GROUPS FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION HAVE REASON TO CHEER
GROUPS FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION HAVE REASON TO CHEER
Thu Oct 4, 7:58 PM ET
WASHINGTON -- Since the late '70s, I have attended the annual fall meetings of a group called FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Although small and not well-known, it is the major citizens' group fighting illegal immigration, and its meetings have been instructive of how public opinion was moving.
For years, the meetings, held in hotels, were small and unprepossessing -- just ordinary folks concerned about their country being overwhelmed by illegals. The group's headquarters are in unimposing offices on Connecticut Avenue that would surely not frighten any member of Congress or lobbyist into thinking of FAIR in terms of power.
The meetings are composed of the kinds of Americans you used to meet everywhere: neighborly, friendly, unimpressed with their importance, but also increasingly angry at being forgotten and ignored. Over the years, as America's careless policy of open borders has kept the number of illegals growing -- 3 million ... 6 million ... 8 million ... now at least 12 million and maybe as many as 20 million -- there was a feeling at the meetings of just hanging on.
Too much raw power was on the other side, in the big corporations seeking cheap labor, in the Catholic Church seeking more members, in unconcerned Americans seeking not to have to act in the public realm or raise their voices. But there was a stubborn attitude at the meetings of "This is not right, and somehow we're not going to put up with it!" That attitude has been boiling inside more and more Americans.
Then came this year. After months of confrontations last spring and summer in Congress between liberals and big corporations on one side and average citizens on the other, FAIR has come into its own. At the meeting here on Sept. 29, there was still a slight subtext of fear -- but this time it was fear of being too confident and of losing the gains of the last six to eight months as all the pro-immigration bills in Congress were defeated, in effect by citizen action itself.
"What happened this last summer was a profound moment in the movement," Dan Stein, president of FAIR, said to start out the meeting. "We saw the new technologies giving the American people unprecedented capacity to participate in this public debate -- we saw the little mouse defeating all the big corporations, although we were being outspent by, what, $10 million to 1?"
"I hope," he said at one point, "we don't underestimate how rapidly things are changing -- but we also must understand that we are involved in a quiet revolution among the American people, with FAIR and the allied organizations and the visionaries."
Then he gave the big news. After all these years in their nice but prudent suites on Connecticut Avenue, the FAIR staff were moving to new offices just off Capitol Hill, where they would have regular press briefings, full audio-visual studios, and the capacity to train numbers of activists.
If this was at least a temporary victory, it was one of the most original in recent history.
Citizen anger and potential power, loosely organized by FAIR, with its 250,000 members, and allied groups, this time was closely tied up with talk radio, whose hosts are mostly anti-illegal immigration. At one point, 37 talk-radio hosts came together to push the cause, which was the first time such a thing had happened, according to Steve Gill, a prominent pro-FAIR talk-radio host in Tennessee.
"We're in the middle of an information revolution," he told the group. "Before talk radio, something you could listen to on the car radio and bang your car (if you became angry). Now you can call in and make it an interactive communication. We are at the mike, but you control the volume."
Former Colorado governor Richard Lamm, an active force in immigration reform, chimed in with the same idea. "Dan Stein talked about new forces that erupted in our favor," he said, "but there are also new institutions that have done so -- like talk radio."
At the same time, FAIR launched a huge call-in campaign to representatives and senators over the bills put forward last spring. They said that anti-illegal immigration calls outnumbered pro-immigration calls in general by 50-to-1; and at least one senator received 10,000 calls in three days, virtually all anti-illegal immigration.
Another factor that emerged stronger this year was the idea that language must be clearly defined. "They are not 'immigrants,' they are 'illegals,'" Steve Gill insisted. "But the other side likes to define them as immigrants because that harkens back to the old image of America." He was also insistent upon clarifying that "racism is not the issue," because, "if we bordered China, we would have 16 million Chinese." The question of who comes to America is simply distance: "If I can walk five miles, it is surely better than swimming 4,000 miles."
What I saw and heard at this year's meeting, then, was an altered mood, a new if cautious optimism and a new set of techniques for encouraging citizens to deal with the most important domestic issue of today.
http://news.yahoo.com:80/s/ucgg/2007100 ... sontocheer
