Editorial The New York Times
The Nativists Are Restless
Published: January
31, 2009
The relentlessly harsh Republican
campaign against immigrants has always hidden a streak of racialist extremism.
Now after several high-water years, the Republican tide has gone out, leaving
exposed the nativism of fringe right-wingers clinging to what they hope will be
a wedge issue.
Last week at the
National Press Club in Washington, a group seeking to speak for the future of
the Republican Party declared that its November defeats in Congressional races
stemmed not from having been too hard on foreigners, but too soft.
The group, the American Cause, released a report
arguing that anti-immigration absolutism was still the solution for the party’s
deep electoral woes, actual voting results notwithstanding. Rather than “pander
to pro-amnesty Hispanics and swing voters,” as President Bush and Karl Rove
once tried to do, the report’s author, Marcus Epstein, urged Republicans to
double down on their efforts to run on schemes to seal the border and drive
immigrants out.
This is nonsense, of course. For years Americans
have rejected the cruelty of enforcement-only regimes and Latino-bashing, in
opinion surveys and at the polls. In House and Senate races in 2008 and 2006,
“anti- amnesty” hard-liners consistently lost to candidates who proposed
comprehensive reform solutions. The wedge did not work for single-issue
xenophobes
like Lou Barletta, the mayor of Hazleton, Pa.,
or the former Arizona Congressman J. D. Hayworth. Nor did it help any of the
Republican presidential candidates trying to defeat the party’s best-known
voice of immigration moderation, John McCain, for the nomination.
Americans want immigration solved, and they
realize that mass deportations will not do that. When you add the unprecedented
engagement of growing numbers of Latino voters in 2008, it becomes clear that
the nativist path is the path to permanent political irrelevance. Unless you
can find a way to get rid of all the Latinos.
What was perhaps more notable than the report
itself was the team that delivered it. It included Bay Buchanan, former adviser
to Representative Tom Tancredo and sister of Pat, who founded the American
Cause and wrote “State of Emergency:
The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America.” She was joined by James
Pinkerton, an essayist and Fox News contributor who, as an aide to the first
President Bush, took credit for the racist Willie Horton ads run against
Michael Dukakis.
So far, so foul. But even more telling was the
presence of Peter Brimelow, a former Forbes editor and founder of Vdare.com, an
extremist anti-immigration
Web site. It is named for Virginia Dare, the first white baby born in the
English colonies, which tells you most of what you need to know. The site is
worth a visit. There you can read Mr. Brimelow’s and Mr. Buchanan’s musings
about racial dilution and the perils facing white people, and gems like this
from Mr. Epstein:
“Diversity can be good in moderation — if what is
being brought in is desirable. Most Americans don’t mind a little ethnic food,
some Asian math whizzes, or a few Mariachi dancers — as long as these trends do
not overwhelm the dominant culture.”
It is easy to mock white-supremacist views as
pathetic and to assume that nativism in the age of Obama is on the way out. The
country has, of course, made considerable progress since the days of
Know-Nothings and the Klan. But racism has a nasty habit of never going away,
no matter how much we may want it to, and thus the perpetual need for
vigilance.
It is all around us. Much was made of the
Republican mailing of the parody song “Barack the Magic Negro,” but the same
notorious CD included “The Star Spanglish Banner,” a puerile bit of
Latino-baiting. It is easily found on YouTube. Google the words “Bill O’Reilly”
and “white, Christian male power structure” for another YouTube taste of the
Fox News host assailing the immigration views of “the far left” (including The
Times) as racially traitorous.
And it takes only a cursory look at a worsening
economic climate and grim national mood to realize that history is always
threatening to repeat itself. Last week on Long Island,
the authorities in Suffolk County
unsealed new indictments against a group of teenage boys accused in a murderous
attack against an Ecuadorean immigrant, Marcelo Lucero. Since that crime last
year, many more victims have come forward with stories of assaults in or near
the same town, Patchogue. The police in that suburb seem to have made a habit
of ignoring a long and escalating trail of attacks against immigrant men, until
the hatred rose up and spilled over one night, fatally.
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