You Don't Say: Republicans Admit Anti-Immigrant Movement Driven By Racism
Submitted by Miranda Blue on Thursday, 1/30/2014 12:43 PM
Buzzfeed’s John Stanton today managed to get Republican lawmakers on record
admitting that the movement
to stop immigration report is at least party driven by racial animosity.
One Southern Republican member of Congress, who requested anonymity,
told Stanton outright that “part of it…it’s racial.” South Carolina Sen.
Lindsey Graham put it a little more delicately,
referring to “ugliness around the issue of immigration.”
While it’s unusual to have Republican members of Congress
saying it aloud, it’s hardly a secret that today’s anti-immigrant
movement was built by xenophobia and remains in a large part driven by
it.
Overtly racist remarks by members of Congress likeSteve King and Don
Young or by fringe nativists likeWilliam Gheen or Judson
Phillips could be written off as distractions if they were not part and parcel of this larger movement.
Just look at the three central advocacy groups working to
stop immigration reform. The misleadingly named Federation for American
Immigration Reform (FAIR), the movement “think tank” Center for
Immigration Studies
(CIS), and Numbers USA were all founded by John Tanton, an activist who hardly hid his racist
views, support for eugenics, and white nationalist ideology. (Sample Tanton argument: “I've come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture
to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.")
But it’s not just these groups’ history that’s
problematic. While most have tried to distance themselves Tanton’s
extreme nativist rhetoric, they have turned instead to racial code
language to imply that immigration
undermines American politics and culture.
Dan Stein, the president of FAIR, has warned
that immigrants take part in
“competitive breeding” to supplant native-born whites and that "[m]any
of them hate America, hate everything the United States stands for. CIS
president Mark Krikorian has pointed
to “illegitimate” children and “high rates of welfare use” as
reasons why Latino immigrants will never vote Republican and therefore
shouldn’t be “imported” into the United States.
These arguments linked to two threads common in the
anti-immigrant movement: that immigrants, particularly Latino
immigrants, will never be prosperous, productive members of society, and
that they will never
vote Republican, so Republicans shouldn’t bother to try to appeal to
them.
The first of these arguments was famously illustrated by a
Heritage Foundation study last year that purported to show that
immigration reform would cost the country trillions of dollars, an
inflated number based
on the premise that future generations of immigrants would never
help to grow the economy or give back financially to the country. The
fact that the report was co-written
by a researcher who believes that Latinos have intrinsically lower IQ only served to underline the point that the study was making.
The second line of argument was most clearly put by Eagle
Forum founder and conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, when she said
that Republicans should drop
their attempts at reaching Latino voters and focus instead on
turning out white voters because “there’s not any evidence at all that
these Hispanics coming in from Mexico will vote Republican.” The next
week, CIS sent out a press release echoing
Schlafly’s argument . Pat Buchanan made a similar plea to revive the “Southern Strategy” by ginning up animosity among white voters toward Latino
immigrants. It’s no coincidence that this theory that Republicans
can maintain a whites-only coalition in an increasingly diverse nation
was first laid out by white
nationalist writer Steve Sailer.
These two themes were what was behind a FAIR spokesman’s comment
last week that allowing undocumented immigrants to work
toward legal status would collapse the two-party system and lead to
“tyranny.” Similarly, CIS analyst Steven Steinlight recently claimed
that immigration reform would be the “unmaking of America” because it
“would subvert our political life by destroying the
Republican Party” and turn the United States into a one-party state. As
evidence, he cited the fact that “Hispanics don’t exemplify ‘strong
family values.’”
You don’t have to talk about “cantaloupe calves” to build a
movement that relies on and exploits racial animosity. The
anti-immigrant movement has mastered this art.
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