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I’m an @publicintegrity reporter & I’ve covered anti-immigrant hate rhetoric for nearly 30 years. Bear w/ me and I’ll share why this movement, nurtured by politicians & rightwing media, led us to Trump and his followers storming the Capitol & threatening to do more. 1/
A corporation finally ordered Mark Levin & its other radio hosts w/ millions of listeners to stop spouting lies about elect fraud. https://nyti.ms/2MVWtFa Too late. They & Fox News hosts have banged on about fraud for 2 months. But they've been at it for 30 years.2/
They’ve spread white nationalist hate dressed up as “fiscal impact” arguments that immigrants – Mexicans – are a drain on the economy & Americans. In addition to ranting about culture, hosts have spread bogus reports dressed up as ‘scholarly’ research. 3/
See this report on how Trump spread lies w/ Jeff Sessions & rightwing media during his first campaign, which he kicked off by attacking Mexicans. https://bit.ly/2LKikyA Scapegoating an ethnic group is a warning that demagoguery will beget racial & political violence. 4/
So-called lib media has struggled to cover anti-immigrant sentiment & was fooled into using ‘reports’ by anti-immigrant activist groups (Center for Immigration Studies) as legit analysis & so-called ‘other side.’ All have right to free speech but its work is propaganda 5/
As anti-Mexican hate speech expanded on TV & radio (Lou Dobbs on CNN) reporters felt anger from devotees of Dobbs who'd call & scream at them & editors. An editor trying to appease them once told me “Why don’t you report on the drunk driving immigrants do? We did not. 5/
It was a dangerous idea w/ no root in fact. In 2008, I reported on ‘Dreamers’ in Calif whose parents worked fields & other jobs Americans had hired them to do. The young college students hoped Congress would pass a law to give them a shot at earning legal residency. 6/
The students felt the sting of Dobbs & radio hosts spreading hate. Marco Diaz, a poly sci major, said friendly white neighbors in Sacramento turned chilly toward his family. "All these radio stations have given poison to the American people that they didn't have before." 7/
Diaz & others lamented the lack of understanding that they had no way to legalize. At that time, US biz was promoting a legalization for Dreamers and undocumented workers. If you wanted to understand why, you wouldn’t learn from Dobbs’ show or rightwing talk radio. 8/
Instead of scholars & other experts, you got Minutemen rants at the border on Fox News. It only became worse w/ a proliferation of “hosts” who made a choice to serve as anti-immigrant and then Trump propagandists. 9/
You could see Trump coming long ago. Check out this San Francisco Examiner story that’s almost 28 years old. Imagine people listening to this rhetoric for a generation & electing a president who rode hate to win the White House. 10/
We called the 1993 story 'Racists or Realists? California’s Anti-Immigration Movement. It previews a cancer that decreased in Calif but metastasized nationally. We shouldn’t have put a question mark after that 1993 headline 11/
March 21, 1993 RACISTS OR REALISTS? ANTI-IMMIGRANT SENTIMENT GROWS IN CALIFORNIA
Susan Ferriss OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
LOS ANGELES
The man with the bullhorn began to chant the new anti-immigration mantra as if his life depended on it.
Susan Ferriss OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
LOS ANGELES
The man with the bullhorn began to chant the new anti-immigration mantra as if his life depended on it.
“We’re becoming a Third World! Deport all illegal aliens! Close the border!” Almost on cue, Dennis Zine, candidate for the Los Angeles City Council, joined more than 100 protesters at the curb of Wilshire Avenue in the bustling Westwood District.
There, for several hours on a recent Sunday, Zine and fellow demonstrators thrust placards at motorists reading, “Hasta la Vista, Greedy Illegals,” “Latino Politicians Only Serve Latino Needs,” and “Speak English or Get Out.”
Amid honks of approval, a white man snarled back in disgust: “Go back to Europe, ya racists!”
But the candidate, like others in a new breed of anti-immigration activists, was unmoved.
But the candidate, like others in a new breed of anti-immigration activists, was unmoved.
”I am not a racist! I am not a bigot!” Zine shouted, taking over the bullhorn to deride illegal immigrants and promote his candidacy. “They can use any words they want. We all know what it really is: It’s dollars and cents. We’re paying, and we’re not receiving.”
This is the new fiscal cry of the anti-immigrationists.
It has struck a chord in communities all over recession-mired California, especially where there are visible populations of legal Latino immigrants, their children, and a continuing flow of the undocumented from Mexico and Central America.
Calling California’s economy and environment a mess, bilingual education “a failure,” and multiculturalism “bunk,” anti-immigrant activists are organizing groups of 10 to 100 people throughout the state.
Southern California is ground zero for the tension, but groups have popped up in Marin County, the EastBay, San Jose and the Central Coast.
They are stringing together telephone networks and fax lines, lobbying local governments for crackdowns on illegal immigrants, and trumpeting new and controversial fiscal studies designed to gauge the stress put on public services by immigrants and their “citizen children.”
But even many inside the movement say they detect underlying racial and cultural conflicts that betray more than a pure interest in protecting borders.
Glenn Spencer, founder of Voices of Citizens Together - which organized the rally in Westwood - dismissed the charge but said: “We have an importation of an entire culture. It is a poor culture, an uneducated culture,” whose people are “unwilling to assimilate.”
Linking crime, the state deficit and the misfortunes of African Americans and Hispanic citizens to illegal immigration, Spencer’s group lobbied against the appointment of Zoe Baird as U.S. attorney general after it was reported that Baird ...
had hired two illegal Peruvian immigrants as household help, and is helping make immigration an issue to be reckoned with in Los Angeles’ upcoming elections.
Marin County anti-immigration organizer Bette Hammond said her movement was fueled by “facts and figures” she was gathering to bolster claims that immigrants were “illiterate, unskilled” and “going on welfare.”
Like some politicians, she said she sensed a shift in the political winds. ”Now, you can say the immigration word and not get shut up,” Hammond said triumphantly.
More than a dozen bills to crack down on illegal immigration - many not likely to pass constitutional tests - have been introduced in Sacramento. Among the suggestions: deploying the National Guard on the Mexican border, barring undocumented children from public schools ...
and requiring hospitals to report indigent illegals who seek Medi-Cal care.
”You have to take every step you can to protect our tax dollars,” said Assemblyman Richard Mountjoy, R-Arcadia, who has proposed bills requiring children to provide proof of legal residency to enroll in public school or obtain health care.
“You have to go back to the beginning. . . . Illegal aliens are criminals.”
Current federal law grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States, but Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Simi Valley, has a bill pending in Congress that would withhold citizenship from the U.S.-born children of immigrants unless their mothers have been granted permanent residency
State Assemblyman Pat Nolan, R-Glendale, who proposes deployment of the National Guard on the border, spoke to the small but energetic anti-immigration rally in Los Angeles earlier this month.
Nolan said he was uncomfortable with some slogans and signs he saw. However, he said, “I believe temperate people should be involved in this so it’s not just people angry and shaking fists.”
Nolan’s Latino colleagues are dismayed by the new movement and politicians who entertain it. They agree illegal immigration is a serious concern but insist the negative fiscal impact of illegal immigrants is being vastly overstated.
”It’s so simplistic; it’s so reactionary,” said Assemblyman Richard Polanco, D-Los Angeles, who fears a squelching of rational, humane debate on California’s future and its relations with Mexico and Central America.
”This state has undergone very serious and very troubling transformations in recent years, and these changes occurred not because of immigration, but in spite of it,” Polanco said when he convened a hearing last month before the Select Committee on California-Mexico Affairs.
”Clearly,” he said, “immigrants did not cause the Cold War to end (resulting in layoffs at defense plants), nor the tragedy of the savings and loan industry.”
Polanco chairs the committee, and Nolan is a member of it. The hearing debated the merits of two fiscal-impact studies on immigrants in San Diego County and Los Angeles County, released in August and November 1992.
The Los Angeles study attempts to measure the impact of post-1980 legal and illegal immigrants and their children on health and public education services - which are largely locally funded - in 1991-92.
It concludes that immigrants consume more than they contribute to local coffers, but not as much as they pay to both the state and federal government in taxes.
The study found immigrants paid $4.3 billion in taxes to all levels of government, while they and their children consumed $947 million in services.
Of the $4.3 billion they paid, however, Los Angeles received only $136 million, leaving a deficit of more than $800 million, according to the study.
Polanco said the study underscored the burden the state and county were bearing for all people. And he said he agreed with Gov. Wilson that the federal government should reimburse California for absorbing the majority of immigrants who were legalized under the 1986 amnesty laws.
(President Clinton has pledged to try to deliver more than $1 billion in such funds.)
But anti-immigration groups are using the study and other Los Angeles surveys in bits and pieces to shore up their arguments, Polanco charged.
An oft-repeated statistic is that, in 1991, 63 percent of the births in Los Angeles public hospitals were to illegal immigrant women, said David Hayes-Bautista, a UCLA demographer.
”There is absolutely no foundation for those numbers,” he said. “I was told it was an estimate made in 1987 in an accounting office in Los Angeles County, and ever since then it’s been taken as gospel.”
The Los Angeles study is an excellent beginning to gauge costs of services, Hayes-Bautista added, but it may have overstated the number of illegals in the county by placing the figure at 700,000 - or 7.6 percent of the total population.
The San Diego study, prepared for the auditor general of California by two public administration professors, is more controversial.
The study estimates San Diego County’s resident undocumented at 200,000, about 9 percent of the population, a hugely exaggerated assumption, according to Wayne Cornelius of the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies at UC-San Diego.
Based on that figure, the study tries to tally up everything associated with health, education and criminal justice, concluding that, although the county spends $206.4 million annually on illegals and their children, illegals contribute tax revenues of only $60.5 million.
The study then takes a major step by estimating through extrapolation that immigrants drain the state of $3 billion in services
Economist Adela de la Torre of the Chicano Studies Department at Cal State Long Beach said the San Diego study was so flawed “it should never be used to make public policy.”
To estimate the number of undocumented or “citizen children” of illegals, the study borrows from data on schoolchildren who speak limited English. School authorities do not believe that is an accurate measurement, de la Torre said.
UC-San Diego political scientist Daniel Wolf criticized the study for inflating the numbers of illegal immigrants processed through the criminal justice system by as much as 250 percent.
The survey erred, Wolf said, by selecting three months’ worth of statistics that were “corrected” in a flawed fashion.
Yet the newly released social service statistics are helping define the state and national debate over immigration.
For some Latinos who feel that racism is the real issue driving the new grassroots, anti-immigration movement, reaching out to debate solutions with the other side is becoming harder to stomach.
”I don’t talk to anti-immigration groups, and they don’t talk to me,” Harry Pachon of the National Association of Latino Officials in Los Angeles said icily.
At the Los Angeles rally, there was more than a hint of racial tension in the air.
At the Los Angeles rally, there was more than a hint of racial tension in the air.
”White people are fleeing Los Angeles,” said George Kadar, a Hungarian immigrant who complained not just about illegal Latin Americans but also about “thousands of illegal Jews” in the San Fernando Valley.
Kadar wore a beige helmet with the familiar red circle-and-slash mark over the silhouette of an immigrant family dashing across a highway. It’s the same figure on road signs that warn motorists to watch out for illegals trying to cross Interstate 5 near the Mexican border.
Alex Landi, a member of Voices of Citizens Together, said he was distressed by some of the remarks he had heard at the rally.
”We’re getting the one-fingered salute from a lot of people who think we’re against anything that’s not white,” he said. “I just don’t want us to look like rednecks, not all of us, at least. . . . The melting pot works if you don’t overload it.”
THE END. SAME RHETORIC 28 YRS ON
THE END. SAME RHETORIC 28 YRS ON
