Burma, Immigrants and Tent Cities

When my friend Htin added, "We will camp out at city hall if we need to, we have suffered far worse than that!" I was a little shocked. We'd hung out before and briefly chatted about life as immigrants in the US. As an organizer with the Campaign for Renters Rights, a direct action housing group I Htin got my ear.

Htin is from Burma/Myanmar. He has been here for over a decade. Like myself, he is not fully employed. He volunteers as a translator for local Karen people, a small ethnic group from Burma. The Karens are a nationally oppressed minority in Burma of about 3 million people. There are 200 ethnic Karens who in recent years have arrived in the San Francisco in Bay area and Htin thinks there is not a single person among them that speaks English. When they are at the hospital or social services it requires three persons to translate. First the Karen immigrant say what they need, then another person translates to Burmese, then Htin translates from Burmese to English.

Htin explains the high level of expectations that people had when they came to the US. They thought that they would get help to assimilate, possibly land and housing. They get some help, but after 8 months all public assistance is withdrawn and they are on their own. Everyone of these immigrants spent several years in harsh Thai refugee camps, following years of violence in their homeland, where a brutal dictatorship has been fighting the Karen independence movement for decades.

"The hardest thing was the American dream. They thought all their suffering would be over when they got here. That they could work hard and do well. Now they are at the bottom of a huge mountain of unemployment and many cannot pay their rent anymore.

"But if they are going to get thrown out of their homes, I advised them: we must go down to the city hall, with tents and let the people know how we are being treated. We are used to living in tents. We will do what we need to do."