Malaysia’s TV3 apologizes for calling Kamala Harris ‘daughter of an illegal immigrant’, SE Asia News & Top Stories



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PUTRAJAYA (THE STAR / ASIA NEWS NETWORK) – Malaysian television channel TV3 has apologized for a news report that mistakenly called US Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, the daughter of an illegal immigrant.

“Referring to a news item in Bulletin 1.30 yesterday, we would like to apologize for an oversight by the Vice President-elect of the United States, Kamala Harris. Actually, she is the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, and not as reported.

“We regret the error in his record,” TV3 said on Monday (November 9).

Sunday’s television report had drawn the ire of many.

A video clip of the news report had been circulating all over social media, with many yelling at the TV channel to apologize.

Harris, 55, made history when she became the first woman to be elected vice president in the United States.

TV3 wrongly reported that the daughter of “an illegal immigrant from India” had “broken a stigma when she became the first black woman to serve as California’s attorney general.”

In fact, Ms. Harris’s mother, Ms. Shymala Gopalan, was a biomedical scientist and had moved from India to the United States to continue her studies.

Ms. Gopalan was 19 years old in 1958, when she was accepted into a master’s program in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley.

At the same university, she met her husband, Mr. Donald J. Harris, an economics student from Jamaica who eventually became a professor at Stanford University.

Ms. Gopalan eventually became a scientist at the prestigious Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

A Twitter user wrote: “Newsletter TV3 just called Kamala Harris’s parents illegal immigrants, they need to have the correct information.”

Another user @abbylatif wrote: “Illegal Immigrants? Newsletter TV3 needs to do an open fix.”

Twitter user Kumar wrote: “My mother was a scientific researcher in cancer and was offered a place to work at a prestigious university … not an illegal immigrant.”

When contacted, the US embassy said it would not comment on the matter.

Harris was named vice president-elect after projected US election results showed that she and President-elect Joe Biden had approved the 270 electoral votes needed to win.



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