Naming immigration center after Inouye would be fitting

Next Saturday at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, there will be a special forum to discuss the life of our U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye.

A Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center notice tells how Inouye went from being classified an enemy alien at the outbreak of World War II, to becoming "the most powerful Asian American politician in American history.

"His journey from ‘enemy alien’ to war hero to president pro tempore, his advocacy for civil rights, the U.S. military, Native Hawaiians, American Indians, the people of Hawaii and others, and his work in the Senate all form a legacy that will remain alive for generations," read the forum notice.

For many in Hawaii, knowing Dan Inouye was one of the benefits of living here. We all know brave and admirable people, but how many can say they met a true American hero?

If you met Inouye, you can answer "Yes."

This fact has not escaped the state Legislature, which is running its own Inouye remembrance factory.

There are already 16 separate pieces of legislation supporting different ways to remember our late senior senator.

There is a request that the feds rename Kauai’s Kilauea Point lighthouse after Inouye.

On a local level, legislators ask that Mokulele Highway on Maui, Saddle Road on Hawaii island, the Honolulu International Airport and the East-West Center, be renamed for Inouye.

Also, they advise that the next completed public high school be named the "Daniel Ken Inouye High School" and that Inouye’s birthday should be declared a "Daniel Inouye honorary day."

In a Republican proposal, dripping with irony, there is a call for a "Hawaii federal spending abatement task force to study changes in federal appropriations and their economic impacts in the state" since Inouye’s death.

The Smithsonian forum suggests, and I agree, that "Inouye’s life and place in American history is an opportunity to understand the arc of the Asian American experience over the past 100 years."

It would be presumptuous to say Hawaii is the center of the Asian-American experience or that Inouye is the only guidepost to understanding, but we could accomplish much with a specific place dedicated to Inouye and remembering our locus between Asia and America.

That spot is the old federal immigration building on Ala Moana Boulevard. Now, it is a small part of the federal government’s expanding Department of Homeland Security complex occupying several buildings downtown and by the airport. It is on ceded land that, if declared "surplus" by the federal government, would go back to the state.

The immigration building is the historic ground zero for immigration to Hawaii. If your parents, grandparents or great-grandparents came from Asia to Hawaii, they walked through that immigration building, or before 1934, the buildings that stood there before it was built.

It is the Ellis Island of Hawaii; this where the immigrant experience started.

The building, designed by renowned Hawaii architect, C.W. Dickey, is on the National Register of Historic Places, both for the outstanding architecture and being the place that greeted at least 350,000 immigrants to Hawaii.

Hawaii’s immigration experience was not always the bootstrap idealism portrayed by European immigrants coming to the mainland.

Instead of the Statue of Liberty and the exhortation "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," immigrants to Hawaii were contract laborers.

They faced racism and a form of bondage that allowed the 1904 Pacific Commercial Advertiser to discuss the psychology of the "plantation coolie."

"Yield to his demands and he thinks he is the master and makes new demands; use the strong hand and he recognizes the power to which, from immemorial times, he has abjectly bowed," the newspaper advised.

Dan Inouye gave thousands a reason to hold their heads high. A center dedicated to exploring that "arc of the Asian American experience" would be a remembrance worthy of Inouye’s name.

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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.