Friday, March 6, 2009

Hate Groups' Rise Fueled by Nativism

Sent by Porfirio Q.

Source: CHANGE.ORG



Published March 05, 2009 @ 04:53AM PST


Dee at Immigration Talk with a Mexican American has been blogging on the murder last week of two young Chileans studying in the U.S. The killings were apparently motivated by nativism and carried out by an unbalanced man whose neighbor said he had asked her if she was "ready for the revolution to begin and if [she] had any immigrants in [her] house to get them out." Dee's latest update takes a look at how Dannie Baker's hatred of foreigners filled an otherwise empty life, and how he may have believed the murders were his way of contributing to society by ridding it of foreign influence.

As regular readers of this blog will know, hate crimes against Latin@s have become a regular feature of life in the U.S., as people like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs, and Tom Tancredo build their careers on inspiring fear of immigrants.

Dee points us to a recent Southern Poverty Law Center report on the continued rise of hate groups in the U.S. fueled by anti-immigrant sentiment, the election of Barack Obama, and the faltering economy. The number of hate groups in the U.S. has grown by 54 percent since 2000. The SPLC press release notes that the "rise in hate groups has coincided with a 40 percent growth in hate crimes against Latinos between 2003 and 2007, according to FBI statistics." Most such crimes against undocumented immigrants surely go unreported since, in many jurisdictions, a call to the police may as well be a call to ICE.

I expect our nativist regulars will complain about the medical costs of treating the wounded students and the costs to the taxpayer of the police action to arrest the killer. Sam Huntington would have chalked this massacre up to inevitable cultural conflict between the U.S. and countries to the south, and propose to seal the border to avoid further killings. Huntington and his online acolytes represent the views of a minority of voters, but they've had an oversized impact on immigration policy for the last 20 years. The result is sadly predictable, as the families of the slain students have come to know.

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