The Bias Machine

One thing I never really think about in the ESOL classes where I volunteer is politics. Of course, last year when I learned that Project Learn changed all of its classes to a schedule of six weeks on--two weeks off, due to budget constraints, I knew it was a political decision. But generally, the refugees I work with do not have the vocabulary to discuss politics, and that is more than fine by me. The time in these classrooms is an oasis for me, a tightly-focused escape from all the irritating realities of everyday life, a bubble of time and space dedicated only to vocabulary and syntax.

Last Tuesday, that bubble was burst by the City of Akron.

Have you heard about the sales tax increase the city wants to put on this November’s ballot?  

Have you heard about the new sports arena The University of Akron and the city want to build downtown?

Have you heard about how the tax increase is linked to paying for both the new arena and safety services, like police and firemen?

Have you heard about the surveys the city is conducting at community meetings around town to “raise awareness” of the city’s need for increased safety services, as well as money to pay for them?

Well, the “survey” came to ASIA, Inc. on Tuesday. The official pitch is that the city wants to gather information about “the city’s values” and how to best serve those “values.” It’s hardly a secret that the real goal of this “survey” is to build public support for the tax increase and the arena by making the citizenry feel they are not safe enough, that we need more police and EMS workers and firemen on the city payroll. Oh, and that somehow the new arena is linked to those services, and somehow its construction downtown will make us all safer.

Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it to you.

The refugees in my Tuesday/Thursday ESOL class have all been in the US for less than a year, many for only a couple of months. The majority of them have extremely limited English skills and can barely put together full sentences. A few have jobs in factories but still have difficulty fully understanding safety signage and basic instructional verbiage.

On top of that, these refugees have all spent more than a decade in refugee camps in Thailand or Nepal, where food rations and clean water are limited, sanitation may be entirely missing, and education is basic and sparse. Before the camp, almost all of these people were farmers. And they lived in a fairly lawless state, where soldiers and politicians routinely lie and cheat and steal, where laws are ephemeral and malleable for the elite, where human rights and civil rights are not even close to universal.

These are the people the city wants to hear from. Now, I agree that refugees should have a voice, that they need representation and assistance and full rights under the law.

But how are they supposed to compare the amount of taxes US citizens pay to how much those in the other top 30 developed countries pay? And how can they compare the amount of state and federal funding the city gets now compared to what it received in 1981? And how can they rate whether crime has increased or decreased in Akron in the past 30 years?

Even with an interpreter, which ASIA provided, I’m sure they had a difficult time understanding how to answer these questions or what these questions had to do with them.

Or even how to answer them! We were all given little remote control devices, about the size of a small cell phone, in plastic cases attached to bright orange lanyards. The questions were displayed on two separate PowerPoint screens, one in English, one in Nepali. All the questions were multiple choice. The remote devices were confusing, even to me! Each little button had letters and numbers on it, and there were three or four buttons that seemed to do nothing at all. Many of our students don’t have cell phones of their own and aren’t accustomed to using remote-control devices for TVs or other appliances. Many in the lower-level group have never used a computer.

Of course the City of Akron wants these new arrivals answering these question, though, because their answers will inevitably skew the overall results in the city’s favor.

Are you satisfied with the level of service you receive from the city? Do you think we need more policemen? More firemen? More EMS workers? Do you think it is easier or harder to find a job now than it was in the last 2 years? Was the revitalization of downtown worthwhile?

I’m pretty sure none of our students have ever even been downtown. But what are they going to say? Are they going to criticize the government of the country that took them in and gave them refuge? After a lifetime of experience with a government that stole their land, persecuted them, and kicked them out?

I was pretty upset when I learned that the city was linking the money for safety services to money for building a sports arena in downtown. But I am flat-out outraged at how the city is going about building its case for the ballot issue. Linking safety services to a sports and entertainment facility is tantamount to blackmail, and that’s pretty low. But it’s not really anything new in American politics.

Exploiting new arrival refugees to skew an already biased political survey and advance an agenda that will profit only a few and cost all citizens much, well, that’s pretty crappy. Even in American politics.