University Place

Hmong Refugee Resettlement

>> Jeanan Yasiri: As we begin today, I’d like to extend thanks to our UW partners in supporting this course. The UW Office of Corporate Relations, the UW College of Engineering for their technical support and financial support is provided through the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation which is committed to advancing academic education in entrepreneurialism. Additionally, we’d like to thank our media partners, Wisconsin Public Television, and their University Place crew for taping today’s lecture.

I’m very pleased to introduce our special guest today, Dr. Fred Prehn. Fred makes his living as the owner of Prehn Dental Practice in Wausau, Wisconsin, where he’s lived most of his life. Fred is part of a long-standing family committed to dentistry. His grandfather started the Wausau-based clinic in 1921. Fred’s father joined the practice and eventually Fred and his brothers followed in the family tradition of dentistry as well. But while running a vibrant business requires innovative thinking and enterprising skills, it was Fred’s foray into public service that provided him with, and probably challenged him the most. And that is why I’ve asked him to come and speak with our class today.

In the 1990s Fred served on the Wausau, Wisconsin, school board. It happened to fall at a time when Wausau, Wisconsin, was undergoing transformative change as a community, and the eyes of the nation were on this mid-sized town in middle Wisconsin. So as we start this section of the course as we’re discussing community and social issues and the solutions that are required to integrate new people and new ideas, I wanted you to hear firsthand from somebody who worked very, very hard to manage change on behalf of his community while, quite literally, the whole state and nation were watching. Please join me in welcoming Fred Prehn. (applause)

>> Fred Prehn: Hello, UW Madison. How are you? Good afternoon. First of all, how many have heard of Wausau, Wisconsin, before? That’s a plus. Small town in the central part of Wisconsin, approximately 39,000 people. What I’m going to try to do for you today is to kind of set a stage. A little bit about myself. Like Jeanan said, I am from Wausau, took off to go to school in Madison and then at the Marquette Dental School to get my education. I have a family of six, my wife and four kids. That was taken at the Kohl Center last May when my oldest daughter graduated from campus. So it was a matter of, what do I want to do when I graduate? What’s important to me when I get out of school and I get back to the community?

First, let’s set the stage. Wausau, Wisconsin, was integrated by Germans and Scandinavians in the early 1900s. Most of you may or may not know but Wausau was mainly a lumberjack town. Lumber built the town. Back in 1975 when I graduated from high school, this is the stat which today amazes me, we had one black in our high school of 1500 people. We had one Chinese. He owned the restaurant in town. And believe it or not when I came down to school in Madison, I wasn’t protected, I traveled with my parents. My parents were dentists, so it wasn’t like I was a protected person. But the first time I sat down face-to-face with a minority was in Humanities in 1976 and actually became a friend with one. That’s how white Wausau was in the mid-’70s.

This is downtown Wausau, about 39,000 people. Surrounding towns, about 65,000 people. That’s our biggest building in town. It was just built three years ago. It’s a thriving town. Most people know it because they’ve heard of Rib Mountain, now it’s called Granite Peak, recreational area of the state. From there up they call it the north woods. Some of you may or may not have been there. If not, it’s a great place to live.

But born and raised in Wausau, especially in my family, I’m going to quote John F. Kennedy. He basically said, “For whom much is given, much is expected.” So when I grew up it wasn’t a matter of if I’d ever give back to my community, it was when. So I’ve got family members that were on the historical society. One served in the Senate back in the ’20s, mayor of Wausau. I personally serve on a lot of the boards, my wife does. So we’re pretty active in the community.

But it’s a story from early mid-’80s that I want to bring to your attention today. I ran for the Wausau school board, the Board of Education. Nonpaying public office, elected. My platform was fiscal conservative. I had no children. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to have a family, God willing, and so what I said was if I wanted to make a difference in education in Wausau, I need to start now. So I ran. I was just out of college. Just got married. Just getting my feet on the ground. So I ran for the Wausau Board of Education and I won, mid-’80s. How exciting. Got on the board.

We had a lot of issues coming and going, but there was one issue that was happening in our town which became the emphasis for this whole discussion today. It was the migration of the Southeast Asians. Who are these people? What are these people? Where are they from? Let me tell you, back in 1982 there was 154 Southeast Asians in Wausau. By the mid-’90s it was skyrocketing.

Basically the Southeast Asians, or what we call Hmong, are from Cambodia and Laos, in the mountains. And during the Vietnam War, our government, our CIA and our government operatives used these people to infiltrate Vietnam and help us with the war. Many of you weren’t even alive at the time. Most of you, and frankly it was something that we didn’t even know about. But we took off in ’75 and left the war, these people were left behind. The Vietnamese quickly scooped these people up and put them in camps. So in 1975 the camps started. Some were assassinated, some were killed, but all of them, all of them were put in camps. The Vietnamese wanted these people out of the country because they helped America. They worked in rice fields.

Picture this, picture Wisconsin, four seasons, western civilian. Picture the Hmong in the mountains of Laos. They’re clansmen. They’re tribe-type people. No western civilization. They basically grew their food. They had no money. They didn’t need it. Their whole civilization and their whole society was based on something completely different than Wisconsin. It was a temperate climate. And in 1975 they found themselves sitting in camps.

What are we going to do? What’s America going to do? The government did very little. Government just had blinders. Well, that’s too bad. But people in America, i.e., churches, Good Samaritans, people that cared about these good people, these refugees, decide that we need to help, we need to get them out of Vietnam because the Vietnamese said, you can have them. So we decided to start what we call an immigration or refugee migration. There’s a difference. Immigration are people that came across to America, made this their home. These people really didn’t have any choice. They were told they were going to come here, and they were sponsored. They had no other place in the world to go, and so many of them came to the United States.

So the churches of Wausau got together in the late 1970s and the early 1980s and started sponsoring a family or two. By 1982 there was 154 Southeast Asians in Wausau. It started to grow. These people were completely different. There was all kinds of accusations and stereotypes that happened in Wausau. People didn’t understand this culture. Quickly the newness of it wore off very, very fast. This is the graph we worked with in 1992 when I was on the school board for 10 years. On the far right is 1992. You can see the graph just starts escalating with Southeast Asians in the schools.

So what was the perception with the people in Wausau? They went from, “this is kind of interesting, these people are kind of interesting” to, “there’s trouble.” The stereotypes started. They thought there’s going to be gangs. There was rumors of polygamy. Rumors of women being married at age 12, 13, 14. Set-up weddings. There’s even rumors of the Southeast Asians eating dogs, common pets in town. And what started to at one time being this is interesting, quickly became one of “I don’t think we want these people around.” Very, very fast.

Who’s seen the movie Gran Torino? Show of hands. I sat there and watched that movie last summer, and I just kind of smiled to myself because in the audience people were laughing at some of the lines that Clint was saying. Well, let me tell you folks. That’s what people thought. People actually thought what Clint Eastwood said in the first part of the movie. Lack of understanding, stereotype, he says it, I agree with it and it just kind of mushroomed. So we had a real problem in Wausau.

So as a school board member, probably about 1989-1990, we started talking about at the school board how are we going to handle this. Because here’s what was happening in Wausau. The Southeast Asians were coming in massive numbers. At that time one in 10 citizens in Wausau were Hmong. So we went from zero when I was in high school to one in 10 by 1990. But they all lived in the same part of town. And they said they’re all going to go to the same elementary school. So I would go, and at this time I had four kids and I think my oldest was in first grade in 1990 or 1992, and I go to the parent-teacher conferences, I was president of the school board, and they said, do something. 75% of our class is non-English speaking Southeast Asians. We don’t have the resources to teach these kids anything. We’re teaching them basic skills, where to go to the bathroom. And the white kids are sitting there going, this isn’t good, I’m not getting any instruction at all because my teacher is busy teaching this kid how to walk down the hallway and go to the drinking fountain.

So we knew we had a problem. One of the main problems was that it’s a city-wide issue, not just a school issue. We had to help educate the city and say, wait a minute, we’re all in this together. What are we going to do? Housing was the big thing. You got to get the Southeast Asians, if we can spread them out in the city so they go into the elementary schools and get a little bit diluted. Very difficult task, even to this day it’s not corrected.

The other thing we talked about is racial imbalance and the racial issues and we need to start educating the whites that these people are not leeches of society, they’re human beings that need our help. I always said that Wausau never had, I think it’s on the 60 Minutes piece you’re going to see, I always said Wausau never really had any racists in town because, frankly, we had no reason to be racist. But when the Southeast Asians came in the numbers and you start having some of the problems that they brought and concerns they brought, the racists came out.

So we sat there and said, okay, we had many, many topics and discussions, lots of stuff. And you can see in some of the graphs, the change the city has faced. This graph just skyrockets the Southeast Asians in a 10-year span. I don’t know what town you’re all from, but picture the town you’re from being no minorities, to that in record time. And very few were educated. Very few spoke English. So the social problems were really quite astronomical.

The main problem the school board had is we had massive language barriers. We had to hire ESL teachers. Anybody know what ESL teachers are? English as a second language. They don’t teach, they don’t know how to speak Hmong, but they teach the kids English as a second language. We had none in the ’80s. Today I think we have 17 hired. Increased staffing. Massive need for buildings. Our enrollments went from the normal enrollment you have in any district to huge influx of kids coming in. So we had to build elementary schools. That means what? That means taxes go up. Ma and Pa sit back and they’re saying taxes are bad enough, now you’re going to double my property tax bills. That’s how public education is funded is property taxes. So the tax bills were going off the charts. There was very little housing for the people to live in. They couldn’t afford nice homes. And one of the biggest concerns was the Southeast Asians in town.

I always thought as a board member, like Jeanan said, I was young, I was 30 years old, to me that’s young, maybe not to you but to me that’s young, and these are things I just hadn’t dealt with before. But I knew one thing, my parents gave me an education, just like you’re here getting an education. That gift will make a difference. I always said if we can get these Southeast Asians into society, educated, make them productive members of our society, the problems will go away. Could you do that in Chicago? No way. Milwaukee? Probably not. Madison? Maybe. But Wausau? I said it was doable.

So here was our plan. We developed what they called sister schools. We took the 13 elementary schools that were kindergarten to 6th grade, took the 6th graders out and put them in the middle school, and we made one school all K-2 and the other school all 3-5. We thought it was a great plan. Spread them out, less Hmong per classroom. Kind of help dilute the problem, put more resources to it. But we left the neighborhood school concept. And when we left the neighborhood school concept, busing. Nobody was alive in the ’60s. Anybody alive in the ’60s in this room? Besides me? Busing was one of the most volatile topics that we experienced in the civil rights movement. And the term busing, taking your child from your neighborhood school and moving them, in Wausau about six blocks away, to another school created some of the worst hatred I’ve ever seen in Wausau. Our job was to take the kids, both white and Southeast Asians, move them to different K-2 centers and get them educated. They were all congregated, we needed to spread them out a little bit. So we had busing plans.

This headline tells it: Busing Stirs Up Intense Battle. You aren’t kidding it did. We had harassment. My child was in first grade. She used to have her name on her backpack. Before school started that fall after we implemented the busing plan, received a phone call and a person said, “You SOB, your daughter, your one-year-old daughter Augusta is going to get a bullet in her head when she steps off the bus.” I hung up the phone and I went, Holy mackerel, people are really upset about this. I knew they were but to threaten the life of somebody. So we had to cover up her name, and the first couple days we were very nervous. I got harassed, I lost a fair amount of patients in my dental practice. People were so upset at this whole situation in Wausau and the fact that we wanted to take their kids and move them to different centers that they went ballistic.

So we live in a democracy, do we not? What did Wausau do? Recall us. They collected the petition to sign the petition to have every one of us removed from office that voted for the plan. There’s nine members in the Wausau school board, six voted for it. One abstained and two voted no. So Wausau went through what they call a recall. We pleaded our case in the paper. I explained it at a number of hearings, wrote letters to the editor. It started making national news. National papers picked up on it because this wasn’t just a recall of a local election because somebody is mad at something, this was a major, major social issue. And this was Wausau’s way of saying we’re going to deal with it the way we want to deal with it.

They had the vote and we lost. One day we’re a board member and we have a plan in place to deal with the situation, the next day we’re out of office. So I’m a private citizen again. The new school member got sworn in. The first vote they had was to put things back the way they were. Let me teach you something today that you may or may not have ever heard this term before. It’s called de facto segregation. De facto segregation is when a government body or somebody causes things to be segregated. It’s illegal. ACLU got on board, they filed a lawsuit and they said you can’t just put it back the way it was. The laws prevent that. You can’t take something that was integrated and now put the whites back in their own little school and put the Hmong back in their little school.

Well, they tried but they realized they couldn’t do it. So what did they end up doing? They ended up taking all the Southeast Asians and busing just the Asians to different schools. They let the white kids stay next to the neighborhoods, but if you were an Asian next to an elementary school, they would bus you, an Asian, across town to a different school. And that’s the way they kept things diluted across town.

About six months or a year later, the volatility kind of settled down a little bit but now national news came into play. Got a call from 60 Minutes, our district did, and they said we want to come to town, and we want to do a piece about what’s happened in Wausau. Morley Safer was in my living room and interviewed me. You’ll see the tape in a second. I had hair back then. (laughter) But Morley Safer interviewed me and you could tell they want to centralize this, like all journalists do. They wanted to fire up about the bullet in the head and this and this and this, and the bottom line was, I tried to diffuse it as much as I can in my interview, it’s an excellent piece about what happened.

I’m going to quickly read you the press release before they released. This is October 16, 1994. “On October 16, 1994, the CBS News magazine 60 Minutes described refugee tensions in Wausau, Wisconsin. This small city was populated almost exclusively by the descendants of Germans and Scandinavian immigrants, when, during the ’80s, several churches sponsored Hmong refugees. Today Wausau’s 4,000 refugees are 11% of the population.” This is 1994. “And policies adopted to integrate them have divided the city. About three-fourths of the Hmongs are receiving welfare payments causing some resentment as property taxes skyrocket as additional schools are being built for children of nonworking parents. Hmongs are one-fourth of the elementary school class, and in some cases 75% of the class is Southeast Asian.

To promote integration the Wausau school board began busing children to achieve a rough balance between Hmong and other children in each school. In response, the school board that endorsed busing was recalled.” That would be yours truly. “And today mostly Hmong children are being bused to achieve ethnic balance. They stress the current Hmong residents were welcomed, the town people have stressed that, but that the community needs breathing room to integrate the Hmong in their midst. The show ended with a no-good-deed-goes-unpunished theme. The beneficiaries of Wausau churches set in motion an immigration and migration process that has divided the city.” So let’s watch the 60 Minutes piece. And you can do that.

>> Yasiri: I can do that. >> Prehn: Keep in mind this is 1994.

>> (inaudible) Governors and elected officials have taken up the cause demanding action. (inaudible) The subject is immigration. The US Census Bureau predicts that if federal law remains unchanged over the next 50 odd years, immigrants and their children will add 82 million people to the United States, nearly a third of today’s total population. This — towards immigrants is nothing new, it’s part of the reality of urban America. That reality has now struck the almost middle America, a town so perfect, a lot of people think it only exists in television commercials.

>> Wausau, W-A-U-S-A-U. >> So if your business needs insurance, come to Wausau, Wausau USA.

>> Wausau, Wisconsin, best known from the commercial for the insurance company that’s based there. Wausau is Norman Rockwell Midwest, and, as the 1980s census shows, the most homogenous, the whitest city in the nation. Its 32,000 people felt safe. Crime was rare. Jobs for everyone. All friendliness, godliness and generous. So in the mid-’70s when Wausau’s heart was touched by the plight of Southeast Asian refugees and a local church invited a few families to come, everyone felt good. Dr. Fred Prehn remembers.

>> When they first started coming to town, I thought this is really kind of neat. We’re actually going to have somebody in town besides the white, German or Pole. I had no idea of the situation ahead of us.

>> What happened is the refugee population ballooned into 4,000 in just over a decade. The first immigrants sponsored –. And they, in turn, sponsored others. (inaudible) Culturally they could not be more different from the — of Wausau. 75% of the immigrants are on public assistance. Very few pay local taxes. And Wausau is feeling somewhat less generous.

>> We’ve given and given and given and we think it’s time for them to give something back.

>> The numbers are so high now, and I think that’s part of our insecurities. What do we do, the jobs haven’t increased and people keep coming.

>> (inaudible) — who runs an Asian grocery store says the difference in culture is practically interplanetary.

>> If you don’t get the kind of life that we did, it’s like going to the moon. There is no technology over there, there’s nothing. There’s no phone, no TV, no communication, there’s nothing. All they do is just work on the land and survive.

>> The only prior contact these people had with western technology was a CIA weapons handling course. During the Vietnam War, they were recruited by the United States as a secret army. They suffered huge casualties. And when the Communists took over, they fled to refugee camps entirely. It was the American government’s sense of obligation that eased their way to America. Now they are workless on welfare in Wausau. They may lack technical skills. They may cling to primitive custom, but they’ve gained a primitive understanding of how public assistance works, and they know that Uncle Sam never misses a pay day. And neither do they. Welfare is a sensitive subject to — a Hmong community leader. She says it all has to do with history.

>> When my family came here in 1975, we were the very first group of Hmong families to come to the United States. We were sponsored by American families and they taught us how to work. They gave us education, they gave us an American dream to follow through.
>> Now all Hmong people are sponsored by other Hmong people.

>> Yeah. >> Does that make it more difficult for them?

>> If their relative who sponsored them are on welfare too, it makes it really extremely difficult for them. They can’t teach them to go to school. They can’t teach them that you have to have a job in order to survive.

>> There are people here that say they fear that welfare will become a way of life, does that concern you?

>> Yes, it does. And that’s why right now we’re fighting the educational system so that won’t happen.

>> WXEO’s Wake Up Wausau show, Jeff — your host. We have a problem here that reared its ugly head on Monday night and that is an almost militant Asian community.

>> In the school board meeting, that community for the first time demanded to be heard.

>> Give me a break. You think we’re not going to be here in the next century. And that’s why you didn’t consider us.

>> What angered this almost invisible, docile community was, of course, education. The American institution that historically drives communities apart. In Wausau, the Hmong children make up more than a quarter of the elementary school population.

>> Many times we have asked you to get in touch with us, and every one of those times you failed.

>> White Wausau thought education was their business, after all, they were paying for it. As the number of Hmong students kept increasing, property taxes kept increasing, as much as 10% a year. In four years about $25 million for new and expanded schools. Plus a few million more a year to teach English to Hmong children.

>> Night. >> Night.

>> (inaudible) The families tend to live in the same neighborhood. So by 1992 they had dealt Wausau de facto segregated schools. Dr. Fred Prehn was president of the school board.

>> We knew they were concentrated in four out of 13 elementary schools and kept getting worse and worse by the minute. In some cases, 70%-80% of the kids in a particular classroom were non-English speaking Southeast Asians.

>> The school board decided the only way to integrate was to do what seemed unthinkable in this once united community of only 32,000, bus the children.

>> I want the Hmong kids to play with my kid and talk with my kid so when they’re both working in Wausau, they both talk to each other and they both contribute to town. If you don’t start in first, second, third, fourth, fifth grade, it’s not going to work. You have to start the simulation early, you have to teach them English and you have to the whites talking to these kids.

>> But the majority of the community was against busing and they organized a group representing every aspect of life, housewives, businessmen, factory workers, the professional class. And what they demanded was keeping what they call neighborhood schools.

>> We feel as though our family values are being intruded upon by having our children taken out of our neighborhoods and having them put in a neighborhood that we don’t want them in.

>> A lot of people feel that the word “neighborhood schools,” “family values,” are euphemisms for something else. Neighborhood schools equals white schools.

>> I don’t think so at all. I don’t think race was ever an issue in this. I think what we as a group wanted was our neighborhood school back and cost-effective quality education for all children.

>> And to do it they organized a recall of the election for the school board. It was successful. Five members who voted for busing were thrown out, including Dr. Fred Prehn.

>> Some people voted because they were racist. But the majority, I don’t think, did. The majority were scared of what we were trying to do.

>> Dr. Prehn said patients left his practice because of his stand on busing. Friends stopped talking to each other.

>> Has there been a white flight out of certain parts of town?

>> No question. Within 15 blocks I can name you 15 families that have left this part of town to go private.

>> Private schools.

>> Private schools, you bet.

>> — put his daughter in private school because he felt she would be held back if she was with slower Hmong children.

>> We’re seeing gangs in the schools. For goodness sakes, Wausau, little Wausau, Wisconsin, last year had its first drive-by shooting between two Asian gangs.

>> This is News at 10.

>> The shooting at this car may be the first drive-by shooting in Wausau’s history. Police believe the shooting was a result of tensions between Hmong and Laotian teenagers.

>> The CBS affiliate in Wausau also happened to capture this racial incident on tape. (inaudible) No one was hurt in either incident. But for the people who lived in Wausau all their lives, it was a rude introduction to our brave new world.

>> Come lord Jesus be our guest…

>> Especially for Darryl — and his family.

>> The drive-by shooting was three blocks from our house. On most evenings when we go for a walk our kids ride their bikes down the sidewalk. We walk and there’s a drive-by shooting in our neighborhood? That worries us. That’s a big concern for us.

>> The school board voted to go back to neighborhood schools. The Hmong believed that means segregation and second-class education. With their children learning much faster and integrate better when they’re side by side with white children.

>> For which it stands, one nation, under God…

>> But the new board… (inaudible) It leaves no one entirely happy. A plan that for many people here was proof that no good deed goes unpunished.

>> Wausau is being penalized for being good. The communities that surround Wausau have discriminated against the Asian population and not made them feel welcome, and so they keep coming to Wausau. So in a sense, for treating people well — and that isn’t very fair. (inaudible)

>> Because of federal law and post-Vietnam guilt syndrome, the immigrants keep coming. Now sponsored by Hmong relatives. This family spent five years in refugee camps before their reunion last May. There are thousands more in the camps in Thailand.

>> We’re not here to work so that we can go back. We know we can’t go back. We’re here to stay.

>> These people couldn’t return to their homeland and the promise was that we would provide a refuge for them. We are keeping our federal government’s promise and the burden is on the local government not on the federal government and I think that’s wrong.

>> What you’re saying is if these people would just get up and go away this town would be a great town.

>> (inaudible) That’s not what we’re saying at all. We’re saying that the community may have reached a point where it can’t handle any more.

>> To me that is just racist. There’s never too many. The United States is for everybody. And never did they say that a town can only hold so many people or so many of this kind.

>> While Wausau tries to balance its books, its self-interest, its generosity and a touch of racism, it is as one on the issue of immigration, that the federal government must give them a break.

>> Give us some time to breathe. Give us a chance to get over this conflict. Give us a chance to solve the present situation. Immigration is the backbone of America, to stop it I don’t think would be right. Just slow it down.

>> That’s the Wausau story.

>> Prehn: That’s the Wausau story. You know, sitting there watching that, you may not believe it but that’s the first time I’ve watched it since 1994. I made that tape and I threw it in my closet and when Jeanan asked if I would speak on it because she’d heard about it, I sent her down the VHS tape and she made a DVD, but that’s the first time I watched that piece in close to 17 years.

The Wausau story. What followed the 60 Minutes piece was lots of national news. Atlantic Monthly, if you’re interested in this topic, this is an excellent article from April 1994 by Roy Beck. Instead of having photojournalism this was an in-depth discussion of what happened in the migration. Time magazine did a piece, “Strangers in a Strange Land,” and even to this day I get phone calls because if you Google Southeast Asia and Wausau my name pops up. I get phone calls from students at major universities throughout the country, MIT, Madison, throughout everywhere, California, doing dissertations on migration and refugees and immigration because this is such a unique experiment that happened in Wausau. So it’s a story that doesn’t go away. And it shouldn’t, should it?

What’s it like today in Wausau? Well, kids actually get along. You look at Wausau today and rumors of dog-eating families never were true. There was a drive-by shooting with two gang members. But for the most part it’s an experiment that’s working. Are there problems? Absolutely.

The amount of Southeast Asians per capita in schools has gone down, the middle of the graph is 1997-98. You can see 1992 is the left-hand side, after I left the school board it just kept climbing. Now it’s coming back off. The number of Asians in the actual schools has actually dropped, but the amount of Asians in Wausau is actually quite high. This is a graph that shows you the enrollments in the Wausau school district, but this is also the statistics for Wausau. Remember I told you 1992 Wausau was one in 10, today Wausau is one in four Southeast Asian. 75% of Wausau is white. The Asians are 20%, they’re one in five. The blacks and Hispanics are climbing. We’re getting a lot of Hispanics in the schools. A whole different set of social problems, a whole different set. So Wausau is integrated. No question about it. The elementary schools are fairly well integrated. The high school is.

But more importantly remember that piece they said in 60 Minutes if they start to talk to each other in first, second, third, fourth grade when there’s no outside influences from parents, they’ll talk their whole life. The first black I talked to was in Humanities when I sat down to lecture. I’ve got hundreds of black friends now. They aren’t strange to me. They shouldn’t be. Look in the audience in Madison today. You don’t look at somebody and say, Oh, there’s an Asian over there, there’s a black over there. It’s just a student going to the UW, getting an education.

So I think it’s working. I think if you talk to most people in Wausau it’s working. They’re graduating valedictorian in the high schools. The last 10 years I give out a scholarship for a foundation I sit on at Wausau East, we give out a scholarship to a Southeast Asian and I think the last three out of seven years a Southeast Asian has been 4.0.

But there are still problems. Housing. They still are lower income, and they still congregate in lower income parts of town. One of the biggest problems we have though is positive reinforcement. When you were all in high school, I bet you a dollar to doughnuts that you had positive reinforcement from your parents. They made sure you got good grades. You wanted to come to Madison. Very competitive to get into this school. When I went to school in ’75 you sign your name up and come on down. Now I watch my kids struggle to get into a university of this caliber. They don’t get that.

I talked to a Southeast Asian teacher friend of mine and I asked him, I said, What’s it like in school now today besides one in four? He said, well, it’s interesting. Remember the social experiment I told you about? It’s very interesting because half the Southeast Asians and Hmongs have parents who speak English because they were raised in America. Half don’t. The camps closed five years ago. The last camp closed five years ago.

My Southeast Asian teacher friend yesterday at Wausau East said, “Good morning, class” in Spanish. They’re all Hmong. And they all looked at him and said, What’s that Mr. Hagge? And he said, that’s “Good morning, class” in Spanish. And he said, how do you say that in Hmong? Half the class looked at each other and go, well, I don’t really know. And the other half said what it is. So half this class, English is their language. Half the class, they go home, and they go from speaking English in school to the only language they can communicate with their family is Southeast Asian. It’s like the movie Gran Torino. We became to understand each other. It’s taken 25 years but now when we see a Hmong on the sidewalk, most of us aren’t threatened.

The other problem that we have in Wausau with the Southeast Asians to date, its today’s headlines. This is this morning on the way down to Madison. I grabbed it and it says, Hmong Violence Meeting Historic. The Southeast Asians are a clan civilization. They’re like tribesmen. The head of the clan is the big banana. Females in a clan are suppressed. We’re seeing quite a bit of violence, domestic violence. We’ve had some murders in town where the husband has killed the wife for trying to divorce. There are still situations where the female is told who you’re going to marry and have sex for the first time at age 13-14. We prosecute these people because our laws don’t allow that, but it happens.

For the first time that I’ve seen, clan leaders will address treatment of women. If a clan person decides that this is a problem, we can’t put our head in the sand anymore, I think a change will happen. But up until now the clans have basically kind of not talked about it because they don’t sanction it but if they don’t say anything, it can go on. So the problems that we see in Wausau today are just problems every city is going to see.

I want to stick around for another 30 years. I want to see what happens. I want to see if the Southeast Asians in the high schools and elementary schools speak English and are productive citizens more so than today. Because a lot of what we thought was going to happen, hasn’t happened. Basically, back up here a second, let’s get back to the story at hand. Why are we here today? What’s the class all about?

Wausau is just a piece of the puzzle. It’s about you, all of you. When you graduate from Madison, your main focus right now is academics. I hope. Some of you probably worry about getting in underage at the Mifflin Street Block Party in a couple of months. (laughter) But you’re here for the academics. How many people in the audience are volunteering today, doing something besides academics? Not bad. It’s usually a small percentage. But you’re going to get out of school and you’re going to have a professional life. I’m still a dentist, I also grow cranberries, I have a cranberry marsh in Tomah, Wisconsin, with my wife Linda. And I run two companies professionally. Lots of activity, lots of boards, lots of meetings. That’s how I get income.

I also have a personal life. Those are my four kids. I’ve taken that picture almost every year since they were born. They were on my back until two years ago. Two years ago they sat on my back and lifted their feet up at the cottage for the picture, the horse picture, and my back went out for two weeks. (laughter) This was last November, I said okay, gang, I’m on top. My point being is you have a personal life. My particular case, I have an empty nest next year. Looking forward to doing some traveling with my wife. The kids are out of the house. It’s going to be completely different than we’ve had the last 23 years.

I have lots of hobbies, but volunteerism has always been a part of my life. Starting when I was younger and got out of college and the school board and president of — council Boy Scouts in Wausau. You think after that buzz saw I went through in the ’90s with the recall that I’d climb into a shell and close the door, far from it. It’s just the way I was raised. I go back to the situation I talked in the very, very beginning, for whom much is given, much is expected and required. I was given a lot. I was given an education by my parents. I was given a good life. I was brought up well. And I feel that in order for me to live my life, I need to give back.

All of you here today are given an education, be it from your family, grants, scholarships or maybe you’re working the 7-Eleven, I don’t know. But you’re given something here. You’re at one of the top universities in the country, will you give back? What are your goals in life going to be? Going to get out of school, going to become a Fortune 500 CEO and take the money and buy Maseratis and Ferraris and travel? If you do and that’s all you do, you’re going to have a big void in your life. Because it’s a balancing act. And how you balance what you do when you leave the university tells you what kind of person you are. It’s difficult to judge your personal life with professionalism and volunteerism, but the mix of these three in proper amounts will make you sit back in your rocking chair someday and smile at the enjoyment life can really bring to yourself. So think about it. I know your mind is worried about next week, but I applaud the people that raised their hand and said they volunteer today. To go to school and volunteer at the same time, I never did that. I wish I did, but I didn’t.

The last slide is goal setting. That’s my son Fritz. He’s an engineering student, third year at Madison. Two years ago we climbed Mount Aconcagua. It’s the highest point in the western hemisphere, South and North America. 22,841 feet. He got done with finals, we picked him up, we flew down to South America, Chile, Argentina, we climbed, I got him back, he was back in class two days later. Tight schedule. But it was a goal that we both set many years ago when we started climbing together when he was 13, 14, 15. The question is, what’s your goal going to be in life? Where are you going to go? What are they? And if you achieve them, you can sit back and be a happy person.

I’ll take questions now about anything I talked about, you’ve got about 5-10 minutes.

>> Yasiri: And the students know that I pass the mic to them, so I see a hand at the back of the room. Let me run up there. >> Prehn: It’s so quiet in here.

>> Hi. So when you were on the board and you were theoretically fighting against this and getting everybody organized and being a community organizer, did anybody call you racist? Did people in the community think you were racist?

>> Prehn: No, if anything they called me a flaming liberal. And if you knew me, I’m actually a fiscally conservative kind of guy. I’m a very conservative guy. I come from a conservative family. And so for me to be out there as a community organizer and school board and say let’s tackle this problem, let’s do something about it, it was out of character for me. So nobody everybody called me a racist, but I got called a liberal, a bleeding-heart liberal many, many times. Is that your question?

>> Yeah, and how would you see, that’s different from your character, I guess, as you say, but how do you think that has impacted the rest of your life with working with these and now you say you have many friends who are of particularly Southeast Asian background and what not?

>> Prehn: Enriched. There’s been problems with Southeast Asians and some people would say I wish they would have never showed up, we wouldn’t have had all these issues. But I’ll tell you having them in town the last 25 years has really been a blessing. Because that’s the world we live in. Living in a town 100% white in northern Wisconsin and if that perpetuated and continued it’s a rude awakening getting out in the big dog world. So many of these people are just fascinating to listen to their stories and listen to their lives and have them ask me about my upbringing. It makes you a better person. It’s like taking classes like this today. It’s enrichment. So I guess the key word there is by doing what I did I just felt more enriched.

>> You talked about from whom much is given, much is expected. Are you starting to see now that the education these Southeast Asians are starting to receive in Wausau that they’re coming back to help their communities? Has it come full circle? Or what’s the evolution there?
>> Prehn: I don’t think full circle to answer your question. I think they’ve definitely come back. The Hmong community is very, very tight knit. It’s clan, like I said. But there’s many multifaceted task force that the Southeast Asians and the whites are on together. There was a gang task force, interesting comment, there was a gang task force when that drive-by shooting happened. We need to talk about this gang situation. We had a task force. It ran for two or three years and there was never ever a drive-by shooting so they disbanded because there really isn’t a need for one.

But they give back too. They haven’t come full circle yet. There are very few public servants that are Southeast Asian in Wausau. I’m trying to get one to be on the Boy Scout board in Wausau. It’s tough because they have to get permission from their clan to do it. So you’re talking about a situation that’s just incredibly difficult to break, but the new graduates that come out at 17, 18, 19, 20, I don’t know if anybody knows any, is there any Southeast Asians in the audience today?

They are part of us now. And they’ve got a lot to contribute. Their personalities, that I’ve seen, have been a little bit secluded, a little shy, they aren’t forceful, but they’re getting that way and they should. They’ve been here for 25 years, some of them. And some of them are born and raised, are natural citizens here, they were born here. They weren’t given papers at a later time. They were born in America and they were raised in America, but they have that influence that’s changed over time. So it hasn’t come full circle but it’s going to, I believe.

>> Hi, my name is Brad. Do you have any regrets at how about you went through this whole process?

>> Prehn: Absolutely, Brad, that’s a good question. After we got thrown off the school board I wondered if we did the right thing. I think we set in motion a situation where we hit the problem head on, but I reflect back and I think maybe we forced it too fast. We thought we knew the answer. But I was 32, 33, 34 years old. At 52, my age now, I don’t think I’d approach it the same way. I’d try to skin it a different way. Clearly we didn’t have the public behind us. We may never have but maturity plays a factor. I think we could have done things differently and maybe prevented the recall, but it’s how our society migrated and how it worked. Good question.

>> Hi, my name’s Dan. I was just wondering what the graduation rates from high school are like today from the Southeast Asian percentage as compared to when they first started out.

>> Prehn: I can’t give you the actual statistics, the answer to that question, I think Wausau’s graduation percentage is 92% of the people graduate. The Southeast Asian migration I can’t answer what the percentage is but it’s a heck of a lot better than it was 20 years ago. And I get that from my ESL friend who teaches English as a second language. He’s actually worried about his job because as we get less and less and less Southeast Asians that don’t speak English, that’s his job, English as a second language. We had 17 at one time. I think we’re down to nine now. So that’s a sign that tells me the language barrier has been dropped. There’s no question they’re graduating more, but I can’t give you the actual statistic for that.

>> Yasiri: Is there a final question for Fred? Well, I want to recognize that Fred’s wife Linda and his son Fritz are at the back of the room and we want to thank them for joining us today, too. And Fred, we can’t thank you enough from driving all the way down from Wausau. So we thought we’d bring you a badger mug because we know you’re a badger at heart.

>> Prehn: That’s right. Bucky, Bucky.

>> Yasiri: And I know you join me in thanking Fred Prehn for his story and his service to his community.

>> Prehn: Thank you. (applause)