[News] Immigration and White Racism: Ghost of George Wallace

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/santos03302006.html

March 30, 2006

Immigration and White Racism

The Ghost of George Wallace

By JUAN SANTOS

When the late Alabama Governor George Wallace--surrounded by armed 
guards--stood on the steps of the University of Alabama to prevent a 
young Black woman from entering the University of Alabama, he 
declared, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"

He also inspired a man who would later stand at the US / Mexican 
border, armed to the teeth, to prevent other brown skinned people 
from entering someplace he didn't want to them to enter--the United States.

A year ago Jim Gilchrist brought the mainstream media to a frenzy as 
they reported on his Minuteman Project, a group of racist vigilantes 
who'd traveled to the border--guns in hand--to stop the immigrant 
"invasion" and the "re-conquest," they said, of the US Southwest by Mexicans.

Later, Gilchrist ran for the US House of Representatives as a member 
of American Independent Party--the party founded by Wallace, the 
arch-segregationist.

Like Wallace with the Dixiecrats of his day, Gilchrist has plenty of 
allies in Congress--chief among them Colorado Representative Tom 
Tancredo, best known for advocating that the US "take out" the Muslim 
holy city of Mecca with a nuclear weapon. Tancredo is also known as 
the head of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, where, 
chillingly, he leads 91 members of Congress.

Tancredo and his crew don't like migrants--when the Denver Post 
profiled an undocumented high school student with a 3.9 GPA, the 
Congressman tried to have the boy deported.

Tancredo's Caucus is also credited with pushing through Congress the 
passage of the now-notorious Sensenbrenner immigration bill--the one 
that, if approved by the Senate, would make all people in the US who 
lack papers into instant felons, a criminalized, stigmatized and 
profoundly vulnerable under-caste.

The Congressman is consistent. After taking out Mecca, it would seem, 
Tancredo holds that undocumented immigrants "need to be found before 
it is too late. They're coming here to kill you, and you, and me, and 
my grandchildren."

The Minutemen love Rep. Tancredo, and they do not leave the man to 
suffer alone in his profound paranoia.

Minutemen co-leader Chris Simcox would have us believe that "we need 
the National Guard to clean out all our cities and round them 
[migrants] up. They are hard-core criminals. They have no problem 
slitting your throat and taking your money or selling drugs to your 
kids or raping your daughters and they are evil people."

The temptation, of course, is to dismiss these people as mere 
crackpots. The problem with that analysis however, is clear. These 
people have power. They've dominated and defined the debate on 
immigration for the past year--at least until this past weekend, when 
well over a million--even two million people--marched in opposition 
to their xenophobic and persecutorial dementia.

Southern California activists have seen that racist dementia up 
close, time and again, as we confronted the Minutemen and their 
allies in an effort to keep things from ever getting this far.

We saw it in the eyes of breakaway Minuteman leader James Chase in 
the darkness of the southern desert at midnight, he armed with a 
shotgun; we with nothing but our bare hearts.

We saw it in the eyes of Minuteman supporter Hal Netkin as he slammed 
his car into a crowd of mostly Chicano protestors as Jim Gilchrist 
addressed the California Coalition for Immigration Reform. Gilchrist 
joined the Coalition, which has been identified as a racist hate 
group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Painted as American a hero by the likes of California Governor Arnold 
Schwarzenegger, Gilchrist has been accused by a former campaign 
volunteer of integrating Nazi activists into his campaign for Congress.

He lost the special election, despite his endorsement by 
Sensenbrenner ally Tancredo.

But he put fear into Republican politicians--fear that incumbents 
would face vote draining, immigrant bashing third party candidates in 
November if they didn't take a hard right line against migrants.

They feared Gilchrist sympathizers like the rightist California group 
Save Our State, which has regularly drawn organized Nazis to their 
protests, and which uses the exact rhetoric used by open white 
nationalists and supremacists--such as calling Mexican culture a "cesspool."

The corporate media, informed time and again of Nazi, white 
nationalist and militia connections to the anti-migrant movement, has 
continued to paint the anti-migrants as part of a mainstream. 
Gilchrist himself has claimed he has "240 million" supporters, 
despite the fact that the anti-immigrant movement as a whole could 
field only 700 activists for its "National Day of Protest" this year. 
They were outnumbered 10 to 1 wherever they turned across the country.

Even so, Tancredo, Sensenbrenner and the extreme, racist, right wing 
elements they represent were on the verge of a major legislative 
victory. They were so close they could taste it.

Until Sunday.

Until La Gran Marcha in Los Angeles.

Then their dominance cracked.

They were on the verge of a walled off country. On the verge of 
migrants hunted down, rounded up by La Migra and the police--of brown 
skinned people disappearing in the streets and penned in 
concentration camps they call "detention centers." They were on the 
verge of passing a cruel law that would make all migrants without 
papers felons and make all Brown people suspects in a hostile nation. 
They were on the verge of a new ethnic cleansing of America.

And even though the mass protests of recent days have deeply shaken 
them, they still might win.

Sensenbrenner says he's not intimidated.

Gilchrist, of course, is promising his followers "absolute" victory.

He says the things more seasoned power brokers won't say. Although 
they're on the same side, he says the Sensenbrenner bill doesn't go 
far enough. He wants a wall from sea to sea. He wants the National 
Guard at the border.

He called the families who marched together "throngs of illegal alien 
bullies" and dubbed the mass demonstrations for basic human rights a 
"classic insurrection." He pledges to stand, "stoically unmoved"--one 
might imagine like George Wallace on the steps of the university, 
facing down a lone young African woman, armed thugs in tow.

The future will be decided in the days to come. As senators debate 
their take on migrants, they will continue to put their fingers to 
the wind, to see just how far they can go without profoundly 
alienating their middle class allies and without provoking rebellion 
from below. Senate Republican leader Bill Frist plans to let two 
bills be debated there, including his own draconian take-off on the 
Sensenbrenner bill.

As the debate begins this week, at least 20 LA area high schools are 
planning a massive walkout, on the birthday of Cesar Chavez. A 
national network of migrant support groups will lay out a strategy 
for more vast demonstrations like La Gran Marcha.

They must not stand alone. You must stand with them.

If you don't, the dream of George Wallace's ghost may yet come 
true--a racist, even fascist USA. Today, tomorrow and forever.

Juan Santos is editor of Mexica Tlahtolli, a Chicano and Native 
American newspaper in Los Angeles. He can be reached at 
<mailto:JuanSantos at Mexica.net>JuanSantos at Mexica.net


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