By Sang Nam
As Los Angeles is rocked by ongoing anti-immigration protests, one question keeps surfacing:
Why isn’t the Asian community out protesting?
The answer is layered, but clear. We are not in the streets because we carry a different kind of history — and a deeper kind of anger.
I came to the United States 32 years ago on an F-1 student visa.
To get that visa, I had to provide months’ worth of documentation, including a financial guarantee from a relative in Korea.
Every step was scrutinized, every form counted.
That was normal then — and we accepted it.
We worked hard, paid taxes, waited years for green cards, and even longer to reunite with family members through legal sponsorship.
Today, however, we see undocumented immigrants, mostly from Latin America, take to the streets and demand not only protection but preferential treatment — under the banner of “working families” and “children’s rights.”
And I ask:
Are we not also working families? Have we not raised children under the same sky, obeying the laws, paying the price of time and patience?
Let’s talk about fairness.
In Koreatown, illegal street vendors have overtaken public sidewalks in front of legally rented businesses.
Despite complaints to city officials and LAPD, nothing happens.
Why? Because the City Council is now heavily dominated by Latino representation, and street vendors — legal or not — are their political base.
Instead of enforcing the law, the city responded by issuing discounted licenses to the same illegal vendors, effectively legalizing their takeover.
This isn’t about race. It’s about democratic dysfunction.
When a majority group begins to rewrite the rules solely in favor of itself, we’re no longer in a democracy. We’re in a soft dictatorship of numbers.
And that’s why many Korean Americans — often quietly — find themselves supporting Donald Trump.
Not because they endorse everything he says or does, but because his emphasis on law, order, and fairness resonates with our lived experience.
We followed the rules. We sacrificed. We built businesses.
We didn’t scream in the streets or burn flags.
But now we’re told that our silence makes us invisible — or worse, irrelevant.
We are neither.
We are here, still watching, still waiting, still believing in fairness — even when it doesn’t believe in us.
The Korean community may not be shouting in the streets.
But don’t mistake our silence for consent. Beneath it lies a fierce, patient kind of justice.
