December 2020-Post-election Episode: the campaigns, the voters, and the future of immigration detention under Biden

Published: Dec. 17, 2020, 7:52 a.m.

In this post-election special (thank god it's over), we look at how the election has affected Asian American communities, and also how immigration issues in particular have played out for the incoming Biden administration.

We check in with  Alvina Wong, Campaign & Organizing Director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, and Shaw San Liu, executive director of the Chinese Progressive Association, about how the election played out for AAPI voters in California, including the fight around Proposition 15, a ballot measure that would have raised taxes on high-priced commercial properties.

We also talk to Jerry Vattamala, Democracy Program Director with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, about the group’s extensive exit polling data on Asian Americans in New York, Florida, Georgia and ten other states plus Washington, DC. Not surprisingly, Biden won a significant majority of the overall Asian American vote, but there were pockets of Trump support, as well as some ethnic variations in voters’ choices.  

Finally, we examine one of the critical issues Biden will have to deal with once he enters office: addressing the longstanding inequities in the detention system and undoing the disastrous policies that Trump has put in place over the last four years at the southern border. Yet many of the human rights violations that are occurring now with immigrant detention and deportation were prevalent under the Obama administration as well--that is, they happened when Biden was vice president. We talk to Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network, about how much activists can expect from a Biden administration when it comes to addressing the mass incarceration and deportation of immigrants.

Image: Yin Zhao

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