Thread: MA: Radio station gives voice to fury against illegal immigr

Radio station gives voice to fury against illegal immigration
July 2, 2008
Ken Pittman remembers the day when he first grew angry about New Bedford immigrants who do not have papers to be in the country legally.

It was April 10, 2006, and roughly 500 immigrants and their supporters were staging a protest on the steps of City Hall — one of about 140 such protests across the country that day.

The protests, which attracted millions across the country, were staged to protest the so-called Sensenbrenner Bill, 2005 federal legislation that passed the House but not the Senate. The bill would have increased the penalties for illegal immigration and classify as felons anyone who helps an illegal immigrant remain in the United States.

The arrogant attitude of the protesters greatly bothered him, said Mr. Pittman, the local talk radio host on WBSM-AM in Fairhaven.

They were shouting slogans in Spanish like "Si, se puede!" or "Yes, we can!" arguing that they are just as American as citizens of the United States and that they would not be sent back to Latin America, he recalled.

It focused him on the importance of the issue of illegal immigration, he said.

"When it became an emotional issue for me, is when I saw how out of control our own government was," he said, of the immigrant protesters' public condemnation of the United States law.

His afternoon-drive radio program has spotlighted the immigrant issue as one of its high profile topics ever since.

Illegal immigrants, in New Bedford and across the country, Mr. Pittman emphasized, at rallies being held inside America were defiantly waving flags of other nations .

"Foreign, illegal residents, who have no business being here, were going to tell me how it's going to be, and there's nothing I can do about it," he said.

It opened up his eyes to what he perceived as a threat to the identity of the country itself, he said.

"I reacted to it as though it was a military invasion."

In the two years since the City Hall rally, and especially in the year since the federal government's raid on illegal workers at the Michael Bianco factory in the South End, Ken Pittman has become the best known of a group of local citizens protesting the presence of an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 undocumented immigrants in New Bedford. He's been interviewed in venues as diverse as CNN, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and most of the Boston media.

He is not alone in his views.

Fellow talk jocks Phil Palelologos and Evan Rousseau have the same perspective on the immigrant issue as Mr. Pittman, making WBSM sometimes seem like an echo chamber for nativist fervor against immigrants.

Many of the radio station's listeners, a devoted slice of the working class city's population, organized their own counter-protest, and tried, unsuccessfully, to pressure Mayor Scott W. Lang to use city bylaws to pressure the immigrants to leave.

With New Bedford unemployment one of the highest in the nation at 8.2 percent in April, a commonly heard complaint in the city is that undocumented immigrants are taking jobs that would otherwise go to city workers.

"It's like you and I standing in line and someone cuts the line in front of us," said Brian Smith, a retired city firefighter.

As proof of the negative effects of the immigrants on American workers, some citizens point to the local residents who lined up to apply for the Bianco jobs after the raid, and who have kept the factory operating without using undocumented immigrants ever since.

Another common complaint is that the immigrants are often paid wages that Americans can't afford to accept.

"The fish cutters are paying a fraction of what they would pay union workers," Mr. Smith said.

Some local residents stressed that they don't have anything against immigrants.

But they said they are bothered that newer immigrants have access to taxpayer-funded services such as medical care and public education, even though both the immigrants and their employers often use a cash economy that avoids paying taxes and worker's compensation contributions.

"It has to be straightened out for the sake of the economy and the health-care costs," said Ray Souza, a retiree, whose grandparents emigrated from Portugal.

He said that new immigrants need to come to the country legally as he says the Portuguese and Irish forefathers of today's citizens did. He questions whether the new immigrants are even buying into the idea of loyalty to the United States.

"My grandfather came over years ago and he was here six months ... and he became a citizen," he said. "Some people come now and say 'I don't want to be a citizen.' They want to make money and go back."

The divisions between supporters of the immigrants and those who object to them remain deep.

Mr. Rousseau said he was outrageously compared to a Nazi by the Rev. Marc Fallon of Catholic Social Services — who in a Standard-Times letter to the editor compared the radio's anti-immigrant rhetoric to criticism of Jews in 1930s Germany.

"I'm not a Nazi, and as a (fellow) Roman Catholic I was offended," Mr. Rousseau said.

The Rev. Fallon wrote his letter last November in the wake of New Bedford police statements that the city's Mayan immigrants — an indigenous group from Guatemala, who are said to be fearful of police and accustomed to carrying cash wages — were being targeted for robbery.

The previous year, the Holy Cross priest had counseled another Mayan immigrant, Esteban Tum Chach, who was viciously stabbed to death as he attempted to aid another Mayan immigrant. The immigrant was being harassed over a baseball cap.

The priest has stood his ground saying that talk radio — both locally and nationally — has focused much more on immigrant workers than on "corporate interests" that have ruined the Central American agricultural economy through corn subsidies and free trade.

"There would be no Central American workers living in New Bedford if they didn't have fish houses and clothing factories offering them jobs," he said.

"We will not accept the idea of dehumanizing and scapegoating these extremely poor peasants."

Much of the local non-profit immigrant groups have come to Father Fallon's defense.

Corinn Williams, executive director of the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts, said her agency has stopped using WBSM to get its economic development message out in the wake of programming she calls "corrosive" to the local community.

"I find it unfortunate that local talk radio is in lock step with national talk radio," she said. "It's a non-stop diet of this stuff that the local listener is listening to."

But the radio hosts say they are being labelled mean-spirited simply because they are against people disobeying the law. That in itself is unkind, they say.

"I could see the unfairness of the situation," for Americans, Mr. Paleologos said. "And yet, I was told that I had a hard heart for the way I felt."

The radio hosts acknowledged that many of their callers direct their furor against the immigrants. But they say that almost from the beginning they have also called for tough sanctions against any New Bedford businesses that willingly employ undocumented workers.

"If you are doing this ... I'd say it right to your face, 'You are the most unpatriotic, hurtful person that this country can hope to have,' Mr. Pittman said. "And you're the reason why there's a problem."

Mr. Paleologos calls for a guest worker program and crackdowns on illegal employers that he says would eventually cause the immigrants to leave voluntarily.

"The immigration reform policy (of the 1980s) has been breached," he said.

At one point, Mayor Lang and Mr. Rousseau talked about a summit meeting of sorts between the Catholic priests, immigrant advocates and the radio hosts, but the gathering never took place.

Mayor Lang seems to want a low profile on the issue.

He has eschewed the radio callers' suggestions that he use the city's code enforcement officers to crack down on unrelated immigrants living in the same apartments, or working in fish houses without proof of required immunizations. He says that immigration status is both determined and enforced by the federal government and that is where the issue will be addressed in the end.

"Once Congress straightens out the law. Everyone will understand what the objective is."

The mayor acknowledged that national leaders have failed to address the problem for two decades. And though he said he doesn't know what the solution will be one way or the other, he expressed confidence it will be resolved.

"I don't think this is the most difficult issue the United States has ever had to face," he said.

www.southcoasttoday.com

immigrants who do not have papers to be in the country legally.

Note use of the passive voice that illustrates typical pro-illegal alien media bias.