Immigration: What Cost Victory?

In a Washington Times op-ed, Linda Chavez calls the defeat of the immigration bill a "Pyrrhic victory" for conservatives:

Our borders will be less secure, not more. Employers who want to do the right thing and only hire legal workers won't have the tools to do so. The 12 million illegal aliens here now will continue to live in the shadows, making them less likely to cooperate with law enforcement to report crimes and less likely to pay their full share of taxes. In other words, the mess we created by an outdated and ill-conceived immigration policy 20 years ago will just get worse.

But you won't hear this if you tune in to talk radio over the next few days or read conservative blogs. There will be lots of gloating over having killed "amnesty." There will be claims that senators finally "listened to the people." And, no doubt, some conservatives will be emboldened to consider the next step in their war against illegal immigration, namely to deport those now here illegally.

Chavez, whose heresies on the immigration issue have helped draw out some of the vicious racism of the Republican base, warns that Democrats will be planning to revisit the issue in 2009, with what could be expanded control over both the legislative and executive branches. And she thinks they'll be right to do so, given the myriad contradictions and failures of current immigration policy.

What Chavez sees is a conservative noise machine grown fat and happy after its latest "triumph," oblivious to the consequences its short-term actions will have in the longer run. She argues that "Republicans who believe this will help them at the polls in 2008 may find themselves sitting on the back benches for years to come."

At this point, it probably doesn't even matter whether anyone else on the right is listening to her. On immigration, at least, the damage to the Republican coalition has been done.

Labels: immigration, Linda Chavez, Washington Times

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:51 AM 0 comments

  Linda Chavez's Adventures in the World of the Blindingly Obvious

Right-wing writer Linda Chavez is finding herself increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that so many of her fellow conservatives are, not to put too fine a point on it, overt racists. In an article for Townhall a couple of weeks ago, Chavez decried the right's culture of hating on the Hispanics:

Some people just don't like Mexicans -- or anyone else from south of the border. They think Latinos are freeloaders and welfare cheats who are too lazy to learn English. They think Latinos have too many babies, and that Latino kids will dumb down our schools. They think Latinos are dirty, diseased, indolent and more prone to criminal behavior. They think Latinos are just too different from us ever to become real Americans.

No amount of hard, empirical evidence to the contrary, and no amount of reasoned argument or appeals to decency and fairness, will convince this small group of Americans -- fewer than 10 percent of the general population, at most -- otherwise. Unfortunately, among this group is a fair number of Republican members of Congress, almost all influential conservative talk radio hosts, some cable news anchors -- most prominently, Lou Dobbs -- and a handful of public policy "experts" at organizations such as the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, in addition to fringe groups like the Minuteman Project.

The post kicked up the predictable shitstorm, as Chavez documented in a follow-up post that features some of the more charming examples of the Townhall crowd's reaction:

On Townhall.com, these delightful bon mots appeared (I've preserved the original spelling and punctuation):

• "Mexicans are pigs"


• "They can be referred to as: Human Locusts."


• "Latino girls are baby factories. They fornicate like animals with no regard for the welfare of the child. Babies having babies while the boy goes out and screws someone else. Most latinos are liars. True again. Look at the corruption at all levels of the mexican government and it carries on to all the people."


• "Quickly, the fact is that we're being invaded by an inferior culture. Every person of low quality we import plants a family-tree that bears low-quality fruit. The rotten fruit of that tree will rot our own fruit."


• "We don't want spanish speaking little retards befouling our great country. REMEMBER SAN HACINTO1"


• "And YES ,Illegals are lazy, disease infested, freeloading moochers. The fact they criminally enter the country automatically qualifies them as lazy freeloaders."


• "Get a clue Chavez...we dont want wetbacks mooching our system and NO we dont need them. They are simply slave labor.nothing more."


• "most Mexicans, especially men, are lazy good for nothing drunks who only care about sacking as many mujeres that they can."

I could go on; there are more than 300 posts on Townhall and hundreds more on less mainstream sites, but you get the point. It's hard to imagine that anyone could get away with posting such foul comments about blacks, or Jews, or gay people on a mainstream website.

It's appropriate, then, that Chavez's next target is the National Review, whose contributors (upholding the magazine's long tradition of racism) have been writing the recipes for the red meat that gets thrown to the angry Townhall-dwelling hounds of the conservative "base." In particular, she goes after John Derbyshire (for his insistence on referring to Mexicans as "Aztecs," and not in a solidarity-with-La-Raza kind of way), and Heather Mac Donald, who just can't stop making shit up.

It's almost certainly a losing battle for Chavez. She laments:

There are only so many times that you can be told to “go back to Mexico” and far worse before your blood starts to boil (and I’m talking about thousands of such responses over the last year). The immigration debate has stirred up some pretty ugly sentiments and conservatives need to be especially careful in this regard. We are, after all, the ones who argue for colorblind policies.

We'll set aside the thick layer of hypocrisy surrounding the "colorblind" claim. For those who wonder why immigration seems to divide the right so much more than the left, I submit that it has a lot to do with the fact that it's on the right one sees so many of the sentiments Chavez documents above. Pretty damn obvious, really.

Labels: immigration, Linda Chavez, National review, racism

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:09 PM 0 comments