Yuen: Telling your immigration story is dangerous today

Before she intoned the words, “I am illegal in this country,” Minnesota House Rep. Kaohly Vang Her did not expect her disclosure to blow up the way it predictably did.

Ahead of a legislative vote on whether to revoke health insurance for undocumented immigrants this week, the Hmong American from St. Paul teared up on the House floor on Monday as she recounted how her family fled southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War. She said her father, who processed refugee paperwork while working for the U.S. consulate, claimed an inaccurate family connection to ensure that they could enter the country together and expedite the process.

“I tell you this story because I want you to think about who it is that you’re calling illegal,” she said during the special session. “My family was just smarter in how we illegally came here.”

That admission was picked up by multiple media outlets, assailed by far-right activists and prompted one Republican lawmaker to call for an investigation. The blowback led Her to clarify that her family followed the legal refugee process and certainly has status now — they’ve been U.S. citizens for nearly four decades.

It’s a pickle for some Americans who are within a generation or two of their families’ arrival in this country: Do they share the sometimes-messy details of their origin story in the United States in hopes of humanizing the fraught issue that is unauthorized immigration today?

In the current political climate, Her’s example would suggest the answer is no.

“This is not an uncommon story, but how do you tell that story?” she said in an interview. “I don’t know how to talk about this issue without hurting all of these people. I’ve opened up this door to this thing that is so big and so ugly, to the detriment of my own family.”

When I caught up with Her a couple days after the legislative session ended, she was reticent about the particulars. Immigration attorneys advised her not to talk about the specifics of how her family got here, fearing that her parents, who are in their 70s and in failing health, could be de-naturalized, a rare process in which the government revokes citizenship of a naturalized citizen.

“I think if people heard it, they would understand it,” she said of the circumstances that her family faced when immigrating. “But there are also people who don’t care to understand. Now I’m in this situation where telling the truth actually could hurt me.”

She was 3 when she and her family arrived in the Midwest. On social media, she’s been called “disgusting” and ordered to “go back to Vietnam” (even though her family hails from Laos). What the haters probably don’t know is that the Hmong were our key allies against the Communists during the war, rescuing downed American pilots and providing intelligence about enemy movements. Her said her maternal grandfather served as a colonel in the “secret war” in Laos, so her family would have qualified to come here anyway.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Hmong resettlement in the United States.

Since her comments, people from all over the country have called the family, concerned. Her own mother, who is not on social media, caught wind of her speech and asked her daughter: “Did you tell our story?”

“I said I did, and I’m so sorry,” Her replied.

“I did not think it would take off in this way,” she told me.

A cohort of friends who knew how it would play out was her Republican colleagues in the Legislature. By Her’s retelling, they were alarmed when a conservative social media personality shared a video clip of her speech on X; they feared it would go viral. (It did.) They sent her texts of love and support. Her declined to identify those colleagues, saying they could face their own retribution from more extreme elements in their party for coming to her defense.

One Republican who thanked Her for sharing her story was Rep. Danny Nadeau of Rogers. “Rep. Her is one of the good ones,” said Nadeau, praising her ability to forge meaningful relationships with lawmakers across the aisle.

After Her’s speech, Nadeau walked over and “gave her a big hug.” He’s not surprised that her story has been weaponized. “Politics today is about, ‘How divisive can we be? How much rhetoric can we throw out?’” he said.

Truth is, the U.S. has a long history of unauthorized immigrants. Her’s story reminded me of a local play I saw with my family in 2017, “The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin.” New York-based playwright Jessica Huang, a Chanhassen native, researched the history of “paper sons,” Chinese immigrants who obtained falsified documents to enter the country after the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882. That was the first law to significantly restrict immigration into the United States and ban members from a specific country.

“We conveniently forget our own families’ stories,” she told me. “For most of us, somewhere along the line in the history of our ancestry, there’s a moment where somebody was desperate and did what they had to do to get here,” she said. “That doesn’t mean every family has a story of illegal immigration, but everybody has some ancestor who had to make huge sacrifices.”

Huang reflected on the example being made of Her. “So many Americans have stories like this in their past,” she said. “If this is what happens when we share them, no wonder it’s all cloaked in secrecy.”

Her doesn’t regret sharing her story, but in the end, it didn’t produce the outcome she desired. The Legislature passed the bill to strip health care coverage from adult undocumented immigrants.

“The story was never going to change the votes,” she said. “So should have I told the story?”