Being a Loser in the Free Market Open Door System Made Me Detest Anti-Immigrant Populism

 I make no secret that I detest Donald Trump. I was instantly turned off when he started going on about Mexicans coming across the border being “rapist” and how there was a need to build a wall to prevent horrible people from Mexico coming across to steal jobs from innocent Americans (read – the White variety), I wanted to vomit because, well that’s not true. I hated it when I saw people lap it up and what was particularly distressing was when you had people of colour in Singapore think of this as “speaking the truth,” (read if only we Singapore Chinese had a champion like Trump). 

I’m a “loser” of the open market system in as much as I had to take a blue-collar job in my late thirties so that I could pay my bill. My colleagues were predominantly Indian and Pilipino and I developed a good deal of affection for them. 

Maybe it’s just me but I can’t understand this belief that your job is being stolen. Whenever I’d hear “my people” complain about dark skinned Asians stealing our jobs and how Trump was really a great guy for proposing what he did with regards to the Mexicans, I’d look at the Kitchen Thambis and Pinoy waiters and ask myself planet these people were living in. The Kitchen Thambis and Pinoy waiters were the guys who had my back and yet the so called “concerned citizens” were supporting the idea that these guys were somehow my enemy.” 

Birthday with the Kitchen Thambis and Bruno’s Bistrot on Telok Kurau Road.

The same transpired when in my insolvency work. I was involved in a liquidation of a construction company. We had to sack or transfer over 30 workers who had not been paid. The receivables came in but somehow the bureaucracy was all about being fair to all creditors including financial institutions and so on (and to be fair to “my people,” the contact point in the financial institution we were dealing with told me privately that whenever a company went into liquidation, he’d always advise his side to write it off – his word were “You’ll pay me 10 cents on the dollar at most. It’s money that can’t interest me – get it to the people who need it the most). Somehow, paying the workers become less and less of a priority.

In that time, I broke the “rules” of working for an insolvency practitioner and extended money I didn’t exactly have to some of the workers. I remember a colleague telling me that I was breaking the “rules” as if this was the worst thing I could do. I was, as they say, “unprofessional.” It was even explained to me that “Indian and Bangladeshi” workers cannot be trusted.

I didn’t know how to explain to people who knew what I was doing that this was the right thing to do. Firstly, I wasn’t giving a handout but an advance on what they had claimed in their Proof of Debt form. Secondly, I also reasoned that although it was money that I couldn’t afford to toss about, it was money that I could make back by sitting in an airconditioned office for a few hours a day while these guys had to slog it out in the sun for the better part of a day so that they could provide “cheap” infrastructure to people like me and profits to slave traders like some of the creditors in this case.

Sure, I was open to accusations of being “unprofessional” and acting against the rules. How do you explain to people that if it’s a choice of being “human” or “professional,” its always better to be human?

I’m glad to say that when we did get round to distributing the dividends, I got paid most of my money and got to see the gratitude on the faces of these guys. One of them even felt that I was important enough to be the first guy outside his family to know his wife was pregnant with twins. He took me out for dinner the day he flew back to India.

Today, if you ask me about the moments, I feel most successful, I will inevitably tell you its when one of these guys remembers me. It makes my day when they send greeting cards or as one of them recently did, called me from India just to wish me well.

So, I detest anti-immigrant populist because from what I’ve experienced, they’re going after the people who I know to be for the most part, hard working and decent. Its like this, when a group of skin heads walk around town chanting “Jews will not replace us,” they make the case for why they need t be replaced. When someone like Sebastian Gorka gets on TV and talks about how the Proud Boys were started as a “Joke,” I’m tempted to think that Mr. Gorka should be placed at the wrong end of the Proud Boys activities and let’s see how funny he thinks it is.

Sure, I know these communities have their bad eggs but for the most part they are comprised of hard-working people trying to make a living. They are stealing jobs from the natives by doing the jobs that the natives won’t do.  Sure, I’m genuinely against the use of violence, however, when it comes to the nut jobs who chant “Jews (or any other ethnic group) will not replace us and think its OK to intimidate, I’m all for using whatever means necessary to eliminate the problem.

 

The Value of a Token

During Singapore’s recently concluded General Election, I received a few notes from friends commenting about the lack of diversity amongst the ruling party’s candidates. While the ruling party did field candidates with Muslim sounding names, there were no noticeable Indian faces. To compound matters, the Deputy Prime Minister (or Prime Minister in-waiting) had said that the public was “not ready for a non-Chinese Prime Minister.” These words were repeated endlessly thus portraying the ruling party as a bastion of racial privilege.

Having lived as an ethnic minority in the UK for my formative years, I get the criticism of the ruling party’s lack of diversity in its candidates. When you are part of a minority, there’s something strangely appealing about being with and speaking with your own kind. In nearly a decade of living in the UK, London’s Chinatown always felt like a comfort zone. Although English is to all intents and purposes “my language” and my friends from that era of my life were all white Anglo-Saxons, there was something comforting about being with people who looked like me and hearing and communicating in something other than English.

However, as I’ve grown older and moved around more, I’ve come to question the value of having a “token” minority around. Do people of a different colour with a seat in a national legislature or on the board of directors make a country’s minorities more comfortable or business more appealing to different customers? If I take myself as an example, I was told that by my Western friends that I should brush up on my Chinese and become a bridge between East and West. However, if I look at myself objectively, I have to ask what type of bridge would I be. The only thing I have in common with most Chinese is the colour of my skin. While I can communicate in verbal Mandarin and Cantonese, I do so badly and I am Chinese illiterate (I communicate with Chinese via Google translate).

Instead of being a “bridge” between East and West, my real value was the fact that I was once an ethnic minority. The only time I get obvious delight from people is a professional setting is when I meet English lawyers and speak to them in a recognizable accent and understand that London is not the only part of the UK. Instead of being the bridge between the Occident and Orient, I gel most easily with people who don’t look like me – being able to discuss the value of Wasim Akram as a fast bowler or Sachin Tendulkar’s batting has proved to be invaluable from a commercial relationship building exercise.

If I look at my own experiences as an example, I have to question the value of tokens. What does the token this or that in the cabinet or on the board of directors actually done for their community that they are supposed to come from? Sure, there is an extreme of people feeling most comfortable with their own kind. Hence you have Chinese hiring Chinese, Indians hiring Indians and as an Australian friend pointed out, short people preferring to hire short people. I am a bald man who got hired by another bald man.

However, with tokens, the opposite is true. Chances are, they become so grateful to be part of what they perceive to be a “selective” group that once in the group, they do their best to ensure their own kind don’t get in. One merely has to observe how immigration officers of South Asian decent treat South Asians trying to enter the UK. It is, as one Englishman put it – a case of “drawing up the drawbridge.”

The most famous example of how a “token” ethnic minority has worked against her own community can be found in the form of Priti Patel, the British Foreign Secretary. The nicest thing about Ms. Patel is that she is pretty to look at.

Pretty but Not by Policy.

However, if you look at her actions, you will notice that they are anything but pretty. Ms. Patel, who is the daughter of Gujurati migrants, who came to Uganda after they were thrown out of Uganda (the people who made the Ugandan economy tick and would later reward Britain for generosity by doing for the British economy what they had done in Uganda), has famously been part of the “hard line” Brexit faction of the Conservative Party and has supported the scrapping of various human rights and environmental protection policies. Ms. Patel’s career in both the private and public sector have involved speaking up for the unsavory. She has helped her husband, a marketing consultant to the tax payers kitty and as Home Secretary, she has notoriously come up with the most hardline immigration policy the UK has ever implemented. By her own admission, her own parents would have never have been allowed to enter the UK.  A concurrence with my views on Ms. Patel can be found at:

https://www.quora.com/Is-Priti-Patel-the-most-attractive-UK-MP 

I am admittedly racist in favour of South Asians trying to enter the UK. In the years that I lived in the UK, these were the most hard-working group who created businesses and made a better life for themselves. The guys begging me for small change were never people of colour, they either opened corner shops or hustled to get you into a mini-cab. It was inevitably the native-born whites who hustled you for small change and got uppity when you refuse to give over the pennies that had been worked for. When someone like Ms. Patel comes with a hardline immigration policy and bleats on about “taking control of OUR borders,” I read it as “Enhancing racial superiority of the lay abouts who would happily murder people who look like me.” I think of a talk given by the British High Commissioner at a law firm that I’ve worked with. For the better part of the talk, she went on about how Brexit was great because we were “taking control of OUR borders.” Then, a White Anglo-Saxon asked her about the “Weaponising of Racism” and described how his wife, who is “non-white” was frightened about returning to the UK. Her Excellency didn’t seem to think that policies set by Ms. Patel were in anyway damaging to this man’s family.

In fairness to Ms. Patel, she isn’t the only ethnic minority who has made a career screwing her own kind. There’s Nikki Haley (Real Name - Nimrata Nikki Randhawa), former US Ambassador to the UN, who is the daughter of Sikh Immigrants (read – people who set up businesses and go to work). While Ms. Haley has been significantly more calculated in her policies than Ms. Patel, she’s also supported hard line policies on immigration, particularly those of the Trump Administration (read – tough fighters who run away when it comes to fighting people who can fight back)

Closer to home, there’s the example of Mr. Samy Velu, who was chairman of the Malaysian Indian Congress for 30-over years. Mr. Velu was very good at staying in public office. He was very good at ensuring that he and his cronies got very rich of public contracts (he was famous for collecting tolls). He was rather less good at doing anything for Malaysia’s Tamil population, who continue to be a kicked upon minority.

In Singapore, we have token ethnic minority ministers who have become very prominent for being, well good spokespeople for the establishment. I think of our often law and home affairs (apparently there’s no conflict of interest between making and enforcing laws), Mr. K. Shanmugaratnam, who accused to rappers from an ethnic minority of stirring racial tensions because they had the audacity to call out a tasteless add which involved someone from the ethnic majority painting his face brown.  It takes an ethnic minority to tell ethnic minorities to stay in their place – you are not allowed to get upset when the majority makes offensive remarks about you.

This isn’t just at the minister level. It’s always visible at immigration. Think of the South Asian immigration officers at any British port waiting to humiliate potential migrants from South Asia. I think of the time when I had a US Green card and wanted to snap it in half and fling it at the immigration officer. It was no coincidence that the officer in question was …..Chinese. In all my years of traveling to the US, I’ve never had a problem with anyone else.

It’s not just about race. It also applies to sex. For all of Donald Trump’s obvious sexism and bragging about sexual assault (grab them by the pussy), he was actually supported by an alarming number of women, who didn’t want another woman in power. Think about this, men will help women, particularly attractive ones. Put it crudely, we’ll do anything to have a woman consider us worthy as bed partners. The worst enemy of woman on the rise (particularly an attractive one), is another woman, who will inevitably view her as competition.

I believe in diversity. I think of places like London or New York, which stand out for economic vibrance, innovation and artistic creativity. Places like these tend to be diverse in more than one way. However, you can use tokenism to create diversity. You have to grow it from the bottom up. The token black, white, Asian, Latino, woman, homosexual etc, tends to do the opposite of create diversity. They’re there to ensure nobody takes their place as the only this or that in that position. Rather than worrying about more brown faces during an election, I’d prefer to hear more Yellow faces talking about giving Brown faces a fairer deal. Rather than a token woman on the board, how about more men promoting women. Tokens exist to enforce the status quo.

I remember an Indian security guard at my Dad’s condo many years ago. He actually took pride in explaining why it was correct that the company he worked for had a policy of not hiring Indians. If that doesn’t say it all, what does?