Replies

Tuesday, 10 October 2006

The Center’s Building Democracy Initiative has released a new report, Mapping the New Nativism: A Survey of State and Local Anti-Immigrant Groups. The report pinpoints the hundreds of state and local anti-immigrant groups that have popped up recently.

The growth of state and local groups has been dramatic, with a nearly 600% increase in the past year and a half. To find out more about these groups, and what you can do to help stop the new nativism, visit www.buildingdemocracy.org.

These are the ones I found in the ‘report’:

The Minutemen

Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)

Save Our State, Proposition 187

Tom Tancredo’s Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus

Everything else is a rant against Republican lawmakers, period.

the Southern Poverty Law Center was founded by Morris Dees and Joe Levin, two local lawyers who shared a commitment to racial equality. Its first president was civil rights activist Julian Bond.

Julian Bond:

At the 2001 convention, which was held before the September 11 attacks, Bond sharply criticized some of Bush’s political appointments, saying that he “selected nominees from the Taliban wing of American politics, appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing and chosen Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection.”

“We must guarantee the irregularities, suppression, nullification, and outright theft of black votes that happened on Election Day 2000 never, ever happen again,” Bond said.

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond called on members of the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization to boost voter turnout to help oust President Bush.

During his keynote speech at the group’s 95th annual convention Sunday night in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Bond also assailed the Bush administration and the Republican Party, accusing the GOP of “playing the race card in election after election.”

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Mark Potek from the Southern Poverty Law Centre says race is an issue in who ends up in jail in the United States and for how long.

Mark Potek, editor, writes in his leading article about “undocumented immigrants.” This categorization of those who are breaking the sovereign and reasonable laws of the United States of America indicates that Mr. Potek has little use for the rule of law.

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“We weren’t surprised that leaders of the religious right finally got into the game,” Devin Burghart, the program director of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Chicago, Illinois-based Centre for New Community, told IPS. “The organisation is trying to stake out a more moderate position than the Minutemen and other extremist anti-immigration organisations, and it is using a religious frame to try and woo supporters.”

“While the language the group is using is more moderate sounding — touting a compromise solution to the problem — its anti-immigrant positions are quite radical,” Burghart added. “And although they claim to be in line with traditional religious teachings, they seem to be ignoring much of the Bible, particularly passages about welcoming strangers.”

“It’s a disingenuous attempt to appear to be not anti-Latino while at the same time pandering to their right-wing base,” Mark Potok, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s Intelligence Project, said in a recent interview. “These leaders are desperately trying to hold their coalition together that very likely cannot stay together.”

According to Burghart, an activist/researcher who has been tracking developments around immigration for several years, Families First on Immigration “is hungry for new members and hopes to tap into a new funding stream. They saw how successful the Minuteman Political Action Committee was in raising money and they hope to strike while the iron is hot.”

The organisation appears to be a “bridge group’ said Burghart, “aimed at bridging the gap between the hard core anti-immigration movement and the religious right.”

In terms of the issues that it is raising, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potek believes that it is unlikely that the group will have any “chance in a Democratic controlled congress.”

However, while the group may not have an immediate impact visa via legislation, it will no doubt try to “inject immigration issues into the heart of 2008 presidential campaign,” said Burghart. If it is able to accomplish that, it will be seen as a success.”

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The New York Times, with the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center, has created a graphic map of noose incidents in the U.S. since the protest march at Jena, La. in September. This timely ABC package helps teachers address the subject of hate symbols.

SPLC in 1991 established Teaching Tolerance, an educational program to help K-12 teachers foster respect and understanding in the classroom. Teaching Tolerance is now one of the nation’s leading providers of anti-bias resources – both in print and online. Its award-winning magazine is distributed free twice a year to more than 500,000 educators, and its innovative multimedia kits are provided at no charge to thousands of schools and community groups.