Immigrants are the new blacks hippies gays
Everyone who’s paying attention knows what the big Republican issue will likely be in 2008. No, it won’t be the war. That’s a losing issue for them. It won’t be the economy. That’s probably a wash as an issue for them. It certainly won’t be health care. It will be immigrant-bashing. We’ve already written (via OpenLeft) about how Republican Jim Ogonowski used anti-immigrant rhetoric to great effect in the special election for the open Congress seat in MA-05.
This could come as no surprise. The modern national Republican party is founded on opposition to civil rights for African-Americans (which is why the party is dying in the northeast where people were never against such civil rights) and anti-gay ballot measures played a crucial role in determining the 2004 election. We can expect a lot of anti-immigrant ballot measures in 2008.
For the record, Karl Rove, love him or hate him, is a staunch opponent of immigrant-bashing as a Republican political strategy. The long-term demographics make alienating Latino voter a slow form of political suicide. But desperate times demand desperate measures, and these are surely desperate times for Republicans.
What’s interesting is what strange characters comes out to play when the name of the game is xenophobia. Here’s some info on some of the groups that are testifying before the State Legislature on Spitzer’s license plan:
Following an Assembly Minority hearing October 3rd on New York State Department of Motor Vehicle’s recent policy change, which featured notorious anti-immigrant Congressman Tom Tancredo, (R-CO), the Senate Majority held their own hearing on October 15th, which featured a similar bench of so-called “experts,†fronting for the most prominent anti-immigrant, nativist organization in America: the Federation for American Immigration Reform (“FAIRâ€).
The Senate Republicans’ three star witnesses, all of whom testified at the Assembly Republican hearing on October 3rd with other FAIR-backed organizations, are all intimately connected in a tight-knit web that leads back to one organization – FAIR – and one person – the father of the modern nativist movement John Tanton.
Read the whole report on FAIR (catchy name, huh?) here.
[btp here: The real scariness of the state GOP working with these guys comes out when you look at who they're in bed with. From the report:
The official website of the 9/11 Families for a Secure America links to a dozen
anti-immigrant organizations10: Links include: Rep. Tom Tancredo’s website, FAIR and Center for Immigration Studies, New Yorkers for Immigration Control and Enforcement, VDARE (designated a “hate group†by the Southern Poverty Law Center11).(snip)
Paul Gigot, editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, has characterized FAIR as “a group of population-control zealots whose goal is no immigration at all.â€20
(snip)
FAIR accepted $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, the controversial foundation that funds eugenics research and has been linked to white supremacy and neo-Nazi groups. The Fund was created in 1937 to finance research in eugenics and “race betterment.â€...Harry Laughlin, the Fund’s first president, advocated the establishment of a uniform sterilization law that
would allow the routine sterilization of those “unfit†for society such as the “feeble minded,†the insane, criminals, epileptics, alcoholics, blind persons, deaf persons, deformed persons, and indigent persons.
Geez, and we thought Dave Malta's anti-special needs campaign lit was bad!]
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Typical strategy - find a powerless minority group, fearmonger and turn the country against them. 51% Your big-picture posts are excellent, Exile, I thoroughly enjoy them.
Be very clear about what conservatives/republicans/whomevers mean when they say “illegal immigrants”. They don’t mean Canadians, Europeans or Asians. They mean Hispanics, specifically Mexicans. (Anyone in this country in violation of expired work visa is illegal too…i don’t hear a lot of noise on that though)
An estimated 80% of all illegal immigrants are Latino, and something like 65% of those are Mexican.
It seems clear to me that when people come down on illegals they are just masking a prejudice against Mexicans. (and not masking it very well, to be honest.)
Apparently Brown really is the new Black.
This will of course back fire on the right, as they continue to alienate (pun intended) a large group of potential voters what would naturally tend to be more conservative. (Something I am sure Karl Rove already knows.)
In the meantime though the real immigration issues won’t be address as the debate right now seems more focused on figuring out what is the best way to punish illegal immigrants that are here now rather than addressing any of the wide range of issues that brought them here and keep them here.
[...] Immigrants are the new blacks hippies gays SCHIP update from Rotten [...]
[...] It’s sad, really, that a political party (Republican) that could once claim fiscal conservatism as one of it’s trademarks has completely devolved into a bunch of bottom-feeding hate-mongers. Immigrants - and by “immigrants”, they mean Mexicans - are just the latest target in a long tradition of divisive politics, going back to the civil rights movement (as Exile pointed out in a previous post.) [...]
[...] We’ve discussed the possible importance immigrant-bashing will have as a GOP tactic in the 2008.ÂÂ ÂÂ Other observers have pointed out that immigrant-bashing did not work very well for Republicans in New York State in 2007, even with all the hub-bub over Spitzer’s license plan. [...]