Imperialist Watch
2007-12-13 20:02:05 UTC
Notes on the Right: The Racist Roots of the Anti-
Immigration Movement
By Lee Cokorinos
http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/newsletter11/story2.
html
Prominent leaders of the anti-immigration movement
would have us believe that not a ounce of racism lies
behind their efforts. The most media-visible figures in
this camp, such as Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, Tom
Tancredo and Victor Davis Hanson may argue the case for
restricting, deporting, rounding up and cutting off
public services to those "illegals" stigmatized as
culturally backward, unhealthy potential terrorists.
But they protest that their motives for doing so are as
pure as the driven snow.
In their writings and media appearances, the leaders of
the anti-immigration movement claim their politics are
based not on a hatred of the racial Other but on their
commitment to the rule of law, the integrity of "our
culture," the objective findings of social science, or
better employment prospects for American workers.
On page after page of In Mortal Danger, Tom Tancredo's
diatribe against non-European immigrants and
multiculturalism, the presidential candidate and
congressman repeatedly complains that he and his
colleagues have been unfairly painted as racist or had
their arguments misconstrued as racist.
But alongside these complaints Tancredo's book drips
with cultural condescension toward Mexican-Americans,
Muslims and African-Americans. While he claims that
illegality is the problem, Tancredo soon moves past
this and calls for revoking the legal citizenship of
what he terms Mexican-American "anchor babies."
Conjuring up racist and sexist imagery, he declares
that "gravid wombs should not guarantee free medical
care." One wonders whether Tancredo, both of whose
grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Italy, would
apply such terminology to his parents, and thus forfeit
his own citizenship.
"Clarity of Thought"
Beset by a "malignant multiculturalism," the "vast
majority of Americans" are, according to Tancredo,
forced to deal with its "raging intolerance of
traditional America." This leads to such outrages, he
tells us on the following page, as Vanderbilt
University renaming its Confederate Memorial Hall
dormitory to Memorial Hall just "because the word
'Confederate' made some people uncomfortable."
It apparently doesn't make him feel uncomfortable.
Tancredo addressed a meeting bedecked with Confederate
flags and promoted by the neo-Confederate League of the
South last year. Dr. Michael Hill, the League of the
South's president, has warned that the U.S. faces the
prospect of "being overrun by hordes of non-white
immigrants."
In his book, Tancredo also reaches back into history to
embrace the crudest forms of colonial racist rhetoric.
He points to what he calls a "very poetic speech"
delivered in 1899 by Winston Churchill against Muslims'
"degraded sensualism," "fearful fatalistic apathy,"
"improvident habits," "slovenly forms of agriculture,"
etc. These, of course, are exactly the kinds of taunts
that the racial nativists of the American past directed
at Tancredo's Italian forebears when they reached the
U.S.
Casting about for more current action heroes, Tancredo
settles on "noted constitutional attorney" Ann Coulter.
Coulter, a former staffer with the Center for
Individual Rights, has defended Charles Murray and
Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, which links race
and IQ, and regularly heaps racist abuse on Muslims and
others, as in "I believe our motto should be after
9/11: Jihad monkey talks tough; jihad monkey takes the
consequences. Sorry, I realize that's offensive. How
about 'camel jockey'? What? Now what'd I say? Boy, you
tent merchants sure are touchy. Grow up, would you?"
Although Tancredo claims that individuals should be
judged on their actions and merits rather than their
group identity, he takes up Coulter's proposal that
everyone from "suspect countries" should be immediately
deported. Tancredo has also proposed wholesale
deportation of undocumented immigrants. "If only our
political leaders possessed" Coulter's "clarity of
thought," he writes.
The Suburban Plantation
Victor Davis Hanson, author of Mexifornia: A State of
Becoming and another prominent think tank/TV talking
head in the immigration debate, also argues for a
radical cutback in Mexican immigration and vigorous
efforts to root out multicultural thinking. At the core
of his approach is an imperious demand that immigrants
conform to his narrow, Anglicized view of American
culture.
He also abuses his progressive critics for allegedly
falsely charging the anti-immigration movement with
racism. "To discuss the issue rationally," he claims,
"is to expect charges of racist and nativist." He then
blithely condemns American schools for promoting "the
fiction of cultural equality."
Hanson, a senior fellow at the right wing Hoover
Institution, comes from a long line of California
Central Valley growers and occupies a special niche in
the firmament of reaction, providing a philosophical
bridge to earlier forms of anti-immigrant ideology.
One of the more enduring mythical themes in the
cultural history of white supremacism in the United
States has been the idyllic nature of the Southern
plantation, where everyone knew his or her place in the
racial pecking order. In exchange for accepting this
social order the laboring classes, according to this
mythology, would be rewarded with a stable existence,
leading to a "natural" harmony.
This thinking was championed by mid-20th century
adherents of the so-called "Southern Agrarian" movement
such as Richard M. Weaver, one of the founding
intellectual figures of modern conservatism. Skirting
around the questions of slavery and Jim Crow lynching,
they romanticized the supposed gentility and "small is
beautiful" values of "civilized" southern life. Hanson
extends some these Agrarianist themes, such as the
dignity of manual labor, to the farms and ranches of
the southwest, worked largely by immigrant workers from
Mexico.
While he does not embrace the philosophy of antebellum
plantation idealism, Hanson's writings, particularly
the early chapters of Mexifornia, are filled with misty
Agrarian school images of the alleged nobility and
order of a fading rural California farm life (e.g., his
nostalgia for "the good times of our agrarian past").
In southern California the Agrarian mythological
tradition has played out in odd and sinister ways (a
eugenics movement was part of it, as Matt Garcia
recounts), combining misplaced nostalgia for social
relations on the small commercial farm and, in its more
recent incarnation, a celebration of the bucolic white
suburbs as the pinnacle of civilization.
For Brian Janiskee, Hanson's Claremont Institute
colleague, "the seemingly quiet and bland order of the
California suburb is, in effect, a metaphysical
affirmation of the revolutionary core of the American
regime."
Needless to say, an intense and sometimes nasty
struggle for cultural hegemony and economic and
political power is taking place in the California
suburbs between a shrinking and resistant white
population and a growing Latino community. Journalist
Roberto Lovato reports that one participant at an
Anaheim city council meeting said California is
becoming "ground zero for America's second civil war."
"Imperatives to be Honored"
This rural/suburban reality sits rather incongruously
with Hanson's shifting claims that racism is either no
longer a big deal (it "belongs largely to the past") or
is immutable ("mankind by its very nature is prone to
be murderous, racist and sexist"). "Today's Big Lie,"
he tells us, is that "racism, discrimination [and]
labor exploitation" have been "the burdens of the
Mexican-American experience."
Such arguments, of course, have long been directed at
African-Americans, and have a strong appeal for right
wing opponents of a strong and effective government
role in promoting racial justice. As they pour out of
the think tanks and media outlets of the right, they
are feeding increasingly coordinated populist assaults
on African-American and immigrant communities.
Veterans of the Prop 209 campaign in California, such
as Ward Connerly and Glynn Custred, and others now
backing Connerly's "Super Tuesday" multistate campaign,
have also jumped on the anti-immigration bandwagon by
linking it with their assault on affirmative action.
On the back cover of Mexifornia Linda Chavez of the
misnamed Center for Equal Opportunity, which has been
waging war for years against the gains of the civil
rights movement in law, education, employment and fair
housing, dutifully endorses Hanson's view of what she
calls "disturbing trends among Mexican immigrants."
This despite the fact that Chavez seems to have had her
own misgivings about anti-Mexican bias among her right
wing colleagues. She specifically calls out "a fair
number of Republican members of Congress, almost all
influential conservative talk radio hosts, some cable
news anchorsââ,¬'most prominently, Lou Dobbsââ,¬'and a
handful of public policy 'experts' at organizations
such as the Center for Immigration Studies, the
Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA,
in addition to fringe groups like the Minuteman
Project."
Those who thought these words might signal a welcome
move toward multiculturalist rationality among the
anti-diversity crowd were soon to be disappointed.
Chavez quickly retracted them.
Praising Hanson's book in the Wall Street Journal for
its "highbrow, agrarian outlook," Chavez' sidekick
Roger Clegg offers his own racialized and imperious
endorsement of "the core values that define American
citizenship," such as "don't demand anything because of
your race or ethnicity" and "don't view working hard
and studying hard as 'acting white.'"
These are not a matter of choice for free individuals
in a democratic society, but, he sternly instructs us
(acting white?) "habits to be inculcated and
imperatives to be honored."
Clegg's "core values" are an open book. "I have a lot
of sympathy," he tells us, "for those who want to
recognize the heroism of Confederate soldiers, and even
more for those who have a reflexive and negative
reaction to the NAACP's pronouncements these days. My
father's parents were from Mississippi, and my
parents and I are Texans, and in all my years growing
up and playing army I can never remember choosing to be
a Yankee rather than a Rebel."
Racial Nationalism and Immigration
Pat Buchanan, a veteran figure in anti-immigration
politics, has a substantial following among the
"pitchfork brigade" at the grassroots of the populist
right, and is also a regular presence on MSNBC. His
sister Angela "Bay" Buchanan served as chair of Tom
Tancredo's Virginia-based Team America PAC, which
promotes anti-immigration candidates, and has now
joined his presidential campaign team. Bay Buchanan and
Tancredo attended the Tombstone, Arizona kick-off rally
of the Minuteman Project in April 2005.
Although he pays lip service to the legal changes
brought about by the civil rights movement from the
mid-1950s onwards, in his book State of Emergency: The
Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, Pat
Buchanan deplores what he calls America's "national
guilt over racism."
Buchanan believes this guilt is leading toward national
and racial suicide ("demography is destiny"), a theme
once championed by Theodore Roosevelt that has a long
history in the American nativist movement. In
attempting to explain this guilt phenomenon, he points
to the "seminal" work of Peter Brimelow, who argues
that America's alleged obsessive guilt about racism was
caused essentially by an overreaction to the genocidal
crimes of the Nazis.
By committing to "cleanse itself from all taints of
racism and xenophobia," Buchanan quotes Brimelow, the
"U.S. political elite" eventually "enacted the epochal
Immigration Act of 1965," which did away with a quota
system based on national origins that favored European
immigration.
Brimelow, an English immigrant who runs VDARE, a
website filled with white supremacist and anti-Semitic
material, has called the Pioneer Fund, a foundation
that has backed racial eugenics research, a "perfectly
respectable institution." Buchanan writes a regular
column for VDARE, for which Tom Tancredo has also
written.
In the acknowledgments section of State of Emergency,
Buchanan singles out the late Sam Francis (who edited
the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens'
paper, The Citizens Informer) and Brimelow as the
vanguard of the anti-immigration movement. And while he
praises the leaders of the anti-immigrant think tank
infrastructure, such as Roy Beck of NumbersUSA, Mark
Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies and Dan
Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform
(FAIR), he cites a slew of VDARE columnists in the book
and thanks James Fulford of VDARE for help with the
manuscript.
The racist roots of the anti-immigration movement run
deep. In his important study of American immigration
politics up to the 1920's, Strangers in the Land, John
Higham identifies two broad strains of anti-immigrant
racial supremacism, one based on culture and the other,
with the rise of Social Darwinism, based on heredity
and genetics. These trends now seem to be converging,
and are being mainstreamed into the American media
through Buchanan's high visibility.
Nativism Goes to Harvard
As Higham points out, anti-immigrant racial nativism
was not restricted to populist demagogues who directed
their appeals to poor and working class whites (e.g.,
an anti-immigrant Minute Men organization was formed in
1886 in New York). Powerful strains of racially-charged
propaganda directed at immigrants have also emanated
from the political elite and top universities.
Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., stood up in the Senate in 1896
and warned in a debate over imposing literacy tests on
immigrants that America's national character was in
danger of being "bred out." Francis A. Walker, the
president of MIT, developed a theory in the late 1890s
that "beaten men from beaten races" were, with their
higher birthrate, dooming white America.
Books such as Madison Grant's 1916 The Passing of the
Great Race, proclaimed that "democracy is fatal to
progress when two races of unequal value live side by
side." The book helped spur a nativist movement, backed
by the Ku Klux Klan, that contributed to the passage of
draconian restrictions on immigration in 1924. The new
nativist movement of today has also spurred a
resurgence of the racist Klan.
Grant, a lawyer and president of the New York
Zoological Society, was vice president of the
Immigration Restriction League, which was, Higham tells
us, "born at a meeting of five young blue bloods in the
law office of Charles Warren, later a noted
constitutional historian." All five had attended
Harvard together in the 1880's and had gone on to do
graduate work at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School
or its law school.
The IRL, which eventually turned to eugenics and
briefly considered renaming itself the Eugenic
Immigration League, quickly developed close ties with
the leading nativist factions and lobbyists in Congress
and went on to fight immigration under the direction of
prominent attorney Prescott Hall and Harvard professor
Robert DeCourcy Ward.
"Pat Buchanan with Footnotes"
A century after the formation of the IRL, the tradition
of highbrow panic about the perils of immigration still
finds a home at Harvard. In Who Are We? The Challenges
to America's National Identity, Samuel P. Huntington,
arguably the leading political scientist in the U.S.,
strikes the very same themes that Buchanan, Tancredo
and Hanson do in their less footnoted (or in the case
of Hanson, non-footnoted) nativist diatribes: white
Protestant culture, which forms the core of America's
identity, is being marginalized by immigration,
multiculturalism, and (Huntington adds) the
"denationalization" of American elites.
For good measure, he produces a lengthy section on how
affirmative action has contributed to the
"deconstruction of America" through its alleged
abandonment of the intent doctrine, starting with the
labor department's enforcement of the anti-
discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of
1964, and continuing through the Supreme Court case
Griggs v. Duke Power (401 U.S. 424, 1971).
Huntington's notion that the intent doctrine has been
abandoned would surely come as a surprise to those who
see it as a major legal impediment to challenging
racial discrimination. Nevertheless, he writes that
affirmative action, along with "the challenge to
English" has contributed to the rise of "subnational
identities" (African-Americans and Latinos) that are
posing a dire threat to "the core culture."
"Hispanization," he tells us, echoing the rhetoric of
the Minutemen, is threatening a "demographic
reconquista" of the southwest U.S. America's unity,
which he falsely sees as based on "Anglo-Protestant"
culture, is being undermined by largely Mexican
influences. But Huntington, while steering clear of
racist pseudo-science, goes beyond the argument about
culture to suggest that "white nativist movements are a
possible and plausible response" to the prospect that
whites may someday become a minority in the U.S.
As Boston University political scientist Alan Wolfe has
remarked, "the word 'plausible' catches the eye. To say
that something is possible or probable is to make a
prediction; to call it plausible is to endorse it."
Huntington's argument, "at times bordering on
hysteria," is "Pat Buchanan with footnotes."
Huntington's tacit nod to the white populist movement
has been reciprocated by Peter Brimelow, who describes
him as "a friend of VDARE."
Racial Nativism and the Conservative Infrastructure
Ideological advocacy has played an important role in
the resurgence of racial nativism in the anti-
immigration movement. But the conservative think tank
and foundation infrastructure has played an important
part in this revival, both by mainstreaming its ideas
through books, op-eds and media appearances and by
supporting the organizations promoting the demographic
and other research that has fed it. This intellectual
infrastructure feeds this movement at the base.
Charles L. Heatherly, one of the architects of the
Heritage Foundation's model for furnishing right wing
politicians with actionable policy ideas as editor of
several of its Mandate for Leadership handbooks,
provided a "priceless contribution" to In Mortal
Danger, Tom Tancredo writes. A former staffer for
Tancredo, Heatherly now works as a senior aide to the
congressman (see his appearance on Tancredo's behalf
on YouTube).
Victor Davis Hanson's Mexifornia was written at the
suggestion of Peter Collier, the founding publisher of
Encounter Books, which has been backed by the Koch,
Bradley and Olin Foundations. It is an expanded version
of an article published by Hanson in City Journal, the
Manhattan Institute's flagship publication. Myron
Magnet, the journal's editor, helped edit the article
and book.
According to Mediatransparency.org, the Olin foundation
provided $100,000 in funding for VDARE through Sally
Pipes' Pacific Research Institute. Olin also funded the
John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, of which
Samuel P. Huntington is the founding director. The
Smith Richardson and Bradley foundations provided
support for Huntington's Who Are We?
Bradley also provided support for the Center for
Immigration Studies. A report advocating the mass
deportation of illegal immigrants, "The Economics of
Immigration Enforcement," has been published by Henry
Regnery's Georgia-based National Policy Institute. The
Pioneer Fund lists the National Policy Institute as its
largest grant recipient on its 2005 federal tax return.
Fighting Wedge Politics
The right wing political infrastructure has also fed
strategic initiatives designed to polarize the African-
American and Latino communities over immigration. The
Minuteman movement, which has spread across the country
and experienced two major splits, has prominently
featured Ted Hayes, an African-American immigration
opponent at its rallies. Rosanna Pulido, a Latina,
heads the Illinois Minuteman Project, based in Skokie.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform, co-
founded by John Tanton, the Michigan-based leader of a
dense network of anti-immigration organizations,
attempted to form a front called Choose Black America
in May 2006.
The good news is that efforts to counter the wedge
politics of the Minuteman movement and national groups
such as FAIR are gaining ground. The Equal Justice
Society, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Latino
Issues Forum, Greenlining Institute and Centro Legal de
la Raza have begun the process of encouraging much-
needed dialogue (http://tinyurl.com/2rqq9s) on
immigration issues.
In the South, with a growing Latino population,
critically important organizing and advocacy
initiatives to counter the wedge politics of the right
are being led by the National Network for Immigrant and
Refugee Rights, Highlander Research and Education
Center Institute for Immigrant Leadership Development
(INDELI), Black Alliance for Just Immigration and the
Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network. If
adequately funded and supported, this infrastructure
can engage the racial nativist movement where it counts
mostââ,¬'at the grassroots level and in the media.
Lee Cokorinos conducts political research on right-wing
movements and organizations. He is the author of The
Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial
and Gender Justice (Rowman & Littlefield), and Target
San Diego: The Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy
and Smart Government, and can be reached at
***@earthlink.net.
Immigration Movement
By Lee Cokorinos
http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/newsletter11/story2.
html
Prominent leaders of the anti-immigration movement
would have us believe that not a ounce of racism lies
behind their efforts. The most media-visible figures in
this camp, such as Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, Tom
Tancredo and Victor Davis Hanson may argue the case for
restricting, deporting, rounding up and cutting off
public services to those "illegals" stigmatized as
culturally backward, unhealthy potential terrorists.
But they protest that their motives for doing so are as
pure as the driven snow.
In their writings and media appearances, the leaders of
the anti-immigration movement claim their politics are
based not on a hatred of the racial Other but on their
commitment to the rule of law, the integrity of "our
culture," the objective findings of social science, or
better employment prospects for American workers.
On page after page of In Mortal Danger, Tom Tancredo's
diatribe against non-European immigrants and
multiculturalism, the presidential candidate and
congressman repeatedly complains that he and his
colleagues have been unfairly painted as racist or had
their arguments misconstrued as racist.
But alongside these complaints Tancredo's book drips
with cultural condescension toward Mexican-Americans,
Muslims and African-Americans. While he claims that
illegality is the problem, Tancredo soon moves past
this and calls for revoking the legal citizenship of
what he terms Mexican-American "anchor babies."
Conjuring up racist and sexist imagery, he declares
that "gravid wombs should not guarantee free medical
care." One wonders whether Tancredo, both of whose
grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Italy, would
apply such terminology to his parents, and thus forfeit
his own citizenship.
"Clarity of Thought"
Beset by a "malignant multiculturalism," the "vast
majority of Americans" are, according to Tancredo,
forced to deal with its "raging intolerance of
traditional America." This leads to such outrages, he
tells us on the following page, as Vanderbilt
University renaming its Confederate Memorial Hall
dormitory to Memorial Hall just "because the word
'Confederate' made some people uncomfortable."
It apparently doesn't make him feel uncomfortable.
Tancredo addressed a meeting bedecked with Confederate
flags and promoted by the neo-Confederate League of the
South last year. Dr. Michael Hill, the League of the
South's president, has warned that the U.S. faces the
prospect of "being overrun by hordes of non-white
immigrants."
In his book, Tancredo also reaches back into history to
embrace the crudest forms of colonial racist rhetoric.
He points to what he calls a "very poetic speech"
delivered in 1899 by Winston Churchill against Muslims'
"degraded sensualism," "fearful fatalistic apathy,"
"improvident habits," "slovenly forms of agriculture,"
etc. These, of course, are exactly the kinds of taunts
that the racial nativists of the American past directed
at Tancredo's Italian forebears when they reached the
U.S.
Casting about for more current action heroes, Tancredo
settles on "noted constitutional attorney" Ann Coulter.
Coulter, a former staffer with the Center for
Individual Rights, has defended Charles Murray and
Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, which links race
and IQ, and regularly heaps racist abuse on Muslims and
others, as in "I believe our motto should be after
9/11: Jihad monkey talks tough; jihad monkey takes the
consequences. Sorry, I realize that's offensive. How
about 'camel jockey'? What? Now what'd I say? Boy, you
tent merchants sure are touchy. Grow up, would you?"
Although Tancredo claims that individuals should be
judged on their actions and merits rather than their
group identity, he takes up Coulter's proposal that
everyone from "suspect countries" should be immediately
deported. Tancredo has also proposed wholesale
deportation of undocumented immigrants. "If only our
political leaders possessed" Coulter's "clarity of
thought," he writes.
The Suburban Plantation
Victor Davis Hanson, author of Mexifornia: A State of
Becoming and another prominent think tank/TV talking
head in the immigration debate, also argues for a
radical cutback in Mexican immigration and vigorous
efforts to root out multicultural thinking. At the core
of his approach is an imperious demand that immigrants
conform to his narrow, Anglicized view of American
culture.
He also abuses his progressive critics for allegedly
falsely charging the anti-immigration movement with
racism. "To discuss the issue rationally," he claims,
"is to expect charges of racist and nativist." He then
blithely condemns American schools for promoting "the
fiction of cultural equality."
Hanson, a senior fellow at the right wing Hoover
Institution, comes from a long line of California
Central Valley growers and occupies a special niche in
the firmament of reaction, providing a philosophical
bridge to earlier forms of anti-immigrant ideology.
One of the more enduring mythical themes in the
cultural history of white supremacism in the United
States has been the idyllic nature of the Southern
plantation, where everyone knew his or her place in the
racial pecking order. In exchange for accepting this
social order the laboring classes, according to this
mythology, would be rewarded with a stable existence,
leading to a "natural" harmony.
This thinking was championed by mid-20th century
adherents of the so-called "Southern Agrarian" movement
such as Richard M. Weaver, one of the founding
intellectual figures of modern conservatism. Skirting
around the questions of slavery and Jim Crow lynching,
they romanticized the supposed gentility and "small is
beautiful" values of "civilized" southern life. Hanson
extends some these Agrarianist themes, such as the
dignity of manual labor, to the farms and ranches of
the southwest, worked largely by immigrant workers from
Mexico.
While he does not embrace the philosophy of antebellum
plantation idealism, Hanson's writings, particularly
the early chapters of Mexifornia, are filled with misty
Agrarian school images of the alleged nobility and
order of a fading rural California farm life (e.g., his
nostalgia for "the good times of our agrarian past").
In southern California the Agrarian mythological
tradition has played out in odd and sinister ways (a
eugenics movement was part of it, as Matt Garcia
recounts), combining misplaced nostalgia for social
relations on the small commercial farm and, in its more
recent incarnation, a celebration of the bucolic white
suburbs as the pinnacle of civilization.
For Brian Janiskee, Hanson's Claremont Institute
colleague, "the seemingly quiet and bland order of the
California suburb is, in effect, a metaphysical
affirmation of the revolutionary core of the American
regime."
Needless to say, an intense and sometimes nasty
struggle for cultural hegemony and economic and
political power is taking place in the California
suburbs between a shrinking and resistant white
population and a growing Latino community. Journalist
Roberto Lovato reports that one participant at an
Anaheim city council meeting said California is
becoming "ground zero for America's second civil war."
"Imperatives to be Honored"
This rural/suburban reality sits rather incongruously
with Hanson's shifting claims that racism is either no
longer a big deal (it "belongs largely to the past") or
is immutable ("mankind by its very nature is prone to
be murderous, racist and sexist"). "Today's Big Lie,"
he tells us, is that "racism, discrimination [and]
labor exploitation" have been "the burdens of the
Mexican-American experience."
Such arguments, of course, have long been directed at
African-Americans, and have a strong appeal for right
wing opponents of a strong and effective government
role in promoting racial justice. As they pour out of
the think tanks and media outlets of the right, they
are feeding increasingly coordinated populist assaults
on African-American and immigrant communities.
Veterans of the Prop 209 campaign in California, such
as Ward Connerly and Glynn Custred, and others now
backing Connerly's "Super Tuesday" multistate campaign,
have also jumped on the anti-immigration bandwagon by
linking it with their assault on affirmative action.
On the back cover of Mexifornia Linda Chavez of the
misnamed Center for Equal Opportunity, which has been
waging war for years against the gains of the civil
rights movement in law, education, employment and fair
housing, dutifully endorses Hanson's view of what she
calls "disturbing trends among Mexican immigrants."
This despite the fact that Chavez seems to have had her
own misgivings about anti-Mexican bias among her right
wing colleagues. She specifically calls out "a fair
number of Republican members of Congress, almost all
influential conservative talk radio hosts, some cable
news anchorsââ,¬'most prominently, Lou Dobbsââ,¬'and a
handful of public policy 'experts' at organizations
such as the Center for Immigration Studies, the
Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA,
in addition to fringe groups like the Minuteman
Project."
Those who thought these words might signal a welcome
move toward multiculturalist rationality among the
anti-diversity crowd were soon to be disappointed.
Chavez quickly retracted them.
Praising Hanson's book in the Wall Street Journal for
its "highbrow, agrarian outlook," Chavez' sidekick
Roger Clegg offers his own racialized and imperious
endorsement of "the core values that define American
citizenship," such as "don't demand anything because of
your race or ethnicity" and "don't view working hard
and studying hard as 'acting white.'"
These are not a matter of choice for free individuals
in a democratic society, but, he sternly instructs us
(acting white?) "habits to be inculcated and
imperatives to be honored."
Clegg's "core values" are an open book. "I have a lot
of sympathy," he tells us, "for those who want to
recognize the heroism of Confederate soldiers, and even
more for those who have a reflexive and negative
reaction to the NAACP's pronouncements these days. My
father's parents were from Mississippi, and my
parents and I are Texans, and in all my years growing
up and playing army I can never remember choosing to be
a Yankee rather than a Rebel."
Racial Nationalism and Immigration
Pat Buchanan, a veteran figure in anti-immigration
politics, has a substantial following among the
"pitchfork brigade" at the grassroots of the populist
right, and is also a regular presence on MSNBC. His
sister Angela "Bay" Buchanan served as chair of Tom
Tancredo's Virginia-based Team America PAC, which
promotes anti-immigration candidates, and has now
joined his presidential campaign team. Bay Buchanan and
Tancredo attended the Tombstone, Arizona kick-off rally
of the Minuteman Project in April 2005.
Although he pays lip service to the legal changes
brought about by the civil rights movement from the
mid-1950s onwards, in his book State of Emergency: The
Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, Pat
Buchanan deplores what he calls America's "national
guilt over racism."
Buchanan believes this guilt is leading toward national
and racial suicide ("demography is destiny"), a theme
once championed by Theodore Roosevelt that has a long
history in the American nativist movement. In
attempting to explain this guilt phenomenon, he points
to the "seminal" work of Peter Brimelow, who argues
that America's alleged obsessive guilt about racism was
caused essentially by an overreaction to the genocidal
crimes of the Nazis.
By committing to "cleanse itself from all taints of
racism and xenophobia," Buchanan quotes Brimelow, the
"U.S. political elite" eventually "enacted the epochal
Immigration Act of 1965," which did away with a quota
system based on national origins that favored European
immigration.
Brimelow, an English immigrant who runs VDARE, a
website filled with white supremacist and anti-Semitic
material, has called the Pioneer Fund, a foundation
that has backed racial eugenics research, a "perfectly
respectable institution." Buchanan writes a regular
column for VDARE, for which Tom Tancredo has also
written.
In the acknowledgments section of State of Emergency,
Buchanan singles out the late Sam Francis (who edited
the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens'
paper, The Citizens Informer) and Brimelow as the
vanguard of the anti-immigration movement. And while he
praises the leaders of the anti-immigrant think tank
infrastructure, such as Roy Beck of NumbersUSA, Mark
Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies and Dan
Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform
(FAIR), he cites a slew of VDARE columnists in the book
and thanks James Fulford of VDARE for help with the
manuscript.
The racist roots of the anti-immigration movement run
deep. In his important study of American immigration
politics up to the 1920's, Strangers in the Land, John
Higham identifies two broad strains of anti-immigrant
racial supremacism, one based on culture and the other,
with the rise of Social Darwinism, based on heredity
and genetics. These trends now seem to be converging,
and are being mainstreamed into the American media
through Buchanan's high visibility.
Nativism Goes to Harvard
As Higham points out, anti-immigrant racial nativism
was not restricted to populist demagogues who directed
their appeals to poor and working class whites (e.g.,
an anti-immigrant Minute Men organization was formed in
1886 in New York). Powerful strains of racially-charged
propaganda directed at immigrants have also emanated
from the political elite and top universities.
Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., stood up in the Senate in 1896
and warned in a debate over imposing literacy tests on
immigrants that America's national character was in
danger of being "bred out." Francis A. Walker, the
president of MIT, developed a theory in the late 1890s
that "beaten men from beaten races" were, with their
higher birthrate, dooming white America.
Books such as Madison Grant's 1916 The Passing of the
Great Race, proclaimed that "democracy is fatal to
progress when two races of unequal value live side by
side." The book helped spur a nativist movement, backed
by the Ku Klux Klan, that contributed to the passage of
draconian restrictions on immigration in 1924. The new
nativist movement of today has also spurred a
resurgence of the racist Klan.
Grant, a lawyer and president of the New York
Zoological Society, was vice president of the
Immigration Restriction League, which was, Higham tells
us, "born at a meeting of five young blue bloods in the
law office of Charles Warren, later a noted
constitutional historian." All five had attended
Harvard together in the 1880's and had gone on to do
graduate work at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School
or its law school.
The IRL, which eventually turned to eugenics and
briefly considered renaming itself the Eugenic
Immigration League, quickly developed close ties with
the leading nativist factions and lobbyists in Congress
and went on to fight immigration under the direction of
prominent attorney Prescott Hall and Harvard professor
Robert DeCourcy Ward.
"Pat Buchanan with Footnotes"
A century after the formation of the IRL, the tradition
of highbrow panic about the perils of immigration still
finds a home at Harvard. In Who Are We? The Challenges
to America's National Identity, Samuel P. Huntington,
arguably the leading political scientist in the U.S.,
strikes the very same themes that Buchanan, Tancredo
and Hanson do in their less footnoted (or in the case
of Hanson, non-footnoted) nativist diatribes: white
Protestant culture, which forms the core of America's
identity, is being marginalized by immigration,
multiculturalism, and (Huntington adds) the
"denationalization" of American elites.
For good measure, he produces a lengthy section on how
affirmative action has contributed to the
"deconstruction of America" through its alleged
abandonment of the intent doctrine, starting with the
labor department's enforcement of the anti-
discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of
1964, and continuing through the Supreme Court case
Griggs v. Duke Power (401 U.S. 424, 1971).
Huntington's notion that the intent doctrine has been
abandoned would surely come as a surprise to those who
see it as a major legal impediment to challenging
racial discrimination. Nevertheless, he writes that
affirmative action, along with "the challenge to
English" has contributed to the rise of "subnational
identities" (African-Americans and Latinos) that are
posing a dire threat to "the core culture."
"Hispanization," he tells us, echoing the rhetoric of
the Minutemen, is threatening a "demographic
reconquista" of the southwest U.S. America's unity,
which he falsely sees as based on "Anglo-Protestant"
culture, is being undermined by largely Mexican
influences. But Huntington, while steering clear of
racist pseudo-science, goes beyond the argument about
culture to suggest that "white nativist movements are a
possible and plausible response" to the prospect that
whites may someday become a minority in the U.S.
As Boston University political scientist Alan Wolfe has
remarked, "the word 'plausible' catches the eye. To say
that something is possible or probable is to make a
prediction; to call it plausible is to endorse it."
Huntington's argument, "at times bordering on
hysteria," is "Pat Buchanan with footnotes."
Huntington's tacit nod to the white populist movement
has been reciprocated by Peter Brimelow, who describes
him as "a friend of VDARE."
Racial Nativism and the Conservative Infrastructure
Ideological advocacy has played an important role in
the resurgence of racial nativism in the anti-
immigration movement. But the conservative think tank
and foundation infrastructure has played an important
part in this revival, both by mainstreaming its ideas
through books, op-eds and media appearances and by
supporting the organizations promoting the demographic
and other research that has fed it. This intellectual
infrastructure feeds this movement at the base.
Charles L. Heatherly, one of the architects of the
Heritage Foundation's model for furnishing right wing
politicians with actionable policy ideas as editor of
several of its Mandate for Leadership handbooks,
provided a "priceless contribution" to In Mortal
Danger, Tom Tancredo writes. A former staffer for
Tancredo, Heatherly now works as a senior aide to the
congressman (see his appearance on Tancredo's behalf
on YouTube).
Victor Davis Hanson's Mexifornia was written at the
suggestion of Peter Collier, the founding publisher of
Encounter Books, which has been backed by the Koch,
Bradley and Olin Foundations. It is an expanded version
of an article published by Hanson in City Journal, the
Manhattan Institute's flagship publication. Myron
Magnet, the journal's editor, helped edit the article
and book.
According to Mediatransparency.org, the Olin foundation
provided $100,000 in funding for VDARE through Sally
Pipes' Pacific Research Institute. Olin also funded the
John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, of which
Samuel P. Huntington is the founding director. The
Smith Richardson and Bradley foundations provided
support for Huntington's Who Are We?
Bradley also provided support for the Center for
Immigration Studies. A report advocating the mass
deportation of illegal immigrants, "The Economics of
Immigration Enforcement," has been published by Henry
Regnery's Georgia-based National Policy Institute. The
Pioneer Fund lists the National Policy Institute as its
largest grant recipient on its 2005 federal tax return.
Fighting Wedge Politics
The right wing political infrastructure has also fed
strategic initiatives designed to polarize the African-
American and Latino communities over immigration. The
Minuteman movement, which has spread across the country
and experienced two major splits, has prominently
featured Ted Hayes, an African-American immigration
opponent at its rallies. Rosanna Pulido, a Latina,
heads the Illinois Minuteman Project, based in Skokie.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform, co-
founded by John Tanton, the Michigan-based leader of a
dense network of anti-immigration organizations,
attempted to form a front called Choose Black America
in May 2006.
The good news is that efforts to counter the wedge
politics of the Minuteman movement and national groups
such as FAIR are gaining ground. The Equal Justice
Society, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Latino
Issues Forum, Greenlining Institute and Centro Legal de
la Raza have begun the process of encouraging much-
needed dialogue (http://tinyurl.com/2rqq9s) on
immigration issues.
In the South, with a growing Latino population,
critically important organizing and advocacy
initiatives to counter the wedge politics of the right
are being led by the National Network for Immigrant and
Refugee Rights, Highlander Research and Education
Center Institute for Immigrant Leadership Development
(INDELI), Black Alliance for Just Immigration and the
Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network. If
adequately funded and supported, this infrastructure
can engage the racial nativist movement where it counts
mostââ,¬'at the grassroots level and in the media.
Lee Cokorinos conducts political research on right-wing
movements and organizations. He is the author of The
Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial
and Gender Justice (Rowman & Littlefield), and Target
San Diego: The Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy
and Smart Government, and can be reached at
***@earthlink.net.