In a cafe I frequent on the Monterey Peninsula, generally a
bastion of liberality, there is a regular customer, an elderly gent
who likes to talk politics. We’ve never met, but I’ve been
eavesdropping. His opinions often unencumbered by facts, he speaks
with the easy certainty and air of authority common to the ill
informed. He seems harmless enough.
In a cafe I frequent on the Monterey Peninsula, generally a bastion of liberality, there is a regular customer, an elderly gent who likes to talk politics. We’ve never met, but I’ve been eavesdropping. His opinions often unencumbered by facts, he speaks with the easy certainty and air of authority common to the ill informed. He seems harmless enough.
The other day his conversation was filled with assertions about Mexicans living off welfare, taking American jobs (how these two things can be accomplished at once I’m not sure) and – my favorite “invading” the country. “Those people,” he said, are moving into nice neighborhoods (again, how they can afford to do this on low-paying jobs while living off welfare is best left to the fevered imagination) and destroying property values.
I hadn’t heard crap like this since I was a boy in the 1960s, when one day I heard my grandfather swear at the “damn niggers” on his TV screen who were burning down Watts.
This gentleman, my neighbor, exemplifies the most pernicious aspect of the debate over immigration.
It is not the questionable motives of groups like the Minutemen, those arrested adolescents patrolling the Mexican border living out adolescent military fantasies. The most troubling thing is the cover the debate has provided for a lot of buried, vicious sentiment now rising to the surface and threatening to warp public opinion in dangerous ways – even on the Monterey Peninsula. My neighbor is the tip of an iceberg of reenergized racial politics and hatred.
In one of those under-the-radar reports, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a respected and seasoned player in the fight against racism and intolerance, last month issued its “intelligence report” for 2005 on hate-group activity in the United States. The number of active groups rose from 762 in 2004 to 803 in 2005 alone. Since 2000, the number of such groups is up 33 percent.
California has 52 of them. One, a branch of the Brotherhood of Klans, part of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, is in Soledad.
Since data for the report was collected, anti-immigration forces have further ginned up their activities. Some of their goals enjoy broad support. The American public generally agrees with the notion that in the age of terrorism our borders should be secure, whether or not they are truly at risk.
But witness how the immigration controversy has emboldened the lunatic fringe – which is looking less fringe-like with each passing epithet.
The Anti-Defamation League has been tracking their speech, and it is disturbing how openly violent it has become. Hal Turner, a radio talk show host in New Jersey, said this last October 31 (on your public airways): “Slowly but surely we are headed toward the solution that I have been advocating for years: Kill illegal aliens as they cross into the U.S. When the stench of rotting corpses gets bad enough, the rest will stay away.”
Agreement with Turner’s is not confined to the usual hate groups. Orphaned since the militia movement of the 1990s, many would-be foot soldiers who have become active in southern border groups like the Minuteman, Ranch Rescue and National Vanguard share Turner’s sentiments, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
The last time we heard such sentiments, following the Sept. 11 attacks, there was a wave of vigilantism against Arabs in America.
Now Sept. 11 is again being pressed into service, and again racial profiling is the result. The unsupported theory that terrorists could be crossing the southern border – as infiltration routes go, the forests of northern Minnesota are a lot safer, at least in summer, not to mention less detectable – provides cover for acting out suppressed racial animosities.
It’s tempting to dismiss people like Hal Turner as cranks, fanatics too far out of the mainstream to worry about. But once hate starts to spread it’s hard to contain. Today it threatens to overwhelm legitimate debate on immigration reform.
My elderly neighbor may not be aware that there is a struggle underway for his malleable soul. He has already adopted the relatively benign language of middle-class racism, which, like an entry-level drug, is leading him to the temptations of Turner’s agitated rhetoric. How much more will it take for him to plunge that spike into a vein?
And then, what kind of ugly country will we have become?
