As we continue to fight for immigration reform, one thing that we can be sure about is a right-wing attack. A preview of this came about in the days building up to the successful immigration march in D.C. when fringe right-wing groups like Numbers USA, The John Tanton Network and the Tea Party Movement started pulling out all the stops to counter the building momentum for immigration reform. Predictably, their approach mirrored the strategies they employed a few years ago, during the last big push for reform that took place in 2007 under former President George Bush.
A report by liberal advocacy group People for the American Way called “(Pre)Viewing the Right-Wing Playbook on Immigration” has pulled from years of expertise on the right to lay out a list of the key strategies that are traditionally employed to defeat immigration reform, followed by tools to retaliate against these irrational and unsound attacks.
One of the most common strategies employed by the right is an appeal to racial fear. This is carried out in a number of ways, including the positing of the “Brown” threat to a “White America,” and the outrageous portrayal of immigrants and their supporters as invaders and enemies of the United States. Inciting prejudice against Latinos, Rep. Tom Tancredo commented in November 2006-
Look at what has happened to Miami. It has become a Third World country…. You would never know you’re in the United States of America. You would certainly say you’re in a Third World country.
Not to be left behind, former Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan continued in the vein of this fear-mongering around the “immigrant invasion”. He wrote in 2007-
What is happening to us? An immigrant invasion of the United States from the Third World, as America’s white majority is no longer even reproducing itself. Since Roe v. Wade, America has aborted 45 million of her children. And Asia, Africa and Latin America have sent 45 million of their children to inherit the estate that aborted American children never saw.
It goes without saying that claims that America has been built by and for White people are historically incorrect and intensely racist. More importantly, this country continues to be shaped by immigrants and draws immense political and economic strength from its diversity.
Continuing in the vein of racial divisiveness is the idea that immigration rights advocates are themselves racist, a notion that has emerged in the post Obama election days. While television personality Glenn Beck has referred to President Obama as someone who was opposed to white people, he has generated the idea from numerous accusations of racism thrown at pro-immigration advocates during the 2007 push for reform. At that time, the radio host Michael Savage attacked the National Council of La Raza by calling it “the Ku Klux Klan of the Hispanic people.” He went on to say that it was “the most stone racist group I’ve ever seen in this country”.
Portraying undocumented immigrants as responsible for terrorism and crime waves, as well as positing them as “unclean” carriers of disease and bio-terrorism is one of the tactics that the far right has employed on both local and national levels during past debates around immigration. Such as when Lou Dobbs claimed immigrants were causing an epidemic of leprosy in the country which was simply untrue. Or when during the debates over immigration reform, Rep. Steve King, of the House Republicans’ “Immigration Reform Caucus” extrapolated fictional statistics claiming that 12 American citizens “die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day”. If that’s so, then why is it that the President’s Council of Economic Advisers reports that immigrants have lower crime rates than U.S. citizens and that immigrant men ages 18 to 40 are less likely than other U.S. residents to be incarcerated.
While we hope that most of you would be taken by the impulse to laugh off these strategies as racist, rabble-rousing garbage, we must take note that such nativist fear-mongering has the power to garner significant support from many, especially within the current climate of an unstable economy. Work such as People For the American Way’s “Right Wing Watch: In Focus” series gives us the best tool to fighting these attacks – truly understanding the reasoning behind them, and countering them on their own territory.
Let’s fight racism on our route to humane immigration reform!
Photo courtesy of usatoday.com.
While it is difficult to find much coherence within the fractured and fast-changing 
