Obama+Immigrants= Haters in full effect
by digby
Right Wing Watch caught up with everyone’s favorite “self-deporter”, Kansas Secretary of State and all around xenophobe, Kris Kobach. He is very frightened.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a leader in the anti-immigrant movement, said during his Sunday radio program that it’s possible that a Hispanic majority in the U.S. could conduct an “ethnic cleansing.”
Kobach made his remarks in response to a caller who asked, “What happens, if you know your history, when one culture or one race or one religion overwhelms another culture or race?”
Claiming that immigrant rights groups are “calling for the return of the Spanish territory, which could be almost half of the United States,” the caller warned, “When one race or culture overwhelms another culture, they run them out or they kill them. And it’s a bigger issue than just being Democrats. And they know in numbers, once the numbers are so bad, they can pretty much do whatever they want to do.”
He’s got a point. That is,after all, what the Europeans, our white American forefathers, did to the natives here in the Americas. When they weren’t committing all-out genocide anyway. But that was a long time ago. More recently, you may recall that Kobach is the guy who came up with Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” plan which bears more than a passing resemblance to ethnic cleansing. Adam Serwer described it this way:
“Self-deportation” might sound like something you don’t want your parents to catch you doing, it’s actually an old euphemism for an immigration strategy of “attrition through enforcement.” What “self-deportation”—the favored approach to immigration of the GOP’s right-wing—actually means is making life so miserable for unauthorized immigrants that they “voluntarily” leave. Here’s Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies (the anti-immigrant think tank that tried to mainstream the “terror baby” conspiracy theory) explaining the concept in 2005:
Among the other measures that would facilitate enforcement: hiring more U.S. Attorneys and judges in border areas, to allow for more prosecutions; passage of the CLEAR Act, which would enhance cooperation between federal immigration authorities and state and local police; and seizing the assets, however modest, of apprehended illegal aliens.
These and other enforcement measures would enable the government to detain more illegal aliens; additional measures would be needed to promote self-deportation. Unlike at the visa office or the border crossing, once aliens are inside the United States, there’s no physical site to exercise control, no choke point at which to examine whether someone should be admitted. The solution is to create “virtual choke points”—events that are necessary for life in a modern society but are infrequent enough not to bog down everyone’s daily business. Another analogy for this concept to firewalls in computer systems, that people could pass through only if their legal status is verified. The objective is not mainly to identify illegal aliens for arrest (though that will always be a possibility) but rather to make it as difficult as possible for illegal aliens to live a normal life here.
This is the right-wing’s answer to the question of how you deport 11 million unauthorized immigrants: You don’t. You force them to “deport themselves.” Although immigration reform advocates would prefer a solution that involves a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants already here, Romney and his top immigration advisers believe they can remove millions of people through heavy-handed enforcement that makes life for unauthorized immigrants intolerable. This approach is notable for its complete lack of discretion and flexibility. Unauthorized immigrant parents with citizen children who need to go to school? Americans who are married to an undocumented immigrant who needs medical treatment? “Self-deportation” hits them all with the same mailed fist.
I can think of somebody else who had that idea and implemented it for a few years until he decided that more drastic steps were needed.
It’s interesting that someone who came up with such a plan would project it back on to the very people he sought to “cleanse” the nation of. There’s some heavy duty psychological baggage operating there.
This paranoia is getting completely out of hand on the right, however. They truly seem to believe that a vast horde of latinos are going to go on a rampage and kill them. I’m not kidding. This is the leap they have made. Just listen to Laura Ingraham or watch Fox. They are working the right wingers into total hysteria.
Here are just a few of the stories Right Wing Watch has captured:
Arrest Obama for his Immigration Action
Fighting Obama’s immigration action is like fighting ISIS
The immigration announcement could lead to civil war
Allen West predicts demand for impeachment over immigration
Rep. Kelly says Obama dragging America into a civil war
Heritage: Obama will use government goodies to replace Americans with Latinos
Viguerie: Both Republicans and Democrats want to impeach Obama over immigration
And on and on and on. They are having a hissy fit of epic proportions. Whether they can work up a Tea Party level lather over it is still unknown. But they’re trying.
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