Is it any wonder that immigrant Los Angeles finds itself in the eye of Tropical Storm Don?
President Trump has stormed in with talk of Muslim travel bans, plans to build a wall along the Southern border, and ambitions to deport millions. And Los Angeles County has been ground zero for immigrant flows and immigration issues for decades. In the early 1980s, roughly a fourth of …

We here in Los Angeles are familiar with the use of fear as an instrument of public policy. Whether it was the LAPD’s occupation of South Central, the Hollywood black lists, the Japanese internment or the zoot suit riots, we’ve been perpetrators and victims, and we bear the scars.
Now it is happening again. Trump’s immigration policies are intended to frighten the vulnerable among us …

Ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79, Iranian American immigrants, including the large number of us living here in Los Angeles, have been personally feeling the effects of the rising and falling tension levels in U.S.-Iran relations. That historic upheaval, which severed Washington’s close ties to the former Shah of Iran, and resulted in the taking of 54 U.S. hostages, has marked interactions between the …

On August 21st this year, I will log my 26th solar eclipse and my 17th total solar eclipse. August 21st is when parts of the contiguous United States will fall in the path of a total eclipse for the first time since 1979. An eclipse happens on those rare occasions when the paths of moon and sun are in alignment, and the new moon covers …

Trump’s immigration policies are a problem for the U.S. economy, and in ways you might not think.
Whether it’s crime, security or jobs—Trump has openly and repeatedly linked many of the supposed woes of the nation to immigrants, fanning the xenophobic flames that exist at some level in all societies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the strong anti-immigrant rhetoric has already slowed the pace of immigration …

At 3 p.m. on January 28, 2017—the day after Donald Trump signed an executive order banning travel to the United States by citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries—I frantically tried to stop the departure of a plane carrying Ali Vayeghan.
Mr. Vayeghan is an Iranian man who had arrived at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) the night before; he was planning to start a new life …

If the apocalypse comes to California, I’ll be ready. After all, I’ve been to San Juan Bautista, which has centuries of experience with the ending of worlds.
I visited the San Benito County town again this summer, when Armageddon seems closer than ever. North Korean missiles may now be able to reach California. The president of the United States has the nuclear codes and no impulse …

Of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant actions, the best known are the barring of immigrants and refugees from Muslim countries, and the rounding up and deporting of undocumented immigrants, even those without criminal records or those who came to the United States as children. Now Trump has proposed slashing the number of legal immigrants, restricting family reunification, and moving towards a “merit-based” system that favors highly-educated, …

Now we’re fissioned—it releases
enough desire to fuel the empire.
That’s my smudged vision on this
frost-fogged, steamed street
at night’s end in these bright overhead
cones and sweeping twin beams.
We are a flood of particles
stripped from our kin clusters,
spilled bridge elevator tunnel,
sluiced river of want, huffing
to fill our slots and seats, each
thriver promised the dollars
good for what? Pacifiers
to soothe our atomized selves—good
for ales or amaros, sliders or oysters,
smokes …

The bad news for Republicans is that their party is dead. The “good” news for the party of Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, and Donald Trump is that the Democratic Party also is dead—or maybe even deader.
That was the big takeaway from an August 10th Zócalo panel discussion at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo district. Titled …