UNITED SIKHS Congratulates President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris
November 10, 2020
New York, NY
UNITED SIKHS congratulates President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris for their momentous win in 2020 elections. America has chosen President-elect Biden as their 46th president after a contentious election.
Newly elected President Joe Biden, aged 77, was declared the winner in Pennsylvania on Nov. 7, 2020 and won by 279 electoral votes versus 214 for the incumbent, Donald Trump. However, despite no evidence of illegal activity, incumbent President Donald Trump’s campaign signaled he would refuse to concede. If Trump refuses to deliver a public concession speech or make a congratulatory call to Biden, it would break with 124 years of American history.
President-elect Biden’s and Vice-President elect Harris’ ancestries and backgrounds remind us that we are all descendants from immigrants. He is a descendant of immigrants from England and Ireland who settled in the States of Maryland and Pennsylvania in the U.S in the mid to late 1700’s and the early to mid 1800’s. He is a graduate of Syracuse University College of Law (1968) and the University of Delaware (1965) and has been commended many times including with the Nishan-e-Pakistan award and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. He is married to Dr. Jill Biden, a high school teacher and college professor who is thought to be the first Second Lady to hold a paying job while her husband was Vice President of the U.S.
In this historic 2020 election, Kamala Harris became the first woman and the first person of African and South Asian descent to be elected as Vice-President of the U.S. She is the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants and was born in Oakland, California. She graduated from Howard University and the University of California Hastings College of Law, was a past Alameda County and San Francisco District Attorney and was the California Attorney General from 2011 to 2017. Because of her heritage and accomplishments, Sikhs, Indian-Americans and Muslims hail Ms. Harris’ recent victory as a remarkable success. However, Ms. Harris’ civil rights record has been heavily criticized. For example, in 2011, UNITED SIKHS and countless other leading Sikh, Muslim and Jewish national religious and civil rights organizations criticized her ill-advised challenge to a California State Personnel Board’s Appeal Division (SPB) ruling. That ruling held that a State correctional facility failed to grant reasonable accommodations and discriminated against a Sikh who wore a beard for religious reasons when it refused to hire him for that reason. In a letter written to the Governor of California at the time the leading civil rights organizations stated that Ms. Harris’ decision “jeopardiz[ed] the civil rights of Sikhs, Muslims and Jews and all others who still face the ignominy of having to choose between religious freedom and a job.” The letter also stated that “the California Attorney General’s adversarial posture in this case was demeaning to religious minorities…” Since 2011, in her capacity as Senator and while campaigning for the Vice Presidential seat, she has demonstrated that she will use her influence and be a staunch supporter and protector of civil rights in the U.S. and abroad.
It is still too early to know how or if the Biden administration will make amends for the civil rights violations but he has promised to help the nation heal from the chaos of these last years, which include the national divisions caused by protests and rioting after the killing of many, unarmed African Americans by police, calls to defund the police, the exponential increase in hate crime that has become a national crisis and the perceived inaction against growing domestic terrorists and armed groups who spread white supremacy hate and neo-nationalist ideologies. The new administration will also have to tackle the negative effects of prior anti-immigrant Executive Orders. On foreign policy, the new administration has stated that rejoining the World Health Organization, global climate challenges and any residual presence in Afghanistan, as well as Iraq and Syria, are priorities. On Afghanistan, Biden has stated that the focus would be only “on counterterrorism operations and supporting local partners.”
“We have been on a campaign to safely resettle Sikh and Hindu Afghan refugees who have suffered the onslaught of ISI terrorist attacks since the U.S. and NATO decision to end the war in the Middle East. The current U.S/Afghan Agreements only vaguely address the threat to these religious minorities,” said Jagdeep Singh, Executive Director, UNITED SIKHS.
UNITED SIKHS staff and volunteers look forward to working with the in-coming administration to ensure the safety and security of Sikh and other marginalized communities against hate abroad and here in the United States where hate crimes present a crisis that has continued unabated.
Issued by
Gundeep Singh
Media Coordinator
UNITED SIKHS