Thread: Beginning of Undocumented Intolerance

http://latinalista.blogspot.com/2006/10 ... ce-of.html

Friday, October 27, 2006
The Beginning of Intolerance of the Undocumented
There's news of more towns jumping on the illegal immigration bandwagon: the mayor of Rogers, Arkansas wants to declare undocumented immigrants as public nuisances, and the city council in Bridgeport, Pennsylvania unanimously passed a resolution to ban undocumented immigrants from working or renting residences in the area.

Like the lynch mobs of the old West, people are conforming to a mindset based on hysteria, and in this case, misleading information.


A U.S. lynch mob in the 1930s (This is a picture of two black men being lynched)(source: digitaljournalist)

For example, according to a prominent Dallas immigration attorney, crossing the border illegally is not a crime and never has been. It's a violation of a civil statute.

And as far as the undocumented being a drain on public services.

Well, with each monthly rent or mortgage payment they make and every burger or taco they buy and every television, sofa or stereo they purchase, they're paying sales tax and property taxes which, in turn, go to the county coffers to pay for a good part of public education and health services — just like us all.

So, the question that suddenly occurred to me was: When did this hysteria targeting undocumented immigrants really begin?

It didn't start last spring in retaliation to the immigration marches.

Something so vile has to worm its way through the public conscience before it gets that strong a foothold.

And it really didn't start with Bush's election either. Days before September 11, Bush was making plans to meet with Mexican President Vicente Fox to start working on a viable plan dealing with the situation.

And it didn't start with House Republicans, though they would probably like to take the credit. Their rhetoric resembles nothing more than the parroting of a persuasive script.

So, when and with what did it start?

Historians and people more schooled in tracing the historical beginnings of such hysterical hatred could probably pinpoint several specific events in our history, but for me, negative heightened awareness of undocumented immigrants, especially Mexicans, began with one man and his book.



Samuel Huntington wrote Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, in 2004.

From the time it was published, debates on how Latino culture was incompatible with our Anglo-Saxon-founded nation dominated the air waves from radio and television to op-ed columns.

And during that time, Huntington's observations evolved into fact to be championed by a people who didn't have enough faith to believe this country could retain its values or its identity.

How ironic that these same people who feared that the undocumented would change the country, are in reality creating a much greater and long-lasting change with their own intolerance and paranoia.
posted by Marisa Treviño @ 5:35 PM

4 Comments:
At 11:56 PM, jo c said…

Wow you really pinpointed it down.
Of course the amnesty in 86 was supposed to end illegal immmigration. Then greedy business figured it could bus cheap labor from mexico and mexico would help and encourage an illegal invasion. Our less educated working in manufacturing etc., started feeling the pain and lower wages.

More and more souls started to speak up and were ignored, until people looking for work were being asked to learn spanish. As hispanics didn't want to learn english or expected our taxes to pay the bill to teach them.
Plus waving the mexican flag everywhere you go doesn't help the fit in process.
Then actually claiming the southwest is rightfully mexico's, also not the best touch in compatiblity.

In truth illegal immigration has been a problem in history before, at least 20 years (86) people have been talking. Congress didn't care because it's big business who actually put them in office, and cheap labor is what they want.

Plus if you are using fake papers to work and continually re-enter our country illegally it is not civil statute, but criminal and you are a criminal, just like a legal citizen who uses fake paper or habitualy break civil law.

2004 and Smuel Huntington, now that is too funny.

You would like to turn this into some race issue and its worked so well before, but like I said things are changing at least for awhile.

I wouldn't worry too much, as soon as the elections are over everything will go back to the same. Then all back on again before 2008 elections.
As the real people who control our country is big business, our wealthy elite.
They can't wait to exploit and control Americans just like Mexico's rich wealthy controls their countrymen.

Go ahead point at the anglo pick any year you want as the start. It won't matter after the election.
You don't want to assimilate as other immigrants have and that is the truth.

Do you really believe a country's leader who cares about his country would lobby citizenship to another country.
A real leader would worry about helping its own stay and build the place they love.
This is about wealth and controlling all of it and exploiting as many people as they can.

One book and one year, now that is funny.


At 9:53 PM, Barnabas41 said…

Immigrant debate’s focus on National
Identity could be good for all Americans
By
Joe Ortiz

One of the phrases that have captured my attention more so than the “illegal” aspect of the immigration imbroglio is “National Identity.” The phrase is also presented as “American Identity” with supporting adjectives such as “cultural, traditional and creeds.” In this day and age, culture can mean many things to many people, but it’s basically the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, traditions and practices that characterizes specific entities. Mexicans have a culture, so do Asians, Jews, Italians, as all ethnic groups do, and America has benefited greatly by them.

As the “immigration” debate continues to rear its ugly head, I have received many emails from white friends about their fear of “American Identity” erosion. Each time I asked what is meant by this phrase (American Identity) the responses I get is that immigrants should be good and law-abiding citizens, committed to speaking in English, patriotic and committed to the values, traditions, creeds and the American culture.

I kept probing for a more succinct meaning to this phrase, and for them not to take for granted that I know (and accept unwittingly) what they mean. Most responded by stating that historically, American Identity has had two primary components: culture and creed. The first they say has been the values and institutions of the original settlers, who were Northern European, primarily British, and Christian, primarily Protestant. This culture included speaking the English language and upholding traditions concerning relations between church and state and the place of the individual in society. Over the course of three centuries, black people were slowly and only partially assimilated into this culture. Immigrants from western, southern, and Eastern Europe were more quickly and fully assimilated, and the original culture evolved and was modified but not fundamentally altered as a result. It was also pointed out to me that American Identity developed through three phases: Anglo-America (1789-1861), Euro-America (1875-1957), and Multicultural America (1972-to the present).

The second component of American identity, many said, has been a set of universal ideas and principles such as liberty, equality, democracy, constitutionalism, limited government, private enterprise. These, many stated, constitute the American Creed, which in essence they believe is the fate of America as a nation is not to have ideologies but to be one.

One person added that the founding (white) fathers did envision diversity as a future problem, hence the national motto, e pluribus Unum. He said that throughout American history political leaders, also fearful of the dangers of racial, sectional, ethnic, economic, and cultural diversity, responded to the need to bring us “Americans” together, and made the promotion of national unity their central responsibility. He quoted Theodore Roosevelt as stating "The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing as a nation, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

However, what truly lies beneath these notions is an attitude of elitist superiority manifested by a mix of paranoia and chicanery that belies honorable pursuit. What most Americans today fail to recognize is that those pilgrims and puritans were all white and did not foresee the immigration realities we see today. The US Constitution, for the most part, promotes and practices principles and treatment of its beneficiary community. Yet, it was written by white folks who did not expect in later years the migration of Jews, Italians, Germans, Irish, Asians and Latins in pursuit of this wondrous concept.

What many also do not know is the white Anglo-Saxon “good old boy” network of implementing this document has been in existent since the day the pilgrims and puritans landed on Plymouth Rock. According to Scott Atkins, who wrote The American Sense of Puritan, “Of the earliest remembrances of the Pilgrims in the latter part of the 18th century was the establishment of the "Old Colony Club" to provide a clear example of how, from the beginnings of an official nation, nationalistic tendencies used the past as current self-justification. Atkins also stated that their true task “was to appropriate the past of religious separatism as an undeniable component of social and culture and, thereby, its American Identity.

Sadly, American Identity proponents are being led by puritanical minded, right wingers and evangelicals who proudly wear this identity on their shirt sleeves, they who are the tails wagging elite sentry dogs full of bile and hatred toward immigrants, especially Mexicans. For the most part, religious zealots (not true Christ-following servants) have used their erroneous belief in what the Bible truly states in quest of an American mission that their so-called “build a wall” patriotism is in tune with its union of near-religious end, being influenced and guided along with political self righteous means. They are convinced (as Atkins stated) that (in regard to liberty), "every part of God's providential proceedings justifies the thought....God does the work, but not without his instruments, and they who are employed are denominated his servants.” In essence, it is their basis of worldly power beyond the more predetermined modes of perceived religious entitlement and aristocracy.

The idea of our (America’s) white forefathers then expands beyond its more literal sense to anticipate that it takes its place in a larger lesson in national (genealogy) identity; what the forefathers started their children are bound to finish. Thus, a majority of white Americans have now become the soldiers and border patrol vigilantes not to just their blood-related ancestors, but to their American Identity itself.

It is easier and perhaps in its way necessary to do what has often been done with the waves of immigrants that lay the foundation of the European presence in New England in the early 1600s, to form a stern but strong figure of religious freedom and peaceful coexistence. But yet, today’s American Identity xenophobic explosion towards Mexican immigrants is no less different than their witch-hunts, elitism, intolerance, and narrow-minded zealotry.

To help explain just what America Identity truly means, it’s the white-Anglo Saxon culture whose influence has had the greater effect and which indeed swallowed the “philosophical” one that was once taught when I went to schools but has since never been practiced to its fullest. The phrase, anyone can grow to be the President of the United States comes laughably to mind. Yet, we still see in media and history books the grateful Pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock, greeted by the true (native) Americans, the ones portrayed by a national holiday, Thanksgiving. Their inherent ideology has nevertheless served as something (for them as) not essential, and therefore, not a danger, to their meaning of American Identity. But it is the white Anglo Saxon Puritanism whose meaning has proved the more dynamic, the more vital to the discourse of public memory. It is American Identity which can be seen as they see fit, and has served as a tool of contention for differing ideological uses and perspectives. However, it’s a sad historical paper trail that they leave behind, along with their strong strain of superiority that is literally negated by Godly principles. Because of their lack of true Godly love (patience, forgiveness, long-suffering, charity, etc.) the lack of these traits, have had a shallow meaning for their national identity.

Yet, this renewed focus on those who fear America’s National Identity is being eroded by Mexican immigrants, could go far in bringing about a more humane view and positive approach as to how Americans (and self avowed Christians) treat their fellow human beings. Within them one searches for the what seems must be a true Godly mind and heart, even as one realizes simply from the differing historical interpretations (scientific, revisionist, new-historical, and otherwise) that such a thing, if it could and did exist, looms farther in the horizon than it should.

Que lastima!


At 5:05 PM, Black American US Citizen said…

Good Afternoon, as a Black American, I am extremely offended of the photo that you used. Who the HELL are you to post such a wicked reminder of the on-going racism that BLACK Americans have experienced and are still experiencing. The Civil rights Movement was about equality. Dr. Martin Luther King- did not die in vain. There is absolutely no comparison to Undocumented Illegal Aliens, whose government encourages its citizens to flee Mexico, instead of providing for them. Mexico is one of the wealthiest Latin American Nations-with Oil, Gold, Commerce, and Trade. Why is there so much corruption and dishonesty in the Mexican Government? Why is there so much poverty among its citizens-when there is wealth? Why is there such a wicked double standard of the way the Mexican government jails, beats, and tortures immigrants trying to enter Mexico. However, the United States is suppose to freely open its Borders to drug traffickers and criminals? The problems of the Mexican Government and the way it treats its citizens, should not be placed on the backs of the United States, and our government.

I am extremely angry at your audacity to go so far as to make your point. You are rude, and I will send this Blog to the NAACP. I strongly suggest that if you are displeased with our government, that you go back to Mexico or wherever you came from.

Once more- Black Americans are US Citizens- born and raised in the United States. Undocumented illegal Mexicans are just that- Illegal, unauthorized Mexicans that have fought their way-ILLEGALLY into the US. I strongly suggest that you get the facts right, and rather than questioning our government that you question the Mexican Government.
At 9:24 PM, Marisa Treviño said…

I am sorry you took offense at the use of the picture. The picture was not chosen to equate what is happening now with what happened during the Civil Rights Movement.

It was chosen to fully illustrate what happens when mass hysteria overtakes common reason. As offensive as this picture is, and it truly is, I could find no other comparable comparison to illustrate how mass hysteria is yet again overtaking common reason.

I reviewed more than 25 pictures before finally choosing this one and one other reason why I chose it was because so many other sites carried it as well. It seems to be the universal symbol for what went wrong in this country — something that has the potential to be repeated.

You should really think about taking down that offensive picture.

I'm sure you wanted to focus on illegal immigrats and the perceived hysteria that accompany their presence, but juxtaposing that with the plight of African Americans is not only erroneous and disrespectful but highly offensive.

If I could offer any advice to those that advocate for illegal aliens: please don't put to shame the glorious accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement by comparing (or even mentioning) it when illegal aliens are the subject. There is a big difference. African Americans are rightful citizens and... you know the rest.

Thank you,
Augustine

Main Entry: hys·te·ria
Pronunciation: his-'ter-E-&, -'tir-
Function: noun
Etymology: New Latin, from English hysteric, adjective, from Latin hystericus, from Greek hysterikos, from hystera womb; from the Greek notion that hysteria was peculiar to women and caused by disturbances of the uterus
1 : a psychoneurosis marked by emotional excitability and disturbances of the psychic, sensory, vasomotor, and visceral functions
2 : behavior exhibiting overwhelming or unmanageable fear or emotional excess

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/hysteria

I think this definition more closely describes Rosa on Dobbs than it does Tancredo. What do you think.