in the 2012 Presidential election chose
Obama, for instance.) Although it is
certainly true that Asian American
electoral participation varies by eth-
nicity, among other factors, the exis-
tence of a large group of liberal-vot-
ing Asian Americans should not be
given short shrift.
Michael Allen
Brooklyn, N.Y.
1
OBAMACARE AND MEBarack Obama’s memoir of how the
Affordable Care Act was passed illu-
minated the origins of a policy that
has affected me profoundly (“The
Health of a Nation,” November 2nd).
I am a career commercial fisherman.
In the nineteen-seventies, when I
started working, fishermen and mer-
chant mariners like me had federally
supported health coverage through a
scheme that had existed for decades.
That scheme was terminated, in 1981,
by Ronald Reagan. For a time, I bought
private insurance, but eventually it be-
came too expensive for my seasonally
fluctuating income.
When A.C.A. insurance became
available, I quickly signed up. A year
later, I had a heart attack, and needed
a cardiac stent. The plan I obtained
through the health-insurance ex-
change covered my extensive medi-
cal bills and, as a result, my wife and
I were able to keep our home, our
truck, and our fishing boat. I am now
seventy. This summer, I spent a hun-
dred and ten days on the ocean. No
one gets where they are without the
help of others. It was a pleasure to
read this piece, which illustrated in
such detail how I was helped by folks
I will never get to meet.
Ken Bates
Eureka, Calif.WHAT’S IN A VOTE?
Hua Hsu’s piece on Asian American
voters raises many interesting points,
but it mentions only briefly an impor-
tant element of history that may have
had a bearing on the lack of voter turn-
out that Hsu discusses (“Bloc by Bloc,”
November 2nd). From the late eigh-
teenth century until the middle of the
twentieth century, the naturalization
of Asian immigrants was against the
law in the U.S. The bar against citi-
zenship began with the Naturaliza-
tion Act of 1870, which initially ap-
plied only to Chinese immigrants. In
1910, however, the Supreme Court held
that the act prohibited the naturaliza-
tion of any Asian.
Chinese immigrants were only per-
mitted to apply for citizenship with
the passage of the Magnuson Act, in
- Other Asian immigrants had to
wait for the McCarran-Walter Act, a
decade later, to have the same oppor-
tunity. Both acts established stringent
quotas on immigration from Asia.
These long-standing barriers delayed
most Asian immigrants in gaining the
right to vote, and they may well have
shaped some Asian Americans’ voting
habits during the decades that fol-
lowed. Given the proliferation of anti-
immigrant rhetoric in the past four
years, this history seems too import-
ant to elide.
Joan E. Thompson
Golden Valley, Minn.
Hsu’s piece is an informative profile
of the political sympathies of specific
pockets of the Asian American pop-
ulation, but I worry that readers will
surmise that most undecided Asian
American voters might easily be per-
suaded to favor Republican candidates.
The existing record of Asian Ameri-
can voting preferences provides some
evidence to the contrary. Exit polls
from the 2008, 2012, and 2016 elec-
tions show that most Asian Ameri-
cans who voted did so in support of
Democratic candidates. (Three-quar-
ters of Asian Americans who cast votes
•
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