The State - News from Sept. 29, 1989

Contending that a seldom-used, 200-year-old law violates their rights to equal protection of the law, some Vietnamese fisherman filed suit in San Francisco to stop the Coast Guard from enforcing the Jones Act, a measure forbidding non-citizens from piloting commercial fishing boats. The lawsuit names six former Vietnamese citizens who have been fishing in California since their arrival in the early 1980s. Attorney Dennis Hayashi of the Asian Law Caucus said the act was originally approved by Congress so the government could commandeer fishing boats in wartime and had not been enforced in decades, until the Coast Guard recently began ordering vessels back to port. Coast Guard spokesman Lt. Cmdr. John Jaskot denied that the Vietnamese have been singled out and insisted that the agency is simply carrying out its obligation to enforce existing laws without passing judgment.