Misdirection

by digby

I’ve been observing discussions here and elsewhere about the immigration debate with increasing anxiety that the Republicans are going to get away with yet another misdirection perfectly designed to derail progressive hopes and dreams by stroking America’s lizard brain. The election feels eerily reminiscent of 1992, when so-called reasonable centrists stoked the crazy man Ross Perot’s campaign by backing his obsessive concern for “the deficit” which was nothing more than a weird abstraction into which misinformed discontented voters could pour their economic fears. The political result was that even though a Democrat won, instead of using the tax windfall from the tech boom to finance new initiatives for the public, the best he could do was hang on to the surplus for as long as possible and then watch as the Republicans passed it out to their rich friends like it was Christmas morning the minute they stole the election. Suckered, suckered, suckered.

This time, of course, the stupid irrelevant issue they are forcing into the ether is illegal immigration. And, like “the deficit” it is virtually designed to twist the Democratic candidates into pretzels as they help the Republicans once again misdirect the public to blame something other than the corrupt plutocrats who just pillaged the treasury for their woes.

Illegal immigration has long been a political football in America and this time is no exception. There have been bracero guest worker programs and repatriation programs from the beginning of the last century. During the 1950’s, Eisenhower had tens of thousands of Latinos deported under Operation Wetback more than a few of them citizens. (Read that link if you want to see just how similar the arguments then were to today’s.) Migration across the border has been present since before there was a border and it’s a “problem” that always exists and nobody cares about until they suddenly … do.

The thing progressives need to keep in mind is that only thing truly different in this latest “crisis” is the growing number of Latino citizens who are getting agitated by the predictably ugly tone of it and are starting to politically organize. That really is new and the ramifications of it are huge and important for both political parties. It is true that the voter registration drive after the massive rallies was disappointing. But those rallies are a sign of something very, very different in this age-old debate and the Republicans know it. That’s why Rove tried so hard to get comprehensive immigration reform knowing very well that he had a short window to take credit among Latinos. They couldn’t get it done, not because of the decent people we all know who are suddenly concerned about illegal immigration, but because of a very distinct cohort of the far right who even the old hardline racists are smart enough to know are on the wrong side of history on this one:

Comments by Republican senators on Thursday suggested that they were feeling the heat from conservative critics of the bill, who object to provisions offering legal status. The Republican whip, Trent Lott of Mississippi, who supports the bill, said: “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”

They gave their monster a megaphone and now they can’t shut them up. (“As ye sow” and all that drivel.)

The issue tends to get ginned up whenever the plutocrats need to misdirect the people from their corruption and malfeasance, so I would be very suspicious of their “support” for CIR in this environment. There is every reason to believe that they will get behind any punitive border enforcement atrocity with everything they have (if they aren’t behind it already.) As much as the Wall Street Journal likes to tout open borders, their real mission at the moment is keeping the people from demanding regulations and laws that will contain their massive greed and reduce income inequality. If it means shutting the border for a little while to keep the rubes from blaming the real culprits, that’s a small price to pay.

But like it or not, the way they do this (over and over again) is by playing to certain xenophobic and racist impulses that are always present among some Americans (or which can be drawn out in others who might not think they have such impulses, but, in fact, do.) It’s one thing to say that we shouldn’t go around willy nilly calling people racists, but it’s quite another to actually believe that racism and xenophobia are not in play in a major way.

We political junkies talk a lot about “intensity” when trying to figure out what issues people vote on and which issues to emphasize in an election. It takes very little scratching beneath the surface of this argument to come up with usual “they live like pigs,” “they’re diseased” and worse among those who say this is the most important issue facing the nation.

But that’s not the whole story either. On their side the intensity is with racists and xenophobes who are pushing their ideas into the mainstream with fervor and focus. On our side the intensity is in all those Latino citizens and legal residents who are living with the same loathing and suspicion as their family members and acquaintances who once were or currently are “illegal” and that’s what our side should be concerned about. Discounting all of those who we would love to see brought into the system, if even those Latinos who are currently registered fail to vote, we will lose Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Florida in the next election again when they should be blue all the way. (Check out the current state of the Democratic party in Louisiana now that it’s been cleared of African American voters to see how this works.)

The Latino community — the fastest growing voting bloc in America — is rightfully very concerned by these condemnations of “illegals” as being diseased, dirty and criminal, since those who say such things don’t bother to make certain important distinctions.

Back at the Help Save Manassas booth, volunteers wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “What part of illegal don’t you understand?” displayed photographs of garbage-strewn houses and yards. One showed a tent next to an overturned wading pool propped up by a stick—overflow, Letiecq claimed, from a house full of illegals. An elderly woman in a Democratic Party T-shirt confronted a stocky ex-Marine named Steve, asking, “How do you know that the people living in these houses are illegal? Poor people would live like that, too.”

“Ma’am, they’re illegal. They are,” Steve said. “You’re in denial.”

People like that have made sure that the Republicans have lost the Latino vote for the foreseeable future. They are making the best of it by falling back on their tried and true methods of vote suppression. The question for progressives is why Democratic leaders would help them do it by having Heath Shuller and half the caucus co-sponsor a punitive enforcement only bill that is a taxpayer boondoggle and a mandate to harrass the Latino community. It simultaneously legitimizes the extremist right wing (who love the bill, by the way) while telling Latino citizens that the Democratic party would rather appease racists like Tom Tancredo than stand up for them and insist on comprehensive immigration reform — which they support in large numbers.

Of course not everyone who is concerned about illegal immigration are racists. But it is clear that the ones who claim “illegals” are dirty, diseased and depraved to make their argument are. I don’t think the vast majority of Americans are comfortable with that kind of talk and if it’s exposed, they might just wise up and realize they are being played — and not want to be associated with such people. And it certainly would reassure our Latino brothers and sisters that the Democratic party is not a party that welcomes people who believe such things.

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