond when their visas expire, some of them fall into the same illegal status often associated with migrants showing up at the border.

Miriam Jordan of the New York Times writes about the "Overlooked Undocumented immigrants from India and China." Nearly half of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now in the country did not trek through the desert or wade across the Rio Grande to enter the country; they flew in with a visa, passed inspection at the airport — and stayed.

Of the roughly 3.5 million undocumented immigrants who entered the country between 2010 and 2017, 65 percent arrived with full permission stamped into their passports, according to new figures compiled by the Center for Migration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank. During that period, more overstayers arrived from India than from any other country.





According to data referenced by the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development (CAPACD), 73 percent of poor Asian American and Pacific Islanders live in the most expensive housing markets, and low-income members face a high risk of economic displacement.

NBC has put out an article about the plight of ethnic enclaves (RE Chinatown, Little Manila, Japantown, Spanish Harlem, etc) fighting higher rents because of the richer tenants moving into their neighborhood.

Asian Americans living in ethnic enclaves like Boston's Chinatown, which has seen a dwindling Asian population as the cost of living has risen, being priced out of the neighborhood would present challenges in their daily lives.



Ligaya Menshan wrote about Doreen Fernandez's impact on today's young Filipino American chefs.


Meet Ligaya Mishan, the New York Times writer telling the world about Filipino food.


Her face may be hidden, but her words resonate as she dines her way through New York City’s culturally diverse food scene for a taste of the city’s many unheralded cuisines, including Filipino.

In this interview by Nana Ozaeta in ANCX, Filipina American Mishan talks about growing up in Hawaii eating silog, writing about the unsung restaurants, and the first time she encountered crispy pata in New York
As a longtime reader of the food section of The New York Times, the author has regularly come across the byline of a certain Ligaya Mishan in the section’s Hungry City column which chronicles “New York’s great unsung restaurants” as part of the city’s culturally diverse food scene. She also writes about broader themes on food and culture for T Magazine.

Mishan was able to write about pioneer chef Doreen Fernandez  and her impact on current Filipino American chefs like Angela Dimayuga, whose Filipino recipes were recently published by the NYTimes.


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