This week, on Wednesday, another GOP candidate from Texas said that she didn’t want Chinese to immigrate to America as she blamed them for spreading the coronavirus.
Sery Kim, a veteran of the Trump administration, is running for a vacant seat in suburban Dallas-Fort Worth. This 6th Congressional District seat became vacant when its lawmaker Ron Wright died earlier this year. The late congressman had succumbed to complications arising from COVID-19.
Wright had won for the second time in November. He polled 50.7 percent while the Democratic candidate Stephen Daniel had polled 45.9 percent of the votes. The special election to fill this seat will be held on May 1.
Sery Kim was addressing a forum for candidates who were in the run for the open seat. She said that she did not want those (Chinese immigrants) in the U.S. and that they steal the country’s intellectual property and that they gave the nation the coronavirus and that they don’t hold themselves accountable.
She ended with a punch line saying, “And quite frankly, I can say that because I am Korean.” This fetched her laughter and applause from the audience.
On Friday, when NBC reached out to her representative for comment, there was no immediate response. However, the Dallas Fort Worth Asian-American Citizens Council rebuked her for these comments in a statement to NBC Dallas on the same day.
The group said that they strongly condemned Sery Kim’s remarks. They said that racist and ethnic insults have no place in today’s society, regardless of their source. They mentioned that although Ms. Kim was of Korean descent it didn’t give her the license to use harmful language against the Chinese or any other ethnicity.
The first case of Covid-19 that was confirmed was that of a 35-year old man from Snohomish County, Washington State who had visited Wuhan in China. The infection most likely spread from him to others.
Sery Kim, who is Korean-American, worked in Small Business Administration during the former president Trump’s term of office.
