Well, the status quo can’t abide anything or anybody rocking the boat, so it’s important for the DC media to start emphasizing differences within the growing immigration movement:
But Jaime Contreras, president of the National Capital Immigration Coalition, said he continues to encourage people to conduct business as usual so that they don’t risk their jobs. And the Rev. Jose E. Hoyos, director of the Arlington Catholic Diocese’s Spanish Apostolate, said he believes people will heed his message to go to work.
“A lot of people have said to me that their lives are going to be normal,” Hoyos said.
The disagreement over the boycott played out last week in a series of news conferences. Many leaders of the April 10 immigration rally on the Mall cautioned against participation in the boycott, and some activists from the Washington region and elsewhere encouraged immigrants to stay away from work, schools and stores.
The good old Washington Post, party organ for the Permanent Government, wholly owned subsidiary of the Investor Class, can always be counted on for stories like this. Now all this story needs is some scary lefty boogyman to scare everybody away:
Some local Latino leaders said they worry about being associated with a Los Angeles-based group, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), that has been active in promotion of the boycott. They said they fear that the group’s broad-based opposition to Bush administration policies could hinder attempts to win allies for immigration reform on Capitol Hill.
ANSWER protested numerous administration policies, including sanctions on Cuba, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. The organization began supporting immigrants’ causes last year in opposition to the Minuteman Project’s plan to patrol the southern U.S. border, said Carlos Alvarez, a Los Angeles-based ANSWER spokesman.
“Ideological cohesion to the T isn’t something that is absolutely necessary right now,” he said.
In California, ANSWER has closely allied itself with the immigrant movement, providing a sound system for marches, creating banners and distributing fliers to promote the boycott. Members of Washington’s Hispanic leadership have not been as welcoming.
Carlos Castro, a leader in two local business groups and owner of the Todos Supermarkets in Northern Virginia, said he was wary of some advocates’ attempts to link immigrants’ rights with leftist causes.
“They want to create instability in the community,” he said. “It is kind of scary, because I lived through the metamorphosis of the Civil War [in El Salvador], and I know leadership and I know instigators. I want to make sure that we get the leaders of the Hispanic community out front. I’m not accusing anyone, but that’s certainly how it looks.”
Oh no, scary! We’re just one step away from Marxist guerillas with bandanas tied over their faces! Of course, ANSWER tries to lock it’s suckers onto anything that moves, and is far from a leader in what has been a very organic, grassroots movement. (I’m sure posts bemoaning embarrassing protestors will start popping up at the Big Progressive Blogs, once orders come down from Reid’s and Schumer’s offices). It fits the media’s lazy narrative, and the newness of the protests has worn off. We’re working our way to the coming media blackouts as the movement progresses, the same way they ignore large peace protests or women’s health celebrations. The main reasons that the immigration protests have gotten the coverage they have is their novelty, and that they give a chance for the news programs to put on angry pundits pushing more rightwing agitprop.
Oh, and speaking of the rightwing, immigration and agitprop, how eager was the Washington Post and other big media to point out the ties between the Minutemen and the White Supremacist movement? I remember hearing a lot about scared patriotic Americas bloviating about the security of our borders, but very little about:
For the most part, only astute monitors of hate groups, anti-racist coalitions and independent journalists identified the glaring similarities between the Minutemen and previous racist vigilantes of the Southwest such as the Klan Border Patrol of the early ’80s, whose members bragged to an undercover police infiltrator that they’d beheaded and buried clandestine border crossers. But when the hurricanes blew in, and the 2,000th soldier in Iraq blew up, the Minutemen media blitz blew away.
The Minutemen themselves didn’t, however. Gilchrist came in third, running as an independent in the O.C.’s 48th congressional district primary race in October, receiving nearly as many votes as Democratic candidate Marilyn Brewer, and though he lost the Dec. 6 special election, he polled a disturbing 25 percent.Two nights after the loss, a beaming Gilchrist told border-obsessed Lou Dobbs on CNN that he will announce at the end of January his plan to run again.
Meanwhile, he and Simcox have continued to organize and encourage border rallies and expand their ranks to include even more pistol-toting rednecks to sit in lawn chairs, chug Coors Light and courageously point out poverty-stricken job-seekers to the Border Patrol, whose ambivalence toward such “help” is well-documented.
The racists have also begun to branch out to the non-border states, where they spy on folks being hired for jobs they themselves would never do. At this point, the Minutemen have perhaps enough members to fill a section of the bleachers at a rodeo, but they won’t release a list of their members, so it’s almost as hard to count them as it is to count the men, women and children who’ve died or disappeared as victims of vigilantes at the border since hate groups began patrolling it in the 1920s.
How about it Lou Dobbs and the editors of the Washington Post? If we’re to accept that this new article is merely an attempt to tell the whole story, why is it that we hear so little about the ugly racial underpinnings of the Minuteman movement, outside some independent media and David Neiwert’s excellent reportage?
One term that I think we can accurately use to describe them is extremist. It’s a term that conveys both the nature of the Minutemen and the challenge they represent to the mainstream.
Indeed, one of the most significant facts about the Minutemen, in this context, is the extent to which they signify the real embrace of right-wing extremism by large swaths of the mainstream conservative movement. This is a development that has real significance beyond merely the debate over immigration.
A thorough review of its core of support — from the white-supremacist American Renaissance and Aryan Nations organizations to less noxious but nonetheless racist outfits like VDare and American Patrol — as well as the words of its own founders and participants will reveal right-wing extremism in every nook and cranny. Portraying them as “jes’ folks” is not merely irresponsible, it’s dangerous.
You know these kinds of people, the kind of people responsible for hate crimes throughout our history and the destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. We won’t be getting that side of the story. It’s important that the working classes be kept fearful and hateful toward one another. Dividing and conquering workers of ALL colors, creeds and races helps to keep wages low and productivity high. Hate grows from a fear that there is no future, no hope, and that some OTHER is responsible for the death of someone’s dreams. If white workers can be convinced that some outside “THEY” are taking away “our” jobs, they can be persuaded to look away from how the current system robs them blind. The Washington Post is an organ of the status quo. It exists first and foremost NOT to “report news” but to reinforce narratives. Much of what appears in that paper is little more than stenography coming from corporate flacks and politicians’ aides.
We all offer the burgeoning Immigrants Rights movement a vote of thanks. If you believe in social justice, you should support their revival of a faith in the power of people working together. Big Business and the political parties feed, like ugly soul-sucking lampreys, on our fear and suspicions of each other. We all want to provide for ourselves and our families. We all want a better, cleaner and safer future. Remember that. People sneak across the border in part because our foreign policy and trade practices distort the wages paid in both their country of origin and here in the US. The problem isn’t immigrant workers, but depressed wages. We can ALL be enriched if we work together for social justice, for living wages, to make sure that ALL children in this country and others are fed, clothed, sheltered and educated. This isn’t about welfare. Well, except that we live in a country where businesses suckle at the government teat for corporate welfare. They regularly run protection rackets where they promise to preserve local jobs as long as a payout in tax breaks and giveaways is slipped under the local government’s tables to waiting hands thrust out from tailored sleeves. THAT is the drain on our tax dollars that we should all be protesting.
