WASHINGTON: Asians may not account for the large majority of illegal immigrants in the United States, but are in the forefront of protests of what they see as increasingly discriminatory moves to regulate immigration.

In recent days, dozens of Asian groups joined mammoth Hispanic-led protests from California to the grounds of Capitol Hill demanding better treatment for immigrants amid plans for a draconian crackdown on illegal immigration.

"Asians were historically discriminated against emigrating to the United States for about 200 years, so we are very wary," said Traci Hong, director of the immigration programme at the Asia America Justice Centre, a national group defending the civil and human rights of Asian Americans.

Mr Hong, an attorney, cited the period from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first US law to ban immigration by race or nationality, saying national origin quotas that discriminated against Asians were not fully eliminated until 1965.

Her centre is among 40 Asian groups up in arms over a bill passed by the House of Representatives that would make it a felony to be in the United States without proper papers, and a federal crime to aid illegal immigrants.

The groups, some of whom likened the bill as the harshest legislation directed at immigrant workers since the Chinese Exclusion Act, said regulations and policies have been used to "systematically" exclude Asians from the United States.

"This bill is the latest and the most egregious in a long line of increasingly harsh, anti-immigrant enforcement-only legislations that has not and will not fix our broken immigration system," they said.

The groups are concerned that the Senate, currently debating immigration reforms, could adopt key provisions from the House bill, including one which basically allows the police to detain suspects first and verify citizenship status later.

"Now how would an officer come to such a presumption: would it be because the person 'did not look American? Would it be because the person had an accent?' It would disproportionately impact the Asian American community," Hong said.

Led by the Chinese, some one million of the 14 million Asians in the United States are illegal immigrants. There are 1.5 million Asians in the backlog of applications for permanent residency status or citizenship.

The Pew Hispanic Centre estimates that of more than 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, 78 percent are from Mexico or other Latin American countries.

Many have children and other relatives who are US citizens and are banking on citizenship as a license for their future.

Lawmakers should pass legislation that enables ‘a path to legalisation’ for undocumented aliens, said Don Shin of the New York-based Young Korean American Service and Education Centre.

Mr Shin, who was among 100 Korean Americans who attended an inter-faith rally outside the US Congress building this week in a bid to press for immigrant rights, said his own father took advantage of a 1986 amnesty to regularise his legal status and now works as a real estate agent in the Los Angeles area.

One in every five Koreans in the United States, numbering around one million, are undocumented, he said.

Many who come to the United States on student or tourist visas stay on illegally because they are able to make a good living here, he said.

"There's no lack of work here. They're able to raise a family and provide for their family," he said.

Treading gingerly ahead of crucial Congressional elections in November, President George Bush favours a guest worker programme but has firmly rejected amnesty for those who entered the country illegally.

Polls have shown that Americans do not favour granting a blanket amnesty to illegal immigrants.

Mr Bush, speaking at a naturalization ceremony this week, said Washington would continue to press foreign governments, like China, to take back citizens staying illegally in the country.

China has reportedly been reluctant to accept its illegal immigrants, including 19,000 being held by American authorities.

"The Asian immigrant population in the US is actually the fastest growing segment in part because it is smaller to start with than the Hispanic population but nevertheless it is definitely growing very fast," said Jack Martin, special projects director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which opposes Mr Bush's guest-worker programme.—AFP

OSLO: Worms, bacteria and beetles living below ground are part of the largest and least known trove of life on earth that could have spinoffs from farming to pharmaceuticals, a UN report said.

“We know little of what is living below our feet...yet it is vital to sustaining life on earth,” said Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

French 19th century chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur was right to say that ‘the role of the very small is large’, Djoghlaf told Reuters.

Experiments in promoting natural organisms in soils — shifting from use of artificial pesticides and fertilisers — had helped improve crop yields in some studies in Brazil, Ivory Coast, Indonesia, India, Kenya, Mexico and Uganda.

Experts in the project believed that soil-dwellers such as earthworms, fungi, termites, ants and bacteria were part of “biggest source of untapped and unknown life on earth”, a UN statement said.

The life forms could help farming and were “a potential source of new...pharmaceutical and industrial products,” it said. Most bids to chart life on earth focus on exotic rain forests, coral reefs or mangroves — overlooking humble mud.

In India, for instance, re-introduction of local earthworms had improved tea harvests at some plantations by almost 300 percent, Djoghlaf said.

In the Los Tuxtlas reserve in northern Mexico, bean yields had risen more than 40 per cent after farmers started using a type of nitrogen-fixing microbe found in local forest soils as a “bio-fertiliser”.

Soil-burrowers such as termites — often dismissed as pests — can help aerate soil and ensure that it can absorb water.

The report said the benefits of diverse soils went beyond farming — the Los Tuxtlas reserve was a rain forest where 40,000 hectares (98,840 acres) were lost in the past 40 years.

“Boosting yields using naturally occurring soil organisms may reduce the need to clear more forest for agriculture, thus helping to conserve the forest and its diversity both above and below ground,” it said.

And soils were often richer in life in forests and fallow land than on farms. A study in Indonesia showed that “the richness and abundance of ants, beetles and termites decreased with increasing land intensification,” it said.—Reuters