Be gone

Newt Gangrene, tapping his never-ending supply of pseudo-intellectual buffoonery, slammed bilingual education in a speech to the National Federation of Republican Women on Saturday in a way that laid out his racist soul for all to see.

After mocking multilingual election ballots as "mandating that various documents be printed in any one of 700 languages depending on who randomly shows up" to vote, Gangrene, who has previously labeled bilingual education as a "danger to the fabric of our nation," described English as "the language of prosperity" and alternatives as "the language of living in a ghetto."

The audience cheered.

Which serves to make clear a point more important than Gingrich's evil rhetoric: The xenophobia he celebrates has a receptive audience among a large and possibly increasing number of white people living in irrational terror of being overrun by brown hordes.

For a perfect illustration of that, just consider the reader comments made about a story in Friday's Washington Post about how

[f]ederal immigration agents detained 69 workers from Latin America and Africa yesterday after raids on nine businesses that used a Baltimore-based temporary employment agency suspected of providing illegal immigrants....

The raids on the Baltimore area companies were part of a stepped-up nationwide campaign by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement against firms suspected of employing illegal immigrants.

The comments not only were overwhelmingly in favor of the raids and the ICE, many of them slipped smoothly into overt bigotry. For example:

- "The uneducated illegal immigrants have no idea how the laws of supply and demand work. They only FEEL what they know. Dont ask them to comprehend why the world works."
- "Another good article of the WP pandering to the poor little illegal immigrant!" This same person referred to Casa De Maryland, a support group for immigrants mentioned in the article, as a "terror group against America itself."
- After claiming that an undocumented worker making $5 to $6 an hour actually receives $20 to $30 an hour in benefits, another bright light among our citizenry claimed "American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean up."
- "Load these vermin into choppers and push them out while hovering a few hundred feet over Mexico. Spare me the pity party for these CRIMINALS who have no respect for our laws."

Oh yes, it was the issue of legality that was surely foremost in these good folks' minds. Or so we repeatedly get told. However, what really seemed to get the juices flowing were these two passages from the story:

[T]earful relatives of several detained women pleaded for them to be released, saying they had young children at home or were pregnant. ...

Immigration officials ... said that they might release as many as 20 detained workers on humanitarian grounds so they could care for their children, but that they would still face immigration charges.

The responses included such gems as

- "Deport the pregnant women *first* so that their children can be born in their country."
- "Make them renounce US citizenship for their children and ship pregnant women out first so they cant make anchor babies."
- Another suggested "these children are nothing but expendable commodities, used by the parents to get tax funded services and benefits while in the country illegally, [who] will be abandoned to become wards of the state."

And my favorite, the chillingly calm statement that

- "[t]he pregnancy issue can be resolved by a little rough housing during the arrest."

These, I emphasize, were not plucked out of a long list of less fearsome expressions - I didn't even go through all the comments, just the first couple of pages. (That was all I could take.) And of those, these were not the exceptions, they were the mainstream.

It's a kind of language for which David Niewert, the proprietor of the valuable Orcinus, has created the term "eliminationist." Words that express a clear desire for a perceived "enemy" not merely to be defeated but to disappear; not just vanquished, vanished. It's hate speech and like most hate speech it's being pushed while hiding under umbrellas to shield it from the truth of its real meaning, umbrellas tagged "fairness" and "the law" and, through it all, "patriotism" - but which would more honestly be called "racism," "selfishness," and "corrupt nativism."

For people like Newt Gingrich and his cheering audience and the people quoted above and the, let's be honest, millions or tens of millions more of their fellow citizens for who they speak, the real problem is not illegal immigration, it's immigration itself, immigration which in their minds is equated, for now, with Hispanics. (I say "for now" because if we look back across the 20^th century, we can find similar expressions directed at various times against Asians, Irish, and Italians, to name just three. Bigotry can be applied against anyone successfully defined as "other.") That's why concern about "illegal aliens" so often overlaps a desire for "immigration reform," which, when push comes to shove, usually comes down to "how do we keep those damn Mexicans out?"

In fact, the whole immigration debate stinks of racism and I can't help but wonder if the surge in enforcement isn't just another plan to game the 2008 elections by manipulating the red hot button of "immigration reform."

But, you know, there's a way to convince me otherwise. And beyond that, a way to convince me that all the push for "reform" isn't just xenophobia in disguise. I want to see those "reform" groups advocating a massive increase in foreign development and humanitarian aid - and not loans channeled through the IMF and World Bank, but grants provided through independent agencies whose respect for human rights can be verified by such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and who are capable of getting that aid to projects at the local and regional level where they will do the recipients, and not the local elites or international financial interests, the most good. And advocate it without mouthing bogus platitudes about how "generous" the US is: Measured in per capita terms, in 2006 the US ranked 20^th out of the 23 major donor nations of foreign economic aid. Measured as a percentage of GDP, the US ranked dead last.

In short, instead of putting the money into fences and guns and raids and prisons, put it into improving the lives of people in other nations on the argument that they will then have less incentive to leave their homes. Then, and only then, will I be able to believe your demands for "enforcement" and "reform" are driven by anything other than your own irrational fears and hatreds.

Footnote: Wikipedia has a list of dozens of nations that are bi- or multilingual, at least some of which appear to have survived quite nicely, contrary to our domestic Newtwit - including about 20 where there is more than one official language. The US, of course, does not (yet) have an official language, but three states and three territories are officially bilingual and one territory has three official languages.