Six Immigration Lies, Dispelled

By Rinku Sen, TomPaine.com. Posted July 24, 2006.

In the ongoing battle over immigration, conservative rhetoric continues to escalate. It's racist, and it gets results. This year, more than 30 states have passed 57 laws banning the undocumented from receiving social services or pledging National Guard troops to patrol the southern U.S. border. Earlier this week, House Republicans in Washington staged a hearing about "cracking down" on undocumented immigrants. Republicans have been told to move ahead but avoid pissing off Latinos - their lesson from Proposition 187 in California -- but a little decoding of the symbols, soundbites and economic arguments they use exposes their fear of a browner nation.

Here, then, are the six racist myths driving the immigration debate, dispelled.

Immigrants are not animals. Last week, Rep. Steve Katz, R.-Ariz., presented his proposal to Congress for a "super fence" along the border. "We could electrify it," he said, "not enough to kill somebody but enough to make them think twice. We do that with livestock all the time." If the problem eased, he suggested, we could open it up again and "let the livestock run through." Enough said.

Neither are they terrorists. In Colorado, a dramatic series of debates ended with the state legislature passing a law requiring adult applicants for public services to prove citizenship. Republicans complained about being beaten down in a "Friday night massacre" because the law didn't go far enough, according to State Rep. Debbie Stafford, R-Aurora. She wanted a ballot measure writing the ban into the state's constitution and also applying to people under 18.

"We're helping to create the next generation of terrorists," she told the Rocky Mountain News . There is no documented connection between immigration and terrorism. When making the flimsy argument that immigration threatens our national security, conservatives like to cite the example of the 9/11 hijackers. Yet, they forget that all 19 hijackers entered the country legally.

Tent cities at the border would be 21st-century concentration camps. Don Goldwater, Arizona's leading Republican gubernatorial candidate, wants to arrest border crossers, imprison them in tents and make them build that coveted super fence. All those National Guard troops sent to the southern border would be kept busy guarding the camps.

There's no invasion. In Idaho, Canyon County Commissioner Robert Vasquez, modeling himself after Tom Tancredo, accused his opponents in a Senate race of "collaborating with the unarmed enemy invading America."

His grandparents were Mexican immigrants, but he fears the consequences of letting in more of their kind, calling this a war: "Either we protect and defend Old Glory at every challenge, or we all learn Spanish and get used to the chicken and worm on the Mexican flag." (Vasquez has joined the National Advisory Committee of Protect Arizona Now, whose chair Virginia Abernethy describes herself as a "white separatist.") There's no evidence, however, that the Latino population will surpass whites any time soon. The Census Bureau projects that by the year 2030, whites will be 24.4 percent of the population; Latinos 20.1 percent. Even in 50 years, Latinos won't outnumber the white majority.

They speak English, just not "English only." Mayor Tom Macklin of Avon Park, Florida, pushed for a new law based on a Pennsylvania precedent that makes English the city's official language -- in addition to fining landlords and denying business licenses to those who accommodate the horde. The city will remove Spanish from all documents, signs and automated phone messages. In Bogota, New Jersey, Mayor Steve Lonegan, generally a free-market libertarian, is campaigning to force McDonald's to remove a Spanish-language billboard. Of course, he'll have to change the town's name too.

Rinku Sen is the publisher of ColorLines magazine and communications director of the Applied Research Center (ARC).

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