Judy Chu: “Thank you, Congressman Garamendi, and thank you for bringing this very, very important order to the floor tonight. I…”

“Thank you, Congressman Garamendi, and thank you for bringing this very, very important order to the floor tonight. I would like to focus for a moment on the oil spill and its impact on the victims. Kim Tran doesn't know how he will pay this month's car insurance, and he has got no idea how he will take care of his mortgage, but what he is most in the dark about is when he will be able to get back in the water and start working again. Kim is a deckhand on a commercial fishing boat which is stationed near Buras, Louisiana, in Plaquemines Parish. He is part of a close-knit community of Vietnamese and Cambodian shrimpers whom the gulf oil spill has hit particularly hard. Many of them came to the gulf coast in the 1980s as war refugees from Vietnam. They did well. It is estimated that the Vietnamese Americans own between one-third and one-half of all of the fishing vessels on the gulf coast. After Katrina, they were one of the first groups to rebuild, but figuring out how to recover from the recent manmade disaster has been difficult. You see, for many of these fishermen, language is a barrier as bottomless as the Deepwater Horizon's well.”