Follow up on ICE Death by Detention

Many detainees may have a valid defense — and at any rate have committed only administrative violations such as overstaying a visa or entering the country without authorization. Yet their cases are handled with a toxic mixture of secrecy and inattention to basic rights.

We posted two days ago on the deaths of detainees in the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We highlighted a New York Times article which described the horrible death of Boubacar Bah, who was incarcerated for an administrative violation. According to The New York Times, the head of a Congressional subcommittee looking into complaints of inadequate medical care in immigration detention announced that she had introduced legislation to set mandatory standards for care and to require that all deaths be reported to the Justice Department and Congress.

“This should not be part of the debate about illegal immigration,” the chairwoman, Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, said of the bill, which she introduced late last week. “This is about whether the government is conducting itself according to the basic minimum standards of civilization.”

Representative Lofgren cited the case of the case of Francisco Castaneda, a Salvadoran who testified at the hearing last fall that he was denied a biopsy for a painful lesion on his penis for 11 months while he was in detention as an illegal immigrant, despite his pleas and doctors’ recommendations. By the time he received the treatment he had been seeking, in February 2007, he was found to have metastasized penile cancer, records show; his penis had to be amputated.

He was released from detention after a diagnosis of terminal cancer, and died on Feb. 16 this year at age 36, leaving behind a 14-year-old daughter.

In March, a federal judge ruled that the government could be held liable in a lawsuit his family is pursuing. The federal government admitted medical negligence in the case last month.

On Tuesday, May 6, 2008, The New York Times published an editorial which accurately portrayed the Kafquaesque nature of the ICE detentions.

NY Times Editorial Death by Detention May 6, 2008

It is shameful, though hardly a surprise, that they remain in the dark. There is no public system for tracking deaths in immigration custody, no requirement for independent investigations. Relatives and lawyers who want to unearth details of such tragedies have found the bureaucracy unresponsive and hostile. In the case of Mr. Bah, records were marked “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, a private company that runs the Elizabeth Detention Center and many others under contract with the federal government.


Secrecy and shockingly inadequate medical care are hardly the only problems with immigration detention. Immigrants taken into federal custody enter a world where many of the rights taken for granted by people charged with real crimes do not exist. Detainees have no right to legal representation. Many are unable to defend or explain themselves, or even to understand the charges against them, because they don’t speak English and lack access to lawyers or telephones.

As authorities at the federal and local level continue rounding up illegal immigrants in these harsh days of ever-stricter enforcement, the potential for abuse will continue to grow — largely out of sight. Although immigration law is every bit as complex as tax law — and the consequences for violators more dire — the detention system seems designed to sacrifice thoughtful deliberation and justice to expediency and swift deportation.

Many detainees may have a valid defense — and at any rate have committed only administrative violations such as overstaying a visa or entering the country without authorization. Yet their cases are handled with a toxic mixture of secrecy and inattention to basic rights. This mistreatment of a vulnerable population, which advocates for immigrants trace to the roundups of Muslims after 9/11 and the subsequent clamor for tougher immigration laws, is hostile to American values and disproportionate to the threat that these immigrants pose.

Congress has failed repeatedly to enact meaningful immigration reform, and the prospects in the next year or so are slim. It can act on this. The government urgently needs to bring the detention system up to basic standards of decency and fairness. That means lifting the veil on detention centers — particularly the private jails and the state prisons and county jails that take detainees under federal contracts — and holding them to the same enforceable standards that apply to prisons. It also means designing a system that is not a vast holding pen for ordinary people who pose no threat to public safety, like the 52-year-old tailor, Boubacar Bah.

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Deaths of Immigrants in Federal Custody Shrouded in Secrecy

A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement.

The New York Times has received a list of detainee deaths of immigrants under custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the three year period from 2004 to 2007. During that period there were 66 confirmed deaths, according to ICE’s data, which the Times notes is considerably sketchy. The title of the article, penned by Nina Bernstein, aptly describes the circumstances surrounding those deaths: “Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in Custody.” Left unanswered is how many more detainees were harmed by inadequate or non-existent medical care, never mind those harmed by physical abuse at the hands of guards.

Let this point be absolutely crystal clear: these people are not in detention because they are criminals or because they committed a criminal offense. Many of these detainees, merely over-stayed their visas, were denied entry or are seeking political asylum. As such, this is not a “dangerous” population. Quite the contrary, many of the inmates were leading productive lives with families and communities to support them. Given the current climate, however, the government sees fit to waste taxpayer money incarcerating people who have no business behind bars. As if the insult of incarcerating low-risk people were not enough, these detainees get shoddier treatment than hardened criminals and have less legal rights. Herein are some excerpts from The Times, excellent article:

Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.

But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.

Boubacar Bah, had overstayed a tourist visa… shackled and pinned …as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours

Mr. Bah’s name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.

The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration.

The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah’s. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.

Mr. Bah’s relatives never saw the internal records labeled “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government. The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth.

Mr. Bah had lived in New York for a decade, surrounded by a large circle of friends and relatives. The extravagant gowns he sewed to support his wife and children in West Africa were on display in a Manhattan boutique.

Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor… Physicians consulted later by The Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding… He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval.

But he died in a sequestered system where questions about what had happened to him, or even his whereabouts, were met with silence.

….Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.

Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong.

No government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated. And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance….

Lingering Questions

The Times, through an immigration lawyer who had received separate calls from two detainees; they were upset about a badly injured man — named “something like Aboubakar” — left in an isolation cell and later found near death.

But advocacy groups said they were unaware of the case. And Michael Gilhooly, the spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that without the man’s full name and eight-digit alien registration number, he could not check the information.

“Everybody liked Boubacar,” said Sadio Diallo, 48, who has a tailor shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he and Mr. Bah had shared an apartment with fellow immigrants since arriving in 1998. “He’s a very, very, very good man.”

For six years, Mr. Bah had worked for L’Impasse, a clothing store in the West Village,

Mr. Bah died on May 30, 2007, after four months in a coma….

There are 57 pages of documents, some neatly typed by medics, some scrawled by guards. Some quote detainees who said Mr. Bah was ailing for two days before his fall on Feb. 1, and asked in vain to see a doctor.

The records ... leave no doubt that guards, supervisors, government medical employees and federal immigration officers played a role in leaving him untreated, hour after hour, as he lapsed into a stupor.

It began about 8 a.m., according to the earliest report. Guards called a medical emergency after a detainee saw Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor.

He kept crying out, then “began to regurgitate on the floor of medical,” the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders.

When he regained consciousness, Mr. Bah was taken to the medical unit, which is run by the federal Public Health Service. He became incoherent and agitated, reports said, pulling away from the doctor and grabbing at the unit staff. Physicians consulted later by The Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding, but apparently no one recognized that at the time.

He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval, “to prevent injury,” a guard reported. “While on the floor the detainee began to yell in a foreign language and turn from side to side,” the guard wrote, and the medical staff deemed that “the screaming and resisting is behavior problems.”

With the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley,.. was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell.

Mr. Bah was ordered to calm down. Instead, he kept crying out, then “began to regurgitate on the floor of medical,” the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders. And with the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley, who wrote that Mr. Bah’s fall was unwitnessed and “questionable,” the tailor was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell with instructions that he be monitored.

Under detention protocols, an officer videotaped Mr. Bah as he lay vomiting in the medical unit, but the camera’s battery failed, guards wrote, when they tried to tape his trip to cell No. 7.

A supervisor removed Mr. Bah’s restraints. He was unresponsive ...a report said, adding: “The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail.”

Inside the cell, a supervisor removed Mr. Bah’s restraints. He was unresponsive to questions asked by the Public Health Service officer on duty, a report said, adding: “The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail.”

About 9 a.m., with the approval of the health officer and a federal immigration agent, the cell was locked.

About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah’s fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: “unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth.”

The watching began. As guards checked hourly, Mr. Bah appeared to be asleep on the concrete floor, snoring. But he could not be roused to eat lunch or dinner, and at 7:10 p.m., “he began to breathe heavily and started foaming slightly at the mouth,” a guard wrote. “I notified medical at this time.”

However, the nurse on duty rejected the guard’s request to come check, according to reports. And at 8 p.m., when the warden went to the medical unit to describe Mr. Bah’s condition, the nurse, Raymund Dela Pena, was not alarmed. “Detainee is likely exhibiting the same behavior as earlier in the day,” he wrote, adding that Mr. Bah would get a mental health exam in the morning.

About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah’s fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: “unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth.” Smelling salts were tried. Mr. Bah was carried back to the medical unit on a stretcher.

Just before 11, someone at the jail called 911.

When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain.

When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain. He was rushed to surgery, and the detention center was informed of the findings.

But in a report to their supervisors the next day, immigration officials at the center described Mr. Bah’s ailment as “brain aneurysms” — a diagnosis they corrected a week later to “hemorrhages,” without mentioning the skull fracture. After Mr. Bah’s death, they wrote that his hospitalization was “subsequent to a fall in the shower.”

Had this happened to an inmate doing time for a violent crime an inquest could be called for and guards and staff could be disciplined, even charged criminally. But because these people are mere detainees they merit little attention and enjoy few rights. How many more have suffered at the hands of incompetent or sadistic guards? You can be assured that the Federal Government will not give us an answer to that question.

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Conservative Republicans Outraged by Radical Nativist Element Taking over Party

Eristic Ragemail has written extensively on the racist roots of nativist and anti-immigrant groups such as VDARE and FAIR. We make no bones about the fact that our agenda is pro-immigrant and in favor of comprehensive immigration reform. There is, however, an interesting web site that is hosted by concerned conservative Republicans. (http://subwaycanaries.blogharbor.com/blog) Their concern stems from the fact that the party is being hijacked by radical right interests. Their mission statement pretty straightforwardly set out their concerns.

MISSION STATEMENT OF THE SUBWAY CANARIES

by SJ Reidhead on Wed 21 Jun 2006 10:24 PM MDT

The purpose of The Subway Canaries is to expose intellectually dishonest conservative ideological hypocrisy.

The Subway Canaries are stalwart Republicans who are dismayed at the direction subversively extreme conservative ideologues are taking the GOP.

The Subway Canaries feel if the true agenda of these individuals and organizations are not exposed to the light of day, the Republican Party will either become the party of Extreme Right Wing Hate and Racism or be forever relegated to a minority party.

This is our only agenda. It is an agenda of truth and intellectual honesty - Truth, Justice and the American Way!

The Subway Canaries are Republican First and conservative second. Any other way is a betrayal of the Republican Party.

Their posts very forthrightly set out some out the roots of many supposedly “mainstream” nativist groups and their loathsome tactics. Herein are some excerpts.

THESE ARE THE MINUTEMEN

NOTE: I was planning to a piece on the FLDS (I have some new information) but was side-tracked by this story. I think this is something that needs to be told. I know I am telling it one-sided, against the Minutemen in California. But what I have found is so repulsive and so vile it needs to be exposed to the light of day. It is obvious someone is going to cross the line one of these days and shots are going to be fired. I have a feeling it will be a Minuteman or one of their supporter who will do the shooting. When this happens and a defense is made, naturally the Hispanic is going to be the evil one.

I think these videos are terribly important. They show how abjectly evil these people are.

Do you have the courage to watch these videos? There are a number of them at Minutemen Unvarnished – and take nearly an hour to watch. Watch the video “Do You Believe in Jesus” as the San Diego Minutemen harass parishioners at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Fallbrook. This is in Fallbrook, CA. . . .

If this is what Sheriff Joe is allowing in Maricopa County, then he is as vile as are these individuals. I don’t care what side of the immigration argument you are on. If you think this is good, decent, and patriotic, then you are seriously disturbed and as evil as are these individuals. When you start harassing people attending church, and mace people as they are going into church as this video shows you are as bad as they are.

ANTI CATHOLIC A TREND?
After watching these videos, it appears to me that there is an anti-Catholic. I’ve been covering the anti-immigration crowd’s anti-Catholic bigotry for several days. Yesterday mentioned that Harold Hutchinson at Called As Seen had picked up on the anti-Catholic bigotry of Tom Tancredo and Lou Dobbs. Harold references a WSJ piece about how they “insulted the Pope”. l The Opinionated Catholic has more. JJ mentions an editorial at Modern Commentaries about Michelle Malkin and her anti-Catholic rants. It is obvious there is a strong anti-Catholic bias in the whole anti-immigration movement, promoted by John Tanton and his dislike of anyone who is not lily white. Why?
LA Times

“…t's not too surprising that one of the pontiff's most vocal critics was the poor man's Howard Beale, CNN personality Lou Dobbs. He's made something of a specialty of bashing the Catholic hierarchy in recent years, as part of his pseudo-populist campaign for ratings. Dobbs charged Benedict with "mixing religion and politics ... in many ways insulting our country, talking about the need to be welcoming. ... I really don't appreciate the bad manners of a guest telling me in this country and my fellow citizens what to do." Well, there you go, though the pope got off easy compared with L.A. civic leaders, whom Dobbs blasted after an earlier -- and totally misleading -- report on Special Order 40 and the case of Jamiel Shaw II, a young man allegedly shot to death by an illegal immigrant who is a gang member. Dobbs called city officials "liars" and singled out Police Chief Bill Bratton, whose defense of Special Order 40 -- which puts certain restrictions on when police can inquire about a suspect's immigration status -- the broadcaster called "irresponsible" and "disgusting politics." "And I think every one of you in the city of Los Angeles, running that city, supporting a sanctuary city and trying to excuse what happened to that family, I think it is contemptible," said Dobbs….”

THE VIDEOS
(WARNING: These videos feature profanity and obscene gestures)

(MigraMatters) If this is an example of those who are anti-illegal and are “Minutemen” in San Diego, then I’d rather be castigated for being against them. These people are filthy, vile, nasty trash. This is a link to a video. I am not doing an inbed, because of the filthy language. From Minutemen Unvarnished comes a ‘best of’ collection of videos about the Minutemen. Maybe you might want to ask for your money back (if they can account for it). You might want to watch “I’m Allowed to Threaten People”. The jerk is wearing a minuteman cap. Look at the people who are with the Minutemen. I wouldn’t let them in my driveway, let alone associate with them. The one “Keep Your Hands to Yourselves” features San Diego Minuteman Founder Jeff Schwilk. Try watching the one “Are You Legal?”

How about this Minuteman waving his flag? He’s nothing but a thug. Watch “Remember after the Alamo” to see what these people look like. They are scary. Watch “No Talking Chickens”. “Hello Witches” features the leader of the San Diego Minutemen harassing two activists. Watch as the Minutemen follow the women, attempting to terrorize them. Do you really think these are nice people? If I were those women, I would have been terrified. The San Diego Minutemen were founded by Jim Gilchrist.

In “If You Love Mexicans” Jeff Schwilk accosts a Home Depot customer. A minuteman then spits at the camera person. “Get out of here” Jeff Schwilk goes after a Home Depot customer. “Morning Wetbacks” shows how gentile the Minutemen are.

In “Vermin of Vista” Jeff Schwilk harasses and intimidates another activist. This man is seriously disturbed. I can’t believe people actually believe the you know what these people spout. In “Bring It On” he tries to mace someone who disagrees with him. In “He’s Trying to Scare Her” our boy Jeff finally gets picked up by a cop for harassing women.

Can you watch these videos and not call them evil? Do you really want to have sympathy for them and for their cause? These people think nothing of interrupting a church service because the people inside are Hispanic. “Can I Get Your Name” is the video. Then in “The Church is Nothing but Pimps” just shows how vile they are, using a loud speaker to blast a church service. Obviously Sheriff Joe isn’t the only one who doesn’t give a rip about disrupting church services. They call the Catholic Church nothing but pimps. Too bad these people can’t be arrested for disturbing a worship service.

Why don’t decent people realize how nasty these individuals are? “I gotta be Freakin’ Rank” shows this same bunch disrupting a funeral so they can harass people near-by. Obviously they have no morality or decency. In this one, a Minuteman did not wear deodorant, and then fans his nasty body in front of Hispanics. A woman is speaking Spanish. They keep yelling at her to shut up. (http://subwaycanaries.blogharbor.com/blog)

The site is comprehensive and includes research on the whole community of nativists with links to their own material exposing the hatred and racism espoused by the groups that find their way on Fox News and to Lou Dobbs mouth. Read it and weep.

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The Racist Roots of the Anti-Immigration Movement

Originally Published Wednesday, 19 December 2007

Orginally published On Black Agenda Report (hyperlink in title)

by Lee Cokorinos

It is true that growing immigrant populations are transforming the United States, but one ancient aspect of Americana remains intact: racial supremacist dreams of a "white" nation. The notion that the United States was and should forever be a White Man's Country - once the accepted creed and rationale of the Republic - resurfaces in hysterical form and very prominent places in the national discourse. In academia, electoral politics, mass media, and revived racist movements on the ground, corporate-funded anti-immigrant forces combine with age-old anti-Black formations to rally against diversity as "a dire threat to ‘the core culture.'" White "nativist movements" are once again called forth to confront the "mortal danger" posed by The Other.

The Racist Roots of the Anti-Immigration Movement
by Lee Cokorinos

This article originally appeared in the Equal Justice Society newsletter.

"Two broad strains of anti-immigrant racial supremacism, one based on culture and the other on heredity and genetics, seem to be converging."

Prominent leaders of the anti-immigration movement would have us believe that not an 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.

"Tancredo's book drips with cultural condescension toward Mexican-Americans, Muslims and African-Americans."

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.

"Tancredo reaches back into history to embrace the crudest forms of colonial racist rhetoric."

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.

"Hanson condemns American schools for promoting ‘the fiction of cultural equality'."

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."

"Ward Connerly and Glynn Custred have jumped on the anti-immigration bandwagon by linking it with their assault on affirmative action."

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 anchors - most prominently, Lou Dobbs - 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.

"Pat Buchanan deplores what he calls America's ‘national guilt over racism.'"

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 new nativist movement of today has also spurred a resurgence of the racist Klan."

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.

"Huntington 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.'"

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.

"This intellectual infrastructure feeds this movement."

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 most - 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,

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Republican Briefing Paper Notes that Immigration is Not Working for them as a Wedge Issue

The Creative Loafing Web Site has published what it claims is an exclusive copy of a secret Republican Party briefing on its 2008 election strategy. Entitled, "Wedge Issue Management Plan (WIMP)" and directed to "Republican campaigns and elected officials" the memo outlines wedge issues which they plan to use in the 2008 election cycle. For those unfamiliar, a Wedge issue is a social or political issue, often of a divisive or otherwise controversial nature, which is used by one political group to split apart or create a "wedge" in the support base of an opposing political group, with a view to enticing voters to give their support to the first group. (Answers.com) The Republicans have been masters at using wedge issues to mobilize their conservative base and to divide political communities. The full text of the memo is available at the Creative Loafing site. (click on title for hyperlink). Of note is the fact that, as Eristic Ragemail has argued, immigration is not paying dividends as a wedge issue for the Repubs. The memo is directed to Florida but it is fair to note that it is part of the larger Republican strategy.

Editor's note: CL was able to obtain an exclusive copy of a secret Republican Party briefing on its 2008 election strategy, which we reprint below:

Memorandum

April 30, 2008

From: GOP strategy brain trust

To: Republican campaigns and elected officials

Re: Wedge Issue Management Plan (WIMP)

We're very happy to see this election year progress as we trot out our WIMP agenda. This interim report should bring you up to speed on the many fronts on which we are working to both mollify our social and fiscal conservative bases and scare the bejeezus out of the moderate voters on other key issues that will force them to flee from the (ugggh) Democrats who managed to beat us out of nine seats in the Legislature in 2006.

We're turning that trend around by going back to basics with these time-honored issues for this year's campaigns, paired with our suggestions for what are sure to be this election year's hottest commodities: WIMP-approved specialty license plates. Order yours now!

Border patrol

Yeah, we know, immigration isn't as good an issue as it used to be for free media, but it is still gold out there in public -- polling shows two-thirds of the state wants stronger immigration enforcement. Toward that end, we saw a flurry of good anti-immigration and anti-illegal immigrant bills: 11 of 'em!

Our fave around the Issues Shop is the one from Rep. Don Brown of DeFuniak Springs, HB 73. It would make our allies in the police departments and sheriff's offices report people's immigration status, hamper all immigrants from getting driver licenses, require employers to verify the immigration status of newly hired employees and increase the criminal penalties for bringing illegals onto our white-sand shores.

We modeled this bill after one adopted in Oklahoma that has sent illegals fleeing the state as a result! (Note to the boys in Economic Development Issues: The Oklahoma economy took a big hit after this bill was passed, what with all the cheap labor going missing, so we should have a backup plan. Maybe another giveaway to one of our big corporate donors? Just thinking out loud here.)

Oh, and don't let it bother you that Rep. Brown's bill seemed bogged down in committees and unlikely to pass. Our supporters got the message anyway.

Even if the foregoing document is not authentic, the analysis is sound. Democrats need not run away from a pro-immigrant position in favor of comprehensive immigration reform.


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