Saturday, February 23, 2008

Immigration: Looking forward




-- by Dave

[Last of a three-part series: See parts 1 and 2.]

The terms of the immigration debate, as we've explored, have been largely set by two competing factions of the right: the eliminationism-prone nativist bloc, and the status-quo-oriented corporate conservatives, with the former's ugly xenophobia taking most of the center stage, especially in the mainstream media.

Liberals, as a result, have largely been relegated to the sidelines so far. But more than any other faction in American politics, they stand the most to gain by seizing the issue of immigration reform and making it their own. Responding to the nonsense spewed by conservatives on immigration is a helpful start, because in debunking their popular delusions with facts, we can also discern the direction reforms need to take. But it's only a start.

A liberal approach to immigration reform, in fact, could also have powerful short- and long-term economic and electoral effects that will benefit not just liberals but the country as a whole. But more importantly, it offers not only the best and wisest solutions to some of the thorny issues surrounding the debate, but it positively advances the core values of liberalism in its finest historical tradition.

It's tempting when discussing any kind of political program to focus on policies and the law, but it's more important, I think, to assess the values and principles that must inform those policies. So it might help, perhaps, to reflect briefly on what the values of liberalism actually are. I think Princeton Sociologist Paul Starr put it about as well as anyone when he wrote:
Liberalism wagers that a state... can be strong but constrained – strong because constrained... Rights to education and other requirements for human development and security aim to advance equal opportunity and personal dignity and to promote a creative and productive society. To guarantee those rights, liberals have supported a wider social and economic role for the state, counterbalanced by more robust guarantees of civil liberties and a wider social system of checks and balances anchored in an independent press and pluralistic society.

Applying these principles to the immigration debate, the shape of a liberal program for comprehensive immigration reform emerges:

-- It would embrace the fundamental dignity of immigrants, as well as the respect due their contributions to the country, both economically and culturally.

As we saw in examining the nativist right's popular delusions about immigration, not only do immigrants play a critical role in providing a supply of unskilled labor to the economy, they are an essential component in keeping America economically competitive -- both now and for the foreseeable future.

As the Washington Post editorialized:
Amid the blizzard of data concerning immigrants' effects on wages, welfare and municipal budgets, the essential point is this: The latest wave of immigrants -- legal and illegal, skilled and unskilled -- has stimulated enormous economic activity and wealth generation in this country, and it is implausible that the American economy would fare as well without them.

Moreover, the nation's future competitiveness hinges on immigration. The Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform is one of the progressive organizations that's leading the fight from the liberal side of the aisle, and their position paper on the economy lays out the case clearly:
Comprehensive immigration reform is essential to maintaining and building a strong, healthy U.S. economy. Every facet of our economy today relies on the hard work and productivity of the immigrant workforce. And even with millions of immigrant workers, the US economy is strong and employment is high and unemployment remains low.

Our current immigration laws and quotas are out of date, unworkable, and limit growth to the economy. Comprehensive immigration reform is needed to strengthen the economy, keep American businesses competitive with their foreign rivals, and protect American workers. We need real reform, and real solutions, for a strong economy.


-- It would be not just about "family values," but about improving and enhancing the well-being of every American family, regardless of status.

I wrote about this in some detail previously:
Many right-wing critics of American immigration policy are fond of saying that current policies would work just fine if the government would "just enforce the laws that are on the books."

It seems never to occur to them that the main reason the government doesn't do so, at least not on a massive scale, is simply that the laws as written are largely unenforceable -- or perhaps more to the point, that enforcing them actually creates larger problems, to the point of atrocities, than those they were intended to address.

The chief problem with immigration law in America is the misbegotten nature of the laws themselves. Much of this has to do with their nakedly racist origins, the legacy of which has never been erased.

This could not be any clearer than the effect of immigration laws on families. Sadly, the story of Tony, Janina, and Brian -- one in which we can watch a family being ripped apart -- is replicated every day in America. Those laws, seemingly designed to actually discourage immigration rather than deal with it both thoughtfully and helpfully, have for many years now had a devastating effect on immigrant families.

As I noted then, this effect has hit home the hardest in the recent "immigration crackdowns" that have produced a significant number of raids on employers of undocumented immigrants in the past year by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials:
What's happened, of course, is that many of these undocumented workers have spouses and children who are either citizens or legal immigrants. In rounding up massive numbers of these immigrants, and ostensibly concerned about keeping families together, ICE has been sweeping up entire families and placing them in euphemistically titled "family detention centers" that are really nothing less than modern concentration camps. And in doing so, they effects of the incarceration on families has been predictably awful:
The report lauded the goal of keeping families together but urged DHS to close the Hutto facility, saying that "prison-like institutions" are not appropriate for families. "Family detention is not one that has any precedent in the United States, therefore no appropriate licensing requirements exist," the report said.

... The report recommended that ICE parole asylum-seekers while they await the outcome of their hearings. It also said that immigrant families not eligible for parole should be released to special shelters or other homelike settings run by nonprofit groups and be required to participate in electronic monitoring or an intensive supervision program that would use a combination of electronic ankle bracelets, home visits and telephone reporting.

The 72-page report also criticized the educational services for children; the food service and rushed feeding times for children; the health care, especially for vulnerable children and pregnant women; the therapeutic mental health care as insufficient or culturally inappropriate; and the recreation time as inadequate for children. The review said that families were being held for months in Hutto and for years in the case of the longer-established Berks facility.

The report also cited inappropriate disciplinary practices used against adults and children, including threats of separation, verbal abuse and withholding recreation or using temperature control, particularly extremely cold conditions, as punishment.


... What's clear is that these effects are the clear result of anti-immigrant agitation that has placed increasing pressure on the Bush administration to act. And when they have acted, the results have been predictably atrocious, especially for families:
Arrests of undocumented immigrants have grown 750 percent between 2002 and 2006, going from 485 arrests to 3,667. That dramatic increase in scale and frequency has produced far more visible humanitarian consequences than ever before, an immigrants' advocate said .

"This is the hidden underbelly of immigration enforcement," said Christopher Nugent, a Washington-based immigration attorney. "This is nothing new. It happens all the time."

Nugent and others said families are separated and children left with friends or relatives every day in the course of normal ICE immigration detentions. But the welfare of children affected by immigration raids has become a bigger issue in recent months as the scope of the immigration raids has expanded.

... "America is going to see more and more of this," said John Keller, a Minneapolis immigration attorney who represented some of the 239 Swift & Co. workers detained in Worthington. The raids are "a very blunt tool that is being applied to family situations."

Children can be separated from detained parents for months, while parents await bond hearings, or deportation. Parents who leave the United States face the choice of taking US citizen children with them, or being separated from them permanently in the hope of giving those children better opportunities here. Social service workers in other cities where raids took place told of scrambling to try to get passports for the US citizen children whose parents chose to take them back to the countries they left.

ICE is not obligated to provide for the children of undocumented workers they arrest, or to go easier on those with children, said Victor Cerda, a former ICE general counsel and a 10-year veteran of immigration enforcement.


-- It would work to make immigration law reflect basic American democratic values: fair play, equality of opportunity, and most of all, fundamental human decency: the mutual respect for our individual rights and freedoms and responsibilities as well as the value of community action in bettering life for every citizen.

I wrote about this a little while back over at Rick Perlstein's place, noting that "the xenophobia favored by conservatives -- which so far has dominated the national discourse on the issue" in fact "has prevented us from having a rational discussion of the real core values of what it means to be American as an essential component of immigration."

When liberals talk about “assimilation” as an essential component of immigration, they shouldn't focus on superficial things like culture and language (by urging, for instance, English-only measures or other superficial steps) -- rather it is our shared values as Americans that we should be talking about. It isn’t about white "culture" (read: privilege) or maintaining the status quo, it’s about absorbing the values that bind us as a nation -- values well beyond race and ethnicity.

As I noted then:
I’m probably not the person to say authoritatively what those values are, but we should be talking about them. As starting points, we can probably all agree that individual freedom, a respect for the rights and freedoms of others, and a respect for the democratic process are good mutual starting points; progressives, centrists and even conservatives might agree further that equality of opportunity, tolerance of opposing views, and an unshakable opposition to scapegoating, violence, thuggery, and threats are also some of our core values. Perhaps others would like to chime in -- the point being that we need to have this discussion.

Moreover, the fact that so many of the new immigrants are coming in through the back door -- instead of being handled legal through a rational legal system -- has eroded our ability to ensure the transmission and absorption of core American values, which is yet another reason to find a way to return immigration to the effective rule of law. I believe that this degradation of the “assimilation” process is fuel not only for the resentment of legal immigrants, but of the larger populace as well.

-- Insist on asserting the right of immigrants to work without being subjected to the panoply of abuses by corporate and business interests who profit from the status quo -- particularly the right to decent wages and working conditions, as well as the ability to organize both as workers and as political blocs.

As the CCIF puts it:
Comprehensive immigration reform is needed to take the unregulated, illegal, and disorderly flow of unscreened and unauthorized workers and replace it with a legal, orderly, limited flow of vetted and authorized workers. When a small number of corrupt employers are able to flaunt the system, it creates a race to the bottom that hurts wages and working conditions for all blue collar and low-wage workers, native-born and immigrant alike. To avoid the exploitation and abuses of flawed guest workers programs, the nation needs a “break-the-mold” worker visa program that adequately protects the wages and working conditions of U.S. and immigrant workers.

One of my commenters, a fellow named Cascadian, discussed this recently:
The problem is the pursuit of cheap labor at the expense of worker's rights. Undocumented workers are a great wedge for employers to use because they are cheap, can be threatened with deportation or worse because of their undocumented status, and hiring or even threatening to hire them drags down wages for Americans who can least afford to make less money.

The solution is to remove the power of this wedge. ... Getting this done means shifting the narrative on this issue from one that blames workers to one that empowers workers, whether citizens or immigrants, against the unsavory practices of businesses.

Cascadian, incidentally, proposes a system of worker visas that sounds like it may indeed "break the mold":
Require employers, even people hiring nannies or people to work on their yards, to pay a livable minimum wage and all relevant taxes to all employees, regardless of whether they are citizens (say, $10-$12 an hour). Give 90-day travel visas to any Mexican citizen that does not have a criminal record or documented associations with terrorist groups. Create a new kind of employment visa that is not tied to a particular job but allows residency with proof of employment, and that reverts to a travel visa at the time of unemployment. Businesses that hire people under this visa program report hiring and firing to immigration so that these people are in the system and the visa status can be updated. Most importantly, fund an audit of businesses tied to fines for violations. If someone is hired without granting a work visa, it's the *employer's* fault, and they're on the hook for six months wages PAID TO THE EMPLOYEE. If it's found that some employees, citizen or not, are not being paid the legal minimum, then again, fine a minimum six months wages paid TO THE EMPLOYEE.

This system would mean that employers would have no leverage over immigrant workers by threatening deportation. It would transform every immigrant worker into someone with an incentive to whistleblow if they're not being paid a fair wage. It raises wages to a level that avoids poverty for everyone and means that there are no jobs in the US that "citizens won't do." That means there are no advantages to hiring immigrants, and several disadvantages (such as the language issue.) The only immigrants who would be hired would be those who honestly could do more work better for the same amount of money.

It makes every immigrant legal, but creates a situation where truly seasonal workers could work and return home, and then come back the next year, without being punished or exploited. They also can lose a job, and look for a new one without violating their visa terms. It also gets everyone documented while still preventing dangerous people from entering the country. It removes the incentives for people to cross the border illegally on both the demand and supply end, and renders the need for additional security measures moot.

As for both citizenship and permanent residency, create a point system that favors English fluency and professional skills but also gives credit to long-time immigrant workers who have been here for years. People who owe fines under the current system would still have to pay them, but that money could be garnished from their future wages, which would be at the prevailing minimum wage and in most cases higher than what people were getting paid anyway. The net effect would be that businesses would be paying fines for their past use of illegal labor. They are the real people violating US law, after all, and not the immigrants who just want to work and would work legally if that were an option.


Ideas like these may turn out to have problematic aspects, but they liberals should be taking proposals like these and throwing them into the mix as an alternative to the tepid (and moreover counterproductive) measures that have emerged from Congress and the White House so far.

-- It should recognize that the clearest means to achieve real equality of opportunity for immigrants lies in creating an equitable and obtainable path to citizenship for those who come here to work.

This is not the "amnesty" for immigrants that gets the nativists worked up into a froth -- though in fact a rational case can be made for outright amnesty as well. As Nathan Thornburgh observes in that Time piece, many critics protest that "amnesty would be unfair to those waiting in line to come legally."
But that's a false comparison. If people are frustrated, as they should be, by the fact that some eligible immigrants have been waiting for citizenship for as many as 28 years, then by all means, fix that problem. Streamline the process for legal immigration. But don't blame that red-tape nightmare on the millions of low-wage illegals already here, who form a very different (and vastly more populous) group.

Nonetheless, comprehensive immigration reform must be about reinvigorating fundamental respect for the rule of law (including our borders). That in turn means that creating a clear path to citizenship entails some acknowledgement on the part of undocumented immigrants that they broke civil laws in coming here and will pay a fine accordingly -- nothing onerous, but an essential step anyway.

But the larger aspect of this reform lies in making immigration both functional and effective -- founded not on irrational fears about racial makeup and cultural decline but on rational criteria, particularly the normal economic demands of the marketplace.

A good example of the way nativist xenophobia undermines rational policy is the debate over issuing driver's licenses to undocumented workers, which turned into such a debacle for Elliot Spitzer. The reality of the matter is that, as Bruce Schneier observes, nearly every knowledgable law-enforcement and anti-terrorism expert will tell you that issuing such licenses actually enhances our domestic security by giving authorities the tools they need to track potential terror or criminal suspects:
In reality, we are a much more secure nation if we do issue driver's licenses and/or state IDs to every resident who applies, regardless of immigration status. Issuing them doesn't make us any less secure, and refusing puts us at risk.

The state driver's license databases are the only comprehensive databases of U.S. residents. They're more complete, and contain more information - including photographs and, in some cases, fingerprints - than the IRS database, the Social Security database, or state birth certificate databases. As such, they are an invaluable police tool - for investigating crimes, tracking down suspects, and proving guilt.

Removing the 8 million-15 million illegal immigrants from these databases would only make law enforcement harder. Of course, the unlicensed won't pack up and leave. They will drive without licenses, increasing insurance premiums for everyone. They will use fake IDs, buy real IDs from crooked DMV employees - as several of the 9/11 terrorists did - forge "breeder documents" to get real IDs (another 9/11 terrorist trick), or resort to identity theft. These millions of people will continue to live and work in this country, invisible to any government database and therefore the police.

-- Comprehend the "bigger picture" by directly engaging our the governments of neighboring nations, especially in Mexico and Latin America, in an economic program aimed at eradicating the grotesque differential in wages -- as well as basic standards of living -- between those nations and the United States.

At some point, as I've noted before, in addition to the "pull" effect exerted on immigration in the Americas by economic demand, we're also going to have to come to terms with the "push" from the southern side of the border. Eventually, we're going to have to begin behaving more like real neighbors when it comes to our neighbors to the south, instead of treating them like the second-class humans as so many Americans are wont to do. Certain imbedded American attitudes -- particularly the notion that poor people are poor because they're lazy and won't work hard enough -- linger in our economic policies and our cultural prejudices. The result is that we come to think of the pervasive poverty of so many Mexicans' daily lives as almost "natural" instead of the atrocity it is.

Marcella Sanchez at the Washington Post discussed this some time back:
Whether you believe Mexican immigrants help or hurt the United States, there is one incontrovertible truth: work here pays much, much better. A low-skilled Mexican worker in this country earns five to six times as much as he would back home, assuming he or she could find a comparable job.

This truth is so obvious it seems a cliche and yet it remains mostly absent from the current debate on how to reform U.S. immigration. For all the talk around the country of border enforcement, guest worker programs, employer sanctions and driver's licensing restrictions, the sad fact is that none of these "solutions'' addresses the root of the problem -- a persistent and large U.S.-Mexican income disparity.

Even the most comprehensive and progressive immigration reform proposal in years, introduced this month by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., is more concerned with making U.S. immigration policy more humane than dealing with income disparity between the United States and Mexico. The bill crafts a guest worker program -- creating new visa categories and quotas and a secure identification system for employers -- but only provides a vague indication that income disparity might be a problem worth taking on.


There have been some ideas put forth for tackling this disparity. Robert Pastor at Newsweek described one such potential solution, particularly in the wake of the economic disaster that NAFTA has proven to be for Mexican workers:
What they should do is think far more boldly. The only way to solve the most pressing problems in the region -- including immigration, security, and declining competitiveness -- is to create a true North American Community. No two nations are more important to the United States than Canada and Mexico, and no investment will bolster security and yield greater economic benefits for America than one that narrows the income gap between Mexico and its North American partners.

Bridging that gap was supposed to be one of the many benefits that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would deliver. And indeed, since NAFTA took effect in 1994, trade and investment among the United States, Mexico and Canada have nearly tripled, making North America the world's largest free-trade area in terms of territory and gross domestic product (GDP). Yet the income gap has widened: the annual per capita GDP of the United States ($43,883) today is more than six times that of Mexico ($6,937).

NAFTA has been inadequate in other ways as well. The agreement made no provisions for cushioning economic downturns like the Mexican peso crisis of 1994-95. It created no credible institutions that operate on a truly regional basis. Thus, after terrorists struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration unilaterally tightened security on its international borders while Ottawa and Mexico City reverted to their traditional ambivalence toward Washington.

Illegal immigration has increased and if anything, NAFTA has inadvertently fueled immigration by encouraging foreign investment near the U.S.-Mexican border, which in turn serves as a magnet for workers in central and southern Mexico. As a result, the number of undocumented Mexican workers who live in the United States has skyrocketed in the NAFTA era, from an estimated 1 million in the mid-1990s to about 6 million today. One of every six undocumented immigrants is under 18 years old, and since the mid-1990s the fastest growth of the population has occurred in states like Arizona and North Carolina that had relatively small numbers of foreign-born residents in the past.

Any comprehensive immigration reform will have to radically readjust NAFTA to address its manifest inequities inherent in the system it creates: as long as capital can move freely over borders but labor cannot, workers will be always at a disadvantage. The absolute freedoms now enjoyed by business interests under NAFTA should be reined in, and the ability of workers to change their citizenship should be made less difficult.

----

Now, because I can't claim to be a real "expert" on immigration -- in the end, I'm simply a journalist/blogger intent on contributing to the discourse -- I fully expect that I've overlooked some important aspect of the debate here, though I have tried to be as thorough as space permits.

But these posts aren't intended as an end in themselves, but simply a start: an attempt to get the conversation going among liberals about what they should be doing about immigration and why it is so fundamentally important an issue for them.

I'm certainly not an organizer or a political doer -- and I'll leave it up to those who are to take the appropriate action to realize any liberal immigration-reform program. But obviously, that's the level where people will take the ideas we develop through the ensuing discourse and make them into reality.

Certainly, doing so will entail building networks among progressive organizations with a direct interest in comprehensive immigration reform, many of whom are already natural allies on other fronts: labor unions, civil-rights groups, Latino and immigrant interest groups, even environmental groups. Those relationships will undoubtedly be complicated and colored by the various interests they represent, but in the end, we can build them soundly on the common ground of our very real shared interests.

And the blogosphere can have a role in this change as well. There is a wealth of blogs out there dealing with immigration and Latino issues on a regular basis, and many of them feature not just important perspectives that need to be part of the conversation, but compelling and powerful writing as well. A sampling: Migra Matters, Latina Lista, Culture Kitchen, Matt Ortega, Immigration Prof Blog, The Silence of our Friends, Citizen Orange, The Unapologetic Mexican ... well, the list is long, and this one is certainly incomplete. But you get the idea.

If you don't make at least a few of these blogs part of your daily reading -- and especially if haven't ever visited them -- you should: Not just because their issues and concerns are our issues and concerns, but also because otherwise, you're missing out on a lot of good writing and reading.

Moreover, it's from small steps like this that we begin building the necessary networks for our future. And when it comes to immigration, that is the bottom line of the matter.

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Friday, February 22, 2008

Immigration: Looking Forward



[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

The terms of the immigration debate, as we’ve explored, have been largely set by two competing factions of the right: the eliminationism-prone nativist bloc, and the status-quo-oriented corporate conservatives, with the former’s ugly xenophobia taking most of the center stage, especially in the mainstream media.

Liberals, as a result, have largely been relegated to the sidelines so far. But more than any other faction in American politics, they stand the most to gain by seizing the issue of immigration reform and making it their own. Responding to the nonsense spewed by conservatives on immigration is a helpful start, because in debunking their popular delusions with facts, we can also discern the direction reforms need to take. But it’s only a start.

A liberal approach to immigration reform, in fact, could also have powerful short- and long-term economic and electoral effects that will benefit not just liberals but the country as a whole. But more importantly, it offers not only the best and wisest solutions to some of the thorny issues surrounding the debate, but it positively advances the core values of liberalism in its finest historical tradition.

It’s tempting when discussing any kind of political program to focus on policies and the law, but it’s more important, I think, to assess the values and principles that must inform those policies. So it might help, perhaps, to reflect briefly on what the values of liberalism actually are. I think Princeton Sociologist Paul Starr put it about as well as anyone when he wrote:
Liberalism wagers that a state… can be strong but constrained – strong because constrained… Rights to education and other requirements for human development and security aim to advance equal opportunity and personal dignity and to promote a creative and productive society. To guarantee those rights, liberals have supported a wider social and economic role for the state, counterbalanced by more robust guarantees of civil liberties and a wider social system of checks and balances anchored in an independent press and pluralistic society.
Applying these principles to the immigration debate, the shape of a liberal program for comprehensive immigration reform emerges:

– It would embrace the fundamental dignity of immigrants, as well as the respect due their contributions to the country, both economically and culturally.


As we saw in examining the nativist right’s popular delusions about immigration, not only do immigrants play a critical role in providing a supply of unskilled labor to the economy, they are an essential component in keeping America economically competitive — both now and for the foreseeable future.

As the Washington Post editorialized:
Amid the blizzard of data concerning immigrants’ effects on wages, welfare and municipal budgets, the essential point is this: The latest wave of immigrants — legal and illegal, skilled and unskilled — has stimulated enormous economic activity and wealth generation in this country, and it is implausible that the American economy would fare as well without them.
Moreover, the nation’s future competitiveness hinges on immigration. The Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform is one of the progressive organizations that’s leading the fight from the liberal side of the aisle, and their position paper on the economy lays out the case clearly:
Comprehensive immigration reform is essential to maintaining and building a strong, healthy U.S. economy. Every facet of our economy today relies on the hard work and productivity of the immigrant workforce. And even with millions of immigrant workers, the US economy is strong and employment is high and unemployment remains low.

Our current immigration laws and quotas are out of date, unworkable, and limit growth to the economy. Comprehensive immigration reform is needed to strengthen the economy, keep American businesses competitive with their foreign rivals, and protect American workers. We need real reform, and real solutions, for a strong economy.
– It would be not just about "family values," but about improving and enhancing the well-being of every American family, regardless of status.

I wrote about this in some detail previously:
Many right-wing critics of American immigration policy are fond of saying that current policies would work just fine if the government would "just enforce the laws that are on the books."

It seems never to occur to them that the main reason the government doesn’t do so, at least not on a massive scale, is simply that the laws as written are largely unenforceable — or perhaps more to the point, that enforcing them actually creates larger problems, to the point of atrocities, than those they were intended to address.

The chief problem with immigration law in America is the misbegotten nature of the laws themselves. Much of this has to do with their nakedly racist origins, the legacy of which has never been erased.

This could not be any clearer than the effect of immigration laws on families. Sadly, the story of Tony, Janina, and Brian — one in which we can watch a family being ripped apart — is replicated every day in America. Those laws, seemingly designed to actually discourage immigration rather than deal with it both thoughtfully and helpfully, have for many years now had a devastating effect on immigrant families.
As I noted then, this effect has hit home the hardest in the recent "immigration crackdowns" that have produced a significant number of raids on employers of undocumented immigrants in the past year by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials:
What’s happened, of course, is that many of these undocumented workers have spouses and children who are either citizens or legal immigrants. In rounding up massive numbers of these immigrants, and ostensibly concerned about keeping families together, ICE has been sweeping up entire families and placing them in euphemistically titled "family detention centers" that are really nothing less than modern concentration camps.

And in doing so, they effects of the incarceration on families has been predictably awful:
The report lauded the goal of keeping families together but urged DHS to close the Hutto facility, saying that "prison-like institutions" are not appropriate for families. "Family detention is not one that has any precedent in the United States, therefore no appropriate licensing requirements exist," the report said.

… The report recommended that ICE parole asylum-seekers while they await the outcome of their hearings. It also said that immigrant families not eligible for parole should be released to special shelters or other homelike settings run by nonprofit groups and be required to participate in electronic monitoring or an intensive supervision program that would use a combination of electronic ankle bracelets, home visits and telephone reporting.

The 72-page report also criticized the educational services for children; the food service and rushed feeding times for children; the health care, especially for vulnerable children and pregnant women; the therapeutic mental health care as insufficient or culturally inappropriate; and the recreation time as inadequate for children. The review said that families were being held for months in Hutto and for years in the case of the longer-established Berks facility.

The report also cited inappropriate disciplinary practices used against adults and children, including threats of separation, verbal abuse and withholding recreation or using temperature control, particularly extremely cold conditions, as punishment.
… What’s clear is that these effects are the clear result of anti-immigrant agitation that has placed increasing pressure on the Bush administration to act. And when they have acted, the results have been predictably atrocious, especially for families:
Arrests of undocumented immigrants have grown 750 percent between 2002 and 2006, going from 485 arrests to 3,667. That dramatic increase in scale and frequency has produced far more visible humanitarian consequences than ever before, an immigrants’ advocate said .

"This is the hidden underbelly of immigration enforcement," said Christopher Nugent, a Washington-based immigration attorney. "This is nothing new. It happens all the time."

Nugent and others said families are separated and children left with friends or relatives every day in the course of normal ICE immigration detentions.

But the welfare of children affected by immigration raids has become a bigger issue in recent months as the scope of the immigration raids has expanded.

… "America is going to see more and more of this," said John Keller, a Minneapolis immigration attorney who represented some of the 239 Swift & Co. workers detained in Worthington. The raids are "a very blunt tool that is being applied to family situations."

Children can be separated from detained parents for months, while parents await bond hearings, or deportation. Parents who leave the United States face the choice of taking US citizen children with them, or being separated from them permanently in the hope of giving those children better opportunities here. Social service workers in other cities where raids took place told of scrambling to try to get passports for the US citizen children whose parents chose to take them back to the countries they left.

ICE is not obligated to provide for the children of undocumented workers they arrest, or to go easier on those with children, said Victor Cerda, a former ICE general counsel and a 10-year veteran of immigration enforcement.
– It would work to make immigration law reflect basic American democratic values: fair play, equality of opportunity, and most of all, fundamental human decency: the mutual respect for our individual rights and freedoms and responsibilities as well as the value of community action in bettering life for every citizen.

I wrote about this a little while back over at Rick Perlstein’s place, noting that "the xenophobia favored by conservatives — which so far has dominated the national discourse on the issue" in fact "has prevented us from having a rational discussion of the real core values of what it means to be American as an essential component of immigration."

When liberals talk about “assimilation” as an essential component of immigration, they shouldn’t focus on superficial things like culture and language (by urging, for instance, English-only measures or other superficial steps) — rather it is our shared values as Americans that we should be talking about. It isn’t about white "culture" (read: privilege) or maintaining the status quo, it’s about absorbing the values that bind us as a nation — values well beyond race and ethnicity.

As I noted then:
I’m probably not the person to say authoritatively what those values are, but we should be talking about them. As starting points, we can probably all agree that individual freedom, a respect for the rights and freedoms of others, and a respect for the democratic process are good mutual starting points; progressives, centrists and even conservatives might agree further that equality of opportunity, tolerance of opposing views, and an unshakable opposition to scapegoating, violence, thuggery, and threats are also some of our core values. Perhaps others would like to chime in — the point being that we need to have this discussion.

Moreover, the fact that so many of the new immigrants are coming in through the back door — instead of being handled legal through a rational legal system — has eroded our ability to ensure the transmission and absorption of core American values, which is yet another reason to find a way to return immigration to the effective rule of law. I believe that this degradation of the “assimilation” process is fuel not only for the resentment of legal immigrants, but of the larger populace as well.
– It would insist on asserting the right of immigrants to work without being subjected to the panoply of abuses by corporate and business interests who profit from the status quo — particularly the right to decent wages and working conditions, as well as the ability to organize both as workers and as political blocs.

As the CCIF puts it:
Comprehensive immigration reform is needed to take the unregulated, illegal, and disorderly flow of unscreened and unauthorized workers and replace it with a legal, orderly, limited flow of vetted and authorized workers. When a small number of corrupt employers are able to flaunt the system, it creates a race to the bottom that hurts wages and working conditions for all blue collar and low-wage workers, native-born and immigrant alike. To avoid the exploitation and abuses of flawed guest workers programs, the nation needs a “break-the-mold” worker visa program that adequately protects the wages and working conditions of U.S. and immigrant workers.
One of my commenters, a fellow named Cascadian, discussed this recently:
The problem is the pursuit of cheap labor at the expense of worker’s rights. Undocumented workers are a great wedge for employers to use because they are cheap, can be threatened with deportation or worse because of their undocumented status, and hiring or even threatening to hire them drags down wages for Americans who can least afford to make less money.

The solution is to remove the power of this wedge. … Getting this done means shifting the narrative on this issue from one that blames workers to one that empowers workers, whether citizens or immigrants, against the unsavory practices of businesses.
Cascadian, incidentally, proposes a system of worker visas that sounds like it may indeed "break the mold":
Require employers, even people hiring nannies or people to work on their yards, to pay a livable minimum wage and all relevant taxes to all employees, regardless of whether they are citizens (say, $10-$12 an hour). Give 90-day travel visas to any Mexican citizen that does not have a criminal record or documented associations with terrorist groups. Create a new kind of employment visa that is not tied to a particular job but allows residency with proof of employment, and that reverts to a travel visa at the time of unemployment.

Businesses that hire people under this visa program report hiring and firing to immigration so that these people are in the system and the visa status can be updated.

Most importantly, fund an audit of businesses tied to fines for violations. If someone is hired without granting a work visa, it’s the *employer’s* fault, and they’re on the hook for six months wages PAID TO THE EMPLOYEE. If it’s found that some employees, citizen or not, are not being paid the legal minimum, then again, fine a minimum six months wages paid TO THE EMPLOYEE.

This system would mean that employers would have no leverage over immigrant workers by threatening deportation. It would transform every immigrant worker into someone with an incentive to whistleblow if they’re not being paid a fair wage. It raises wages to a level that avoids poverty for everyone and means that there are no jobs in the US that "citizens won’t do." That means there are no advantages to hiring immigrants, and several disadvantages (such as the language issue.) The only immigrants who would be hired would be those who honestly could do more work better for the same amount of money.

It makes every immigrant legal, but creates a situation where truly seasonal workers could work and return home, and then come back the next year, without being punished or exploited. They also can lose a job, and look for a new one without violating their visa terms. It also gets everyone documented while still preventing dangerous people from entering the country. It removes the incentives for people to cross the border illegally on both the demand and supply end, and renders the need for additional security measures moot.

As for both citizenship and permanent residency, create a point system that favors English fluency and professional skills but also gives credit to long-time immigrant workers who have been here for years. People who owe fines under the current system would still have to pay them, but that money could be garnished from their future wages, which would be at the prevailing minimum wage and in most cases higher than what people were getting paid anyway. The net effect would be that businesses would be paying fines for their past use of illegal labor. They are the real people violating US law, after all, and not the immigrants who just want to work and would work legally if that were an option.
Ideas like these may turn out to have problematic aspects, but liberals should be taking proposals like these and throwing them into the mix as an alternative to the tepid (and moreover counterproductive) measures that have emerged from Congress and the White House so far.

– It recognizes that the clearest means to achieve real equality of opportunity for immigrants lies in creating an equitable and obtainable path to citizenship for those who come here to work.


This is not the "amnesty" for immigrants that gets the nativists worked up into a froth — though in fact a rational case can be made for outright amnesty as well. As Nathan Thornburgh observes in that Time piece, many critics protest that "amnesty would be unfair to those waiting in line to come legally."
But that’s a false comparison. If people are frustrated, as they should be, by the fact that some eligible immigrants have been waiting for citizenship for as many as 28 years, then by all means, fix that problem. Streamline the process for legal immigration. But don’t blame that red-tape nightmare on the millions of low-wage illegals already here, who form a very different (and vastly more populous) group.
Nonetheless, comprehensive immigration reform must be about reinvigorating fundamental respect for the rule of law (including our borders). That in turn means that creating a clear path to citizenship entails some acknowledgement on the part of undocumented immigrants that they broke civil laws in coming here and will pay a fine accordingly — nothing onerous, but an essential step anyway.

But the larger aspect of this reform lies in making immigration both functional and effective — founded not on irrational fears about racial makeup and cultural decline but on rational criteria, particularly the normal economic demands of the marketplace.

A good example of the way nativist xenophobia undermines rational policy is the debate over issuing driver’s licenses to undocumented workers, which turned into such a debacle for Elliot Spitzer. The reality of the matter is that, as Bruce Schneier observes, nearly every knowledgable law-enforcement and anti-terrorism expert will tell you that issuing such licenses actually enhances our domestic security by giving authorities the tools they need to track potential terror or criminal suspects:
In reality, we are a much more secure nation if we do issue driver’s licenses and/or state IDs to every resident who applies, regardless of immigration status. Issuing them doesn’t make us any less secure, and refusing puts us at risk.

The state driver’s license databases are the only comprehensive databases of U.S. residents. They’re more complete, and contain more information – including photographs and, in some cases, fingerprints – than the IRS database, the Social Security database, or state birth certificate databases. As such, they are an invaluable police tool – for investigating crimes, tracking down suspects, and proving guilt.

Removing the 8 million-15 million illegal immigrants from these databases would only make law enforcement harder. Of course, the unlicensed won’t pack up and leave. They will drive without licenses, increasing insurance premiums for everyone. They will use fake IDs, buy real IDs from crooked DMV employees – as several of the 9/11 terrorists did – forge "breeder documents" to get real IDs (another 9/11 terrorist trick), or resort to identity theft. These millions of people will continue to live and work in this country, invisible to any government database and therefore the police.
– Comprehend the "bigger picture" by directly engaging our the governments of neighboring nations, especially in Mexico and Latin America, in an economic program aimed at eradicating the grotesque differential in wages — as well as basic standards of living — between those nations and the United States.

At some point, as I’ve noted before, in addition to the "pull" effect exerted on immigration in the Americas by economic demand, we’re also going to have to come to terms with the "push" from the southern side of the border. Eventually, we’re going to have to begin behaving more like real neighbors when it comes to our neighbors to the south, instead of treating them like the second-class humans as so many Americans are wont to do. Certain imbedded American attitudes — particularly the notion that poor people are poor because they’re lazy and won’t work hard enough — linger in our economic policies and our cultural prejudices. The result is that we come to think of the pervasive poverty of so many Mexicans’ daily lives as almost "natural" instead of the atrocity it is.
Marcella Sanchez at the Washington Post discussed this some time back:
Whether you believe Mexican immigrants help or hurt the United States, there is one incontrovertible truth: work here pays much, much better. A low-skilled Mexican worker in this country earns five to six times as much as he would back home, assuming he or she could find a comparable job.

This truth is so obvious it seems a cliche and yet it remains mostly absent from the current debate on how to reform U.S. immigration. For all the talk around the country of border enforcement, guest worker programs, employer sanctions and driver’s licensing restrictions, the sad fact is that none of these "solutions” addresses the root of the problem — a persistent and large U.S.-Mexican income disparity.

Even the most comprehensive and progressive immigration reform proposal in years, introduced this month by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., is more concerned with making U.S. immigration policy more humane than dealing with income disparity between the United States and Mexico. The bill crafts a guest worker program — creating new visa categories and quotas and a secure identification system for employers — but only provides a vague indication that income disparity might be a problem worth taking on.
There have been some ideas put forth for tackling this disparity. Robert Pastor at Newsweek described one such potential solution, particularly in the wake of the economic disaster that NAFTA has proven to be for Mexican workers:

What they should do is think far more boldly. The only way to solve the most pressing problems in the region — including immigration, security, and declining competitiveness — is to create a true North American Community. No two nations are more important to the United States than Canada and Mexico, and no investment will bolster security and yield greater economic benefits for America than one that narrows the income gap between Mexico and its North American partners.
Bridging that gap was supposed to be one of the many benefits that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would deliver. And indeed, since NAFTA took effect in 1994, trade and investment among the United States, Mexico and Canada have nearly tripled, making North America the world’s largest free-trade area in terms of territory and gross domestic product (GDP). Yet the income gap has widened: the annual per capita GDP of the United States ($43,883) today is more than six times that of Mexico ($6,937).

NAFTA has been inadequate in other ways as well. The agreement made no provisions for cushioning economic downturns like the Mexican peso crisis of 1994-95. It created no credible institutions that operate on a truly regional basis. Thus, after terrorists struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration unilaterally tightened security on its international borders while Ottawa and Mexico City reverted to their traditional ambivalence toward Washington.

Illegal immigration has increased and if anything, NAFTA has inadvertently fueled immigration by encouraging foreign investment near the U.S.-Mexican border, which in turn serves as a magnet for workers in central and southern Mexico. As a result, the number of undocumented Mexican workers who live in the United States has skyrocketed in the NAFTA era, from an estimated 1 million in the mid-1990s to about 6 million today. One of every six undocumented immigrants is under 18 years old, and since the mid-1990s the fastest growth of the population has occurred in states like Arizona and North Carolina that had relatively small numbers of foreign-born residents in the past.

Any comprehensive immigration reform will have to radically readjust NAFTA to address its manifest inequities inherent in the system it creates: as long as capital can move freely over borders but labor cannot, workers will be always at a disadvantage. The absolute freedoms now enjoyed by business interests under NAFTA should be reined in, and the ability of workers to change their citizenship should be made less difficult.
—-

Now, because I can’t claim to be a real "expert" on immigration — in the end, I’m simply a journalist/blogger intent on contributing to the discourse — I fully expect that I’ve overlooked some important aspect of the debate here, though I have tried to be as thorough as space permits.
But these posts aren’t intended as an end in themselves, but simply a start: an attempt to get the conversation going among liberals about what they should be doing about immigration and why it is so fundamentally important an issue for them.

I’m certainly not an organizer or a political doer — and I’ll leave it up to those who are to take the appropriate action to realize any liberal immigration-reform program. But obviously, that’s the level where people will take the ideas we develop through the ensuing discourse and make them into reality.

Certainly, doing so will entail building networks among progressive organizations with a direct interest in comprehensive immigration reform, many of whom are already natural allies on other fronts: labor unions, civil-rights groups, Latino and immigrant interest groups, even environmental groups. Those relationships will undoubtedly be complicated and colored by the various interests they represent, but in the end, we can build them soundly on the common ground of our very real shared interests.

And the blogosphere can have a role in this change as well. There is a wealth of blogs out there dealing with immigration and Latino issues on a regular basis, and many of them feature not just important perspectives that need to be part of the conversation, but compelling and powerful writing as well. A sampling: Migra Matters, Latina Lista, Matt Ortega, Immigration Prof Blog, The Silence of our Friends, Citizen Orange, The Unapologetic Mexican … well, the list is long, and this one is certainly incomplete. But you get the idea.

If you don’t make at least a few of these blogs part of your daily reading — and especially if haven’t ever visited them — you should: Not just because their issues and concerns are our issues and concerns, but also because otherwise, you’re missing out on a lot of good writing and reading.

Moreover, it’s from small steps like this that we begin building the necessary networks for our future. And when it comes to immigration, that is the bottom line of the matter.

Who would Hitler watch?

-- by Dave

I was inspired by the polling question posed by Fox News:
Who is Usama Rooting For?

Who does Usama bin Laden want to be the next president? More people think the terrorist leader wants Obama to win (30 percent) than think he wants Clinton (22 percent) or McCain (10 percent). Another 18 percent says it doesn’t matter to bin Laden and 20 percent are unsure.

So I ran a quick poll of my fellow Americans (mostly friends of mine, making my methods only slightly less scientific than Fox's), asking them a similar question:
Which network would Hitler watch?

The results: 9 out of 10 answered, without hesitation: "Fox News!" (The general consensus was that it would most appeal to his taste for fine propaganda.) Another .5 percent answered "CNN," while .2% tabbed MSNBC as der Fuhrer's fave. One of the respondents noted that Hitler never watched television, but we ignored him.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

O'Reilly and lynching




-- by Dave

Suppose, back in 2000, that Joe Lieberman were reported to have said something that right-wingers immediately cast as being anti-American. And in discussing it, someone -- oh, say, Bill O'Reilly -- went on the air and semi-defended him thus:
I don't think we ought to send Joe Lieberman to the gas chambers unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the man really feels. If that's how he really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down.

Do you think anyone would have found that acceptable? Do you think he'd have been able to get away with a refusal to apologize for the inappropriateness of the remark?

Because he did essentially the same thing this week in discussing allegedly anti-American remarks made by Michelle Obama:
"I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down."

O'Reilly so far is refusing to back down or apologize, because, as his apologists insist, he was making remarks ostensibly in her defense. His producer put it thus:
"What Bill said was an obvious repudiation of anyone attacking Michelle Obama," he said, via email. "As he has said more than ten times, he is giving her the benefit of the doubt."

Yes -- and doing so by clearly suggesting that if evidence of her alleged anti-American further emerges, he in fact would lead a "lynching party" to get her.

Nevermind that the Klan has vowed to see her husband assassinated.

Nevermind that right now, the white-power haters are coming totally unhinged at the prospect of an Obama presidency.

Nevermind that all this outpouring of hate has played a significant role in the heightened level of security around him.

No, all that seems to matter is Bill O'Reilly's ego, which simply cannot accept the damage that would be inflicted on it by an acknowledgement that making loose references to lynching when discussing African Americans is not just beyond the pale, but one of the ugliest forms of discourse available to Americans.

It's unacceptable for anyone supposedly representing a responsible media organization to be using it -- just as it would be unaacceptable to make Holocaust jokes on the air.

As Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post put it:
There's nothing funny about lynching. There's certainly nothing at all funny or remotely appropriate about the use of a lynching reference to talk about Michelle Obama, and the word "unless," followed by "[w]e'll track it down," is way beyond the pale. It's -- I'm almost speechless, but I have more to say, of course.

We've explained this in some detail previously:
Underlying the stated fear of black rape, moreover, was a broad fear of economic and cultural domination of white Americans by blacks and various other "outsiders," including Jews. These fears were acute in the South, where blacks became a convenient scapegoat for the mesh of poverty that lingered in the decades following the Civil War. Lynching in fact was frequently inspired not by criminality, but by any signs of economic and social advancement by blacks who, in the view of whites, had become too "uppity."

There were, of course, other components of black suppression: segregation in the schools, disenfranchisement of the black vote, and the attendant Jim Crow laws that were common throughout the South. But lynching was the linchpin in the system, so to speak, because it was in effect state-supported terrorism whose stated intent was to suppress blacks and other minorities, in no small part by eliminating non-whites as competitors for economic gain. These combined to give lynching a symbolic value as a manifestation of white supremacy. The lynch mob was not merely condoned but in fact celebrated as an expression of the white community’s will to keep African-Americans in their thrall. As a phrase voiced commonly in the South expressed it, lynching was a highly effective means of "keeping the niggers down."

... Moreover, in addition to the night-riding type of terrorist attacks, mass spectacle lynchings soon appeared. These were ritualistic mob scenes in which prisoners or even men merely suspected of crimes were often torn from the hands of authorities (if not captured beforehand) by large crowds and treated to beatings and torture before being put to death, frequently in the most horrifying fashion possible: people were flayed alive, had their eyes gouged out with corkscrews, and had their bodies mutilated before being doused in oil and burned at the stake. Black men were sometimes forced to eat their own hacked-off genitals. No atrocity was considered too horrible to visit on a black person, and no pain too unimaginable to inflict in the killing. (When whites, by contrast, were lynched, the act almost always was restricted to simple hanging.)

When these remarks were first reported, I assumed it was just a rhetorical slip on O'Reilly's part that he would rectify in short order, as he has in the past. But his refusal to apologize -- and his lame excuse that he was "defending" her when he clearly also threatened her if he eventually determined that she turned out to be insufficiently patriotic -- makes it clear that O'Reilly really doesn't understand just how wrong he was.

For the sake of the health of our public discourse, it's now not only important that he apologize, it's important he do so in a way that helps his audience understand why don't talk about sending "lynch mobs" after African Americans, particularly not prominent ones.

UPDATE: O'Reilly has issued a classic non-apology apology: "I'm sorry if my statement offended anybody. That, of course, was not the intention. Context is everything." No discussion or acknowledgement, of course, of the fact that it was ethically (and morally) outrageous of O'Reilly to make flippant references to lynching.

Just to be clear: If O'Reilly had merely said "I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama," that would still be a problem, since it's not merely in bad taste, it's irresponsible and thoughtless; a lesser problem, certainly, than the reality, which is that he then added: "unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down."

Granted, he didn't say, "We'll track her down," but the implication remains clear: If there were such evidence of her insufficient patriotism, he would be delighted to lead a lynching party against her.

As Skemono adroitly observes:
Here we have the disgusting, senseless uber-patriotism of the right wing laid bare. They have gone beyond "America: right or wrong"; the mantra is now "America is never wrong." The merest suggestion that America is flawed, that it is anything less than perfect, is a crime worthy of organizing a "lynching party."

Obama: Commie pinko liberal fascist




-- by Dave

Well, we figured the "Obama is a Nazi" theme was going to start perking up in short order -- and sure enough, over at Cap'n Ed's place the right-wing [aka "congenitally unfunny"] "Day By Day" strip proves our point.

But wait, Ronco shoppers, that's not all! As David at Supreme Irony and Jeff Fecke at Shakesville observe, he's also apparently a Commie -- a regular ideological twofer!

We get this courtesy of Cliff Kincaid and NRO's Lisa Shiffren:
Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)

I don't know how Barak Obama's parents met. But the Kincaid article referenced above makes a very convincing case that Obama's family, later, (mid 1970s) in Hawaii, had close relations with a known black Communist intellectual. And, according to what Obama wrote in his first autobiography, the man in question — Frank Marshall Davis — appears to have been Barack's own mentor, and even a father figure. Of course, since the Soviet Union itself no longer exists, it's an open question what it means practically to have been politically mentored by an official Communist. Ideologically, the implications are clearer.

Yep -- mixed-race marriages of the '50s were purely products of Communist infiltration and contamination of the purity of our bodily fluids.

Which apparently was also a Nazi plot. But then, according to Schiffren's NRO colleague Jonah Goldberg, fascism and communism are essentially just slightly different versions of left-wing totalitarianism anyway. So hey.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

The Obama haters

-- by Dave

It's not really news that Barack Obama's candidacy is drawing out the worst tendencies of conservatives, including the way they're painting Obama's white supporters as race traitors.

But the far right and its minions have been particularly ugly, including at least one explicit assassination threat, as well as an outpouring of racial bile in anonymous comments sections.

As the likelihood of Obama capturing the Democratic nomination looms ever larger, these folks are apparently starting to ratchet the hate talk even higher. Mark Potok at the SPLC reports:
With the nomination of Barack Obama as the first black Democratic nominee for president seeming more possible by the day, racists and white supremacists are posting increasingly ugly and even threatening remarks on the Internet.

“OBAMA WILL DIE, KKK FOREVER,” concludes a Feb. 15 post by “Rodney” to a blog run by a person identified only as Strider333. Above that signoff, Rodney wrote: “The KKK or someone WILL assassinate Obama! If we get a NIGGER President all you NIGGER’s [sic] will think you’ve won and that the WHITE people will have to bow to you[.] FUCK THAT.”

As Potok notes, a lot of this kind of rhetoric skirts the assassination talk but isn't explicit, mostly because a lot of them are careful not to attract Secret Service attention. But the reality is that there's been enough of it already to warrant early protection for Obama, and heightened protection now.
The most heated anti-Obama talk appears to be on Internet sites that allow people to post messages anonymously. One such site, JD Underground, is a list ostensibly devoted to lawyers, although further details were not available. It has carried a particularly venomous thread, entitled “Nigger President,” that has stretched from January into this month.

“I’m hoping someone will do his public duty of putting a bullet through Obama’s head,” said a poster identified as “Kill Da Nigga.” Another poster suggests “bring[ing] back lynchings” and concludes with a warning: “LOOK OUT NIGGER. THE KLAN IS GETTING BIGGER!!!!!!” And a third, using the screen name “amerikkkan,” says only, “The deep south is making plans.”

Some of them, as the post notes, are hoping to set off a race war. But I think what they'd be most likely to accomplish is a final repudiation and marginalization of racist-right ideology.

Horton hears a Jonah

-- by Dave

Compliments to Scott Horton at Harper's, who nails Jonah Goldberg's hide to the proverbial wall in his review of Liberal Fascism:
It’s hard to say exactly what this book is. It has pretentions. Goldberg wants to sell it as a work of intellectual history, charting the “secret” origins of the “American Left” in fascism. But this is to a work of real intellectual history what a Classic Comics magazine on Plato would be to a Platonic dialogue. Its crudeness and superficiality suggest that Goldberg simply doesn’t understand most of the thinkers he is characterizing—indeed, his descriptions are as primitive and confused when they deal with figures on the left as on the right. The work proceeds with the confidence and artistry of a solid B- undergraduate term paper in a political philosophy class. Not the sort of thing one would expect to find published as a book.

I think Horton's review is largely congruent with mine as well as my running follow-up debate with Goldberg. I particularly note that Horton also considers Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism one of the genuinely definitive texts on the subject.

I only part ways briefly with Horton on one point, but it is an important one:
There is no “fascist” movement in the United States today. Neither are there significant “fascist” political candidates. On the other hand, a wealth of fascist ideas have crept into and influence the nation’s political dialogue. These ideas should not be suppressed or excluded for it would be impossible to do so and maintain the integrity of our democracy. But it is vitally important for the population to understand the historical attachment and roots of these ideas.

In point of fact -- one that I emphasize in my piece -- there are real fascist movements in the United States: particularly the Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Movement, Stormfront, White Aryan Resistance, and various other self-identifying neo-Nazi organizations that are unmistakably and irredeemably fascist. Moreover, there are other movements -- Christian Identity, the "Patriot" movement, Posse Comitatus, and various other far-right organizations -- that are identifiably proto-fascist -- that is, they fully fit the description of what Paxton would call "first stage" fascism, and what Roger Griffin also quite correctly calls "groupuscular" fascism.

The point being that when we talk about fascism today we can readily and properly reference them to move out of the realm of theoretical abstraction and to examine fascism in action, which (as Paxton argues) is always how it must be understood. The continuing existence of these groups underscores Horton's point: that Goldberg misapprehends and misconceives fascism. Whether he does do deliberately or not is a matter of conjecture, I suppose, but his abject fleeing of any serious debate about the book definitely indicates someone acting in bad faith.

Meanwhile, over at Goldberg's 'Liberal Fascism' blog -- which of course features all the latest fan raves and lotsa smooches to Glenn Beck for his ardent adoption of the book, and links to whatever few positive review (see, e.g., the Washington Times) -- anyone looking for a response, or even a link, to Horton's piece will mostly hear the sound of one hand wanking.

We're familiar with that, of course.

Hate crimes and sundown towns

-- by Dave

Speaking of how those Confederate values are still alive and well in the South, I've been meaning to post about the recent torching of a mosque in Columbia, Tennessee:
The call came in to the Columbia, Tennessee 911 call center at 5:20 on the morning of February 9. A fire was raging at the Islamic Center. When local police arrived a few minutes later, they found the broken glass of a door and heavy dark smoke billowing out of a broken window. At the scene, the officers also discovered a black swastika painted on the front of the building, along with two black swastikas and "We run the wold" (sic) and "White Power" painted on the side.

Later the same day, law enforcement officers arrested three local residents: Eric Ian Baker, 32, Michael Corey Golden, 23, and Jonathan Edward Stone, 19. The three men are accused of using empty beer bottles filled with gasoline and rags to set fire to the storefront mosque. They face federal charges of unlawful possession of a destructive device and state charges of arson.

According to the criminal complaint filed in federal court, at least two of the perpetrators of the arson and vandalism of the mosque were Christian Identity Movement adherents. (See the affidavit here.)

Christian Identity is a racist and anti-Semitic religious doctrine which teaches that European whites and their American descendants are the Biblical "chosen people,” while Jews are the literal descendants of Satan and that people of color are subhuman. It has been the theological glue binding together neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan devotees, militia members and others into the white nationalist movement. (For more on Christian Identity, please check out the CNC publication, Christian Identity: An American Heresy ).

The affidavit also notes that Stone stated that “as a result of his participation in the fire of Islamic Center, he earned ‘two stripes’ from Baker, who is his sponsor in the Christian Identity Movement. Stone admitted to Special Agents that he is a member of the Christian Identity Movement, and that stripes or promotions are earned for committing acts of violence against ‘enemies.’” Additionally, Eric Ian Baker explained to the Special Agents that "what goes on in that building is illegal according to the Bible."

A comment in an earlier news report caught my eye:
Islamic leaders in Nashville were also surprised by the arson and vandalism.

"This is the first hate crime we have observed here in Middle Tennessee," said A.K.M. Fakhruddin, former president of the Islamic Center of Nashville. He said the Islamic Center has had support from the greater Nashville community since the mosque was built in the late 1970s.

I'm sure this is true, but it's also true that the hate-mongering against Muslims has been on the rise in recent years, which more often than not eventually translates into hate crimes committed by white supremacists. They are most likely to occur in places like Tennessee where the demographic profile of local communities is rapidly changing to include people of different ethnicities and religious backgrounds -- and simultaneously, places with a history of racial and ethnic cleansing.

Hate crimes, as we've explained on numerous occasions, are message crimes. They are intended to harm not just the immediate victim, but all people of that same class within the community. Their message is also irrevocable: they are "get out of town, nigger/Mexican/Jew/queer/Muslim" crimes.

And as I explained in Death on the Fourth of July, hate crimes like this are the direct descendant of the old racial terrorism practiced against African Americans and other minorities prior to the Civil Rights era: lynching, "race riots," "sundown towns," and other acts of racial and ethnic cleansing which either drove minorities from their midst or held them in utter subjection.

Tennessee, as it happens, is a place where this happened on a notable level. When journalist Elliot Jaspin set out to examine the twelve worst cases of ethnic cleansing in American history for his book Buried in the Bitter Waters: Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America, two of them happened to be in the Volunteer State.

The earliest of the two was in Polk County in 1894. On April 27, a mob of about fifty armed men stormed into a black railroad labor camp with rifles and dynamite and chased the workers out:
It was a short-lived affair. ... The white workers surged forward, shouted to the blacks to leave, and then began peppering the camp with rifle fire. It was over in minutes. The defenseless black workers tumbled out of their tents, raed down the hill, across the railroad tracks that ran parallel to the Ocoee River. The darkness swallowed them as they fled.

The clash decisively settled the issue of black workers in Polk County. According to the 1890 census, 8,361 people lived in Polk County, 566 of them black. Ten years later only 303 African Americans remained, nestled in the relative safety of the western end of the county, protected by the mountain range from what awaited them if they ventured near the copper mines.

The legacy of this cleansing remains with us: In the most recent census, Polk County is 98 percent white. Only 0.4 percent of its population -- 22 people -- is African American.

The second cleansing that Jaspin details in Tennessee took place in Unicoi County, also in the state's eastern half, in 1918.

It began with a lynching -- and like many if not most such acts of murderous mob violence, its causes were dubious at best. The victim was a black laborer named Tom Devert who had been drinking and gambling with some fellow white laborers and had won their money. When the men tried to take it back by force, Devert ran and the white men gave chase. He came upon a local schoolgirl, tried to use her as a shield, and was shot crossing the river with her in tow; the girl wound up drowning. When onlookers gathered, the whites claimed that they had come upon Devert trying to choke the girl and so they defended her.

So Devert's body was dragged into the town square at Erwin and immolated, with other local blacks forced to witness the spectacle:
"The sodden body [of Devert] was dragged back to town the entire distance of a mile and a half," the Johnson City paper explained. "The crowd growing in size until it reached a mob." It was this mob that rousted the entire black population of Erwin and forced them to line up in front of a funeral pyre that the mob was building. "The negroes, among whom there were men, women, and children, were lined up in a row before the rapidly mounting pile of wood upon which was poured oil," goes the Bristol Herald Courier account of the immolation of Tom Devert. "Men with pistols, shotguns and clubs stood before the lined up negroes to prevent their running away and as the last cross tie and the last dash of oil was thrown on the heap, one of the mob is reported to have turned to the cowering crowd and said, 'Watch what we are going to do here and if any of you are left in town by tomorrow night, you will meet the same fate.'" The mob lit the pyre and threw Devert's body onto it. Now, the cry went up to burn the Negro quarter.

Eventually the mob was talked down and there was no more violence. But the entire black population was gone by the next day.

And so it remains in Unicoi County. Today, in the most recent census, its racial makeup is 97.96 percent white. Out of a population of over 17,000, only 12 black people -- 0.07 percent -- remain.

That's how hate crimes are intended to work -- and generally, they do so very well when, as in the historic cases, the community openly backs the haters. That does not happen nowadays -- but silence on the part of the community is often interpreted as tacit approval anyway. It will be interesting to see what steps Columbia's civic leaders take to stand up for the Muslims in their midst now. (Local columnist Dwight Lewis' superb piece on the incident is a good start.)

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Those Confederate values


-- by Dave

It's been kind of amusing watching conservatives reposition themselves on racial issues in anticipation of their upcoming electoral battle with Barack Obama, which seems to be growing likelier by the day.

Mostly they've been trying to revise the history of conservatism and the GOP in the past half-century, generally by omitting that whole sordid business about the Southern Strategy -- or at least wholly redefining what that means.

Of course, this has been an ongoing affair. Last year Michael Medved tried to tell us that slavery wasn't nearly the bad deal everyone made it out to be.

But this sort of stuff has been percolating upwards recently in response to Obama's candidacy, and the general meme has been the one enunciated by Steve Sailer: "[M]any whites hope electing Mr. Obama president will show blacks that white racism isn't what's holding them back anymore. Numerous white Democrats, I would add, view backing Mr. Obama as confirming their moral and cultural superiority over other whites (those redneck racists)."

There's a direct retort to this nonsense, of course: If white liberals are voting for Obama because he's black, then are white conservatives voting against him because he's black?

In any event, our old friends at RedState -- particularly, one fellow named haystack -- are advancing this argument by coming to the defense of the Confederacy:
The Confederate flag might be an outstanding mechanism for folks to look towards in reminding the younger generations of a time and place in American history where dumb redneck hicks from the South considered themselves God-like, or above the natural laws of things, but what you never hear from these Democrat demagogues is what the Confederacy brought to America that has LONG since been lost in the short list of things that matter when it comes to being an American.

As a down-line Confederate, I know of a reverence for God, a deep-rooted respect for my elders, a conviction that a Government is only as good as the independent and strong-willed people who fight FOR her, and a belief that the Federal Government is BEST that governs States the LEAST - this being emblematic of a Republic that was founded with the intention of ensuring as much for her citizens. What I ALSO know, is that anyone that believes such things today are considered racist, or worse. Look, I am derived from Confederates who often-times found themselves indentured servants, so it's not like there's any anti black mentality in my blood-we had as much to lose as anyone else...but we DID appreciate the meaning and value of fighting for what what we believed in-black, white, green, yellow or anything in between...the difference here is that the Democrats want you to believe any who might question such platitudes now must therefore be deemed rednecks. My ancestors, and yours, are rolling in their graves. The Confederate flag might have flown over some dark days of this republic, but that's not to suggest that the ideals of the Confederacy, beyond the darkness of slavery, should be lost in the translation. That flag flew to represent an America that stood up for a people and a belief that a Federal Government had no place in deciding the business of the States' right to determine their futures. Millions of dead later, the ideals are unchanged - do with that what you will.

What haystack is arguing is nothing particularly new, and it has been refuted at length on numerous occasions: the simple fact is that the use of "states rights" in defense of slavery has consistently been understood to be primarily a legalistic front for the assertion of white supremacy. As historian Michael Simpson observes in an SPLC interview:
First of all, without slavery there's no Civil War in the first place, there's no irreconcilable conflict, so that's a sine qua non.

Second, when people talk about conflicting economic systems, obviously the root of the conflict was that the South's economic system was based upon plantation slavery.

So one can't talk about different economic systems without once again coming back to the issue of slavery. That was fundamental to what the South was about.

There is a strange paradox here. These people deride what they call political correctness, and yet one of their first missions is to whitewash the Confederacy of any connection with slavery. They actually seem sensitive to any possibility that the Confederacy is linked with race, and want to absolve the Confederacy of any charges of racism at all.

You can see that in the fight over the Confederate flag, where the neo-Confederates say, "This is heritage, not hate. It has nothing to do with race at all." At the same time they're essentially defending white supremacy, they deny race has anything to do with it.

... Confederates during the Civil War had no problem whatsoever in associating their cause with the protection of slavery and a system of white supremacy which they thought was inherent in the Confederate world order. The Confederates of 1861-65 were much more honest about the importance of slavery than are the neo-Confederates of today.

In a famous address [known to historians as the "Cornerstone Speech"], the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, said in 1861 that "slavery is the cornerstone of the Confederacy." And as late as 1865, Robert E. Lee, who's often cited by neo-Confederates as an opponent of slavery, claimed that while blacks and whites were together in the South, their best relationship would be that of master and slave.

Another famous instance of the South's antipathy to blacks and insistence on white supremacy as a fundamental aspect of the Confederate Army's resistance to the use of black slaves as soldiers, wherein Southern statesmen warned that "The day that such a bill passed Congress sounds the death knell of this Confederacy." The Charleston Mercury ran an editorial warning:
It was on account of encroachments upon the institution of slavery by the sectional majority of the old Union, that South Carolina seceded from that Union. It is not at this late day, after the loss of thirty thousand of her best and bravest men in battle, that she will suffer it to be bartered away; or ground between the upper and nether mill stones, by the madness of Congress, or the counsels of shallow men elsewhere.

By the compact we made with Virginia and the other States of this Confederacy, South Carolina will stand to the bitter end of destruction. By that compact she intends to stand or to fall. Neither Congress, nor certain make-shift men in Virginia, can force upon her their mad schemes of weakness and surrender. She stands upon her institutions -- and there she will fall in their defence. We want no Confederate Government without our institutions. And we will have none. Sink or swim, live or die, we stand by them, and are fighting for them this day. That is the ground of our fight -- it is well that all should understand this at once. Thousands and tens of thousands of the bravest men, and the best blood of this State, fighting in the ranks, have left their bones whitening on the bleak hills of Virginia in this cause. We are fighting for our system of civilization -- not for buncomb, or for Jeff Davis. We intend to fight for that , or nothing. We expect Virginia to stand beside us in that fight, as of old, as we have stood beside her in this war up to this time. But such talk coming from such a source is destructive to the cause. Let it cease at once, in God's name, and in behalf of our common cause! It is paralizing [sic ] to every man here to hear it. It throws a pall over the hearts of the soldiers of this State to hear it. The soldiers of South Carolina will not fight beside a nigger -- to talk of emancipation is to disband our army. We are free men, and we chose to fight for ourselves -- we want no slaves to fight for us.

Haystack's lame defense of the Confederacy as representing values beyond "the darkness of slavery" is of course disingenuous, but again, this nothing particularly new for Southern conservatives -- or for Republicans generally, who have been insistent in their state of denial regarding the legacy of the Southern Strategy.

And it's not as if the current defenders of the Confederacy -- particularly the neo-Confederates who have become deeply embedded within the GOP in recent years -- have been moving beyond race and making their values reflect purely the defense of "states rights" as a constitutional principle. Remember the fight in Georgia in 2004 over the Dixie flag?
Their stated mission is to restore Confederate symbols to prominence on the Georgia state flag and to remove from office Perdue and any other "scalawags" that oppose them. But some fear the flaggers and their sympathizers across the South have racist and anti-government agendas.

Georgia business and political leaders are concerned that the determined group might create a national spectacle by raising the specter of slavery and racism when state voters go to the polls Tuesday.

"The flaggers talk about preserving their Southern heritage, but that is mostly for Yankee consumption. Nobody around here believes that. The underlying theme is race," Georgia political columnist Bill Shipp said. "They are a 21st-century manifestation of the Klan, but they also symbolize disenchantment and alienation with government."

... Many who pose as Confederate-heritage preservationists are actually "pushing an entire revision of the history of the Civil War in the service of present-day racists," Potok said. "They are trying to cleanse the Confederate flag and the Civil War itself of any association with racism or slavery."

Probably the clearest example of how "Confederate values" are about much, much more than "states rights" lies in the way the Confederate flag appears and is used well outside the South -- namely, as a clear-cut symbol of white supremacy.

That was the case when the Dixie flag you see atop this post came out a couple of summers ago alongside a couple of Nazi banners, mixed in with American flags, at an anti-immigrant "Minuteman" rally in California.

It was the case when a group of young local thugs, harassing minorities in the seaside town of Ocean Shores, Washington, on the Fourth of July in 2000 waved their Dixie flag in the faces of the blacks and Asians they were threatening and assaulting -- a case that ended in the death of the chief perpetrator (as I explored in some detail in my book Death on the Fourth of July.

That was the case last year whem a special version of the Dixie flag -- a Klan version, in fact -- flew over a community picnic in Michigan.

The same principle was in effect just a couple of months ago when a group of Maryland students organizing peace rallies were verbally assaulted by fellow students wearing Confederate flags on their T-shirts, and had their posters defaced with swastikas and "white power" slogans.

And it was the case in 2003 when the flags were used by high-schoolers in Western Washington to harass minorities. As I noted then:
Why would the Confederate flag be an issue in northwestern Washington? Because it is a symbol of white supremacism for people well outside the South as well. This is why phony arguments about its meaning are only cover for the stark reality that anyone -- particularly anyone of color -- who is confronted by the flag knows all too well: The Confederate flag is meant to intimidate -- to trumpet the values of white supremacy. The "heritage" which it harkens back to is mostly rife with the charred corpses of lynched innocents.

Whatcom County has a history of right-wing extremism: The Washington State Militia, whose trial In God's Country covered in detail (and which was the subject of Jane Kramer's excellent Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman) was based in rural Whatcom. In recent years there have been cross-burnings aimed at immigrants, and death threats aimed at peace protesters. The Patriots who filled the ranks of the WSM are still very much at large in the county, and their effect keeps bubbling to the surface.

But then, conservatives don't care to acknowledge that this is what "Confederate values" -- including "states rights" -- really are all about.

And if Barack Obama's candidacy, in drawing out the ugliest side of movement conservatives, achieves nothing other than to expose that reality to the cold light of day, it'll have achieved something truly worthwhile.

[Big hat tips to Thers Whiskey and Phoenix Woman.]