Can "White Nationalists" use the immigration issue to reach the mainstream?

[BrainGlutton]

That is one of the theses of the new documentary White Power USA: The Rise of Right-Wing Militias in America, by Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen, excerpted here:

RICK ROWLEY: White nationalists see the anti-immigrant movement as a bridge into mainstream politics. And ground zero for that movement is here in the deserts and mountains of Arizona. Six years ago, right-wing militias began organizing here along the Mexican border. They quickly grew from a few vigilantes hunting for immigrants into a national phenomenon.

With the recession, illegal immigration from Mexico has dropped off 60 percent in the last year to its the lowest level in a decade, but it remains a hot-button issue. In November, one of the largest white supremacist groups in America, the National Socialist Movement, planned an anti-immigration march to the Arizona State Capitol. The NSM claims to have eighty chapters across America. We met Jeff Schoep, the movement’s new leader, at his hotel.

JEFF SCHOEP: Arizona is the front lines. We have a massive illegal immigration problem here in the state, so we’re here to take it to the front lines.

RICK ROWLEY: As we talked, Schoep’s men began to organize the caravan that would bring them to their march. Each car was marked with a number 88. In their simple code, eight stands for the eighth letter in the alphabet. Eighty-eight, or HH, means “Heil Hitler.”

JEFF SCHOEP: America was founded by white men, settled by white men, and it was founded as a white nation. So we’ve got our nation to lose. They call us the fringe. They say it’s a fringe movement, but I think what we’re saying is very mainstream. We’re standing up for the American people, and there’s nothing fringe about that. The membership has really spiked, especially in the past few years. It’s more mainstream now than ever before in our history.

CLIFFORD HARRINGTON: And this is our blood banner. This flag is flown everywhere in the United States.

RICK ROWLEY: Clifford Herrington was the chairman of the National Socialist Movement before they tried to go mainstream, when they still wore Nazi uniforms.

CLIFFORD HERRINGTON: You want to get a shot of my ribbons?

RICK ROWLEY: Tell me about them.

CLIFFORD HERRINGTON: Vietnam, ’68, ’69. US Army, ’66 to ’76. Vietnam, Germany, Japan and Korea. NSM since 1974.

RICK ROWLEY: As we approached the State Capitol, he started to lead a chant.

CLIFFORD HERRINGTON: No niggers! No Jews! The Mexicans must go, too!

RICK ROWLEY: Younger members of the leadership quickly silenced him and chose a theme better suited to a mainstream audience.

NSM MARCHERS: USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

JEFF SCHOEP: We are looking at a country now that can very well face another American revolution! Our forefathers fought and resisted tyranny in this country, just as we stand here today in defiance of illegals, in defiance of a corrupt system that would just as soon put a bullet in the back of the white man’s head! We stand here in defiance of tyranny like George Washington did, like Ben Franklin did, our forefathers! This is America, our country!

NSM MARCHERS: Sig heil! Sig heil! Sig heil!

RICK ROWLEY: In spite of their swastikas and Nazi salutes, it is clear that the National Socialist language has changed. Take away the “Sig heils,” and they sound like many other conservative anti-immigration activists in America.

JT READY: We are doing it right. We’re putting Americans first. We’re taking back our nation, one day at a time, block by block, street by street, city by city. This is our nation, which we built. We are armed. We are free. And if you want our nation, you must take it from us. We are prepared. Thank you. Sig heil!

NSM MARCHERS: Sig heil! Sig heil! Sig heil!

RICK ROWLEY: More than anyone else at the rally, JT Ready embodies the link between white supremacist ideology and mainstream conservative politics. JT was a Republican precinct committeeman in Phoenix and a candidate for the Arizona House of Representatives. His writing appeared on mainstream conservative websites, and he regularly spoke at rallies with powerful Arizona political figures. JT is a former Marine and was also an early collaborator with the vigilante groups that patrol the Mexican border. They call themselves Minutemen, after the citizens’ militias of the American Revolution. Here Ready is in 2004 with Chris Simcox, the founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.

CHRIS SIMCOX: Chris Simcox, founder of Civil Homeland Defense.

JT READY: JT Ready, candidate for Arizona House.

RICK ROWLEY: JT was a rising star in the Republican Party. But after Obama’s election, he came out publicly as a member of the National Socialist Movement, which he now proclaims proudly on his license plate. JT agreed to meet with us, but he wanted to do the interview out in the middle of the desert on Highway 88.

JT READY: What I’m fighting for, primarily, at this point is the survival of the white race.

RICK ROWLEY: JT says that white Americans have been dispossessed and sees America teetering on the edge of a crisis in which their very survival is at stake.

JT READY: Any event which sparks this off—it could be during an election time, it could be the assassination of a prominent leader on either side—things could erupt. Now, within the white movement, we call it “RaHoWa,” racial holy war. And I do believe in a racial holy war, and I believe that we are already fighting that, except that our side hasn’t even begun to fight back yet. So we’re trying to waken our people for survival.

I don’t expect any RaHoWa, of course. But, there are some relevant issues for debate:

(1) How much will this approach resonate with white Americans not previously openly committed to a WN worldview?

(2) Conversely, how much will it discredit the immigration-restriction movement?

(2)(a) How much should it discredit the immigration-restriction movement?

(3) Related: If you believe in immigration restriction for non-racist reasons – e.g., to protect the wages of working-class Americans from immigrant competition; or to protect America’s environment from overpopulation pressure – how should you respond to these racists? Welcome them as strange bedfellows, or shout “Get off my side!”?

[2ply]

Racism has always been a mainstream part of American politics. Segregationists were being elected to the US Senate into the 21st century. I don’t believe however, than white nationalism is a large factor in the anti-illegal immigration movement,

[Simplicio]

It works both ways. I’d say association with White Nationalist’s and the like do more damage to the anti-immigration movement then the anti-immigration movement helps White Nationalists. In CA, for example, pressing for anti-immigration legislation in the 90’s is usually blamed with destroying the GOP in that state, in part because the electorate saw it as racist (despite voting to approve the relevant proposition, no one will ever accuse the American electorate of being overly consistent).

[sleeping]

I always kind of considered the most vocal anti-immigration people ( Minutemen / border protesters ) to be WNs implicitly, if not explicitly.

Incidentally, there was recently a great interview with Rich Benjamin about his accounts of visiting “whitopias”.

(1) How much will this approach resonate with white Americans not previously openly committed to a WN worldview?

They’ll have to max out their cognitive dissonance in not wanting “those people” around, but still claiming that there is no more racism because Obama got elected.

(2)(a) How much should it discredit the immigration-restriction movement?

No more than it already was. Populists like Pat Buchanan have only understood half of the problem (the war against non-wealthy Americans), when it’s really a war against all non-wealthy people. The U.S. would not need to limit the influx of immigrants if it worked to ensure that people around the world have adequate* living conditions.

*I can’t say “commensurate” because there are many poor Americans who are in “adequate”–much less good–situations.

[Argent_Towers]

Trying to stir up controversy, fear and uproar about right-wing racist militias is nothing new; the same thing was done in the early and mid 1990s. It’s a cheap, sensationalistic thing to report on; there is no “rise” of white nationalist militias; it’s a completely fringe movement, and the people involved in it are dirt poor, uneducated, and wield no power. But - ZOMGRACISM! It’s a surefire way to titillate the recreational-outrage loving, media-consuming public.

[BrainGlutton]

@sleeping

The U.S. would not need to limit the influx of immigrants if it worked to ensure that people around the world have adequate* living conditions.

How is one country’s government supposed to do that?

[BrainGlutton]

@Argent_Towers

Trying to stir up controversy, fear and uproar about right-wing racist militias is nothing new; the same thing was done in the early and mid 1990s. It’s a cheap, sensationalistic thing to report on; there is no “rise” of white nationalist militias; it’s a completely fringe movement, and the people involved in it are dirt poor, uneducated, and wield no power. But - ZOMGRACISM! It’s a surefire way to titillate the recreational-outrage loving, media-consuming public.

From the same Democracy Now! story:

Well, for more on this story, we are joined now by Chip Berlet. He is a senior analyst at Political Research Associates and the co-author of *Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. *

Welcome to Democracy Now! Chip Berlet, what would you add right now to this piece that we—this very chilling piece that we’ve just watched? You’ve spent time in Montana, in Idaho. What would you like to add?

CHIP BERLET: Well, I think we need to get away from the idea of the word “extremism,” because it creates the false impression that what is going on here is really just somewhere way out there among crazy people. But the whole point of this documentary is to say, look, there are these sectors. There’s the center political sector, there’s these right-wing populists, and then there’s these insurgent and revolutionary right-wing, you know, Klan, Nazi people. And there’s a dynamic there that we are a part of, all of us in America, a legacy of racism that can be exploited on the racial fault line at any moment. So, people need to understand that this dynamic is not going to result in the Klan or the Nazis taking over America and having an armed coup.

What it’s going to result in is a dynamic between the Republicans and the Democrats, for sure, in 2010. But more importantly, what’s happening now in states like Montana and Idaho and Washington is that immigrants and other communities that are being scapegoated are under attack. And as the economy continues to wobble, we are seeing more and more anger being directed not just up at the government elites, but down at people who have very little ability to defend themselves. And so, the Democrats’ idea that “let’s stir up even more trouble and laugh as the Republicans get pulled to the right” ignores the fact that, you know, the families that I talk to are being harmed by both the Republican and the Democrat and the tea bag movements.

ANJALI KAMAT: And Chip Berlet, you have a piece coming out in The Progressive magazine next month, and in that, you argue that centrist Democrats should stop trivializing right-wing populism. What do you mean by that?

CHIP BERLET: Well, if you just say, “Look, they’re all crazy, they’re all nuts, we don’t have to pay any attention to them, and they’re not real,” that does several things. One is that it obscures this dynamic that’s occurring that Lenny Zeskind explained so well, that there’s a struggle going on in these right-wing movements right now, and white supremacist organizers are trying to pull the tea bag movement way towards more aggression and a more ideological position.

But also, I talked to organizers who said when they try and reach out to white communities, where they have in the past had some traction around issues like immigration or issues like racism or even organizing around the political economy and the environment, that they’re getting doors slammed in their face, because, you know, people can hear the Democrats and—I’m sorry, but the Keith Olbermanns and the Rachel Maddows making fun of their neighbors and them, and they don’t want to hear from progressive organizers.

<snip>

AMY GOODMAN: You have David Duke famously saying that if Obama were elected—of course, this was before Obama was elected president—it would be a, quote, “visual aid to white Americans.” How have things changed in this year of the Obama presidency?

CHIP BERLET: Well, we’ve gotten back to this—it’s basically that with such a large right-wing populist movement already being woven around these white nationalist themes, it’s pulling the Republican Party to the right and towards, frankly, a more racist stance. But it’s also providing an opportunity for the organized white supremacist movement to pull people out of the right-wing populist movement—the tea bag and town hall movement—and pull them into a more aggressive, more racist, a more xenophobic, more anti-Muslim and, in many cases, anti-gay and anti-abortion provider kind of anger. And that is happening on both sides of this right-wing populist movement. The Republicans are being pulled to the right, and the white supremacist organizers are having a heyday of organizing people out of the right-wing populist movement into this militant, aggressive and, frankly, right-wing revolutionary stance.

[sleeping]

@BrainGlutton

How is one country’s government supposed to do that?

By funding food and clean water in poor countries, canceling debts countries can’t repay, enforcing UN resolutions in its dealings with allies, etc.

Though not bombing them into the ground would be a good start.

[Shodan]

(1) How much will this approach resonate with white Americans not previously openly committed to a WN worldview?

Not very much. Opposition to illegal immigration is based on whether or not the immigrant is here legally, not his or her ethnicity. Therefore changing from “you don’t belong here because you broke the law to come in” to “you don’t belong here because you are Hispanic/black/Jewish” is arguing from a different set of premises. The first is pretty self-evident; the second hardly at all.

(2) Conversely, how much will it discredit the immigration-restriction movement?

Again, hardly at all (for reasonable people). We are not arguing from the same position. I have no objection to a Hispanic (or black, or Jewish) person who comes here legally, whereas I have considerable objections to a white guy who sneaked in across the border.

(2)(a) How much should it discredit the immigration-restriction movement?

Not very much. Of course the other side is going to try to use guilt by association but it is like associating those who want to open the borders with La Raza or whoever it is. They just aren’t talking about the same things.

(3) Related: If you believe in immigration restriction for non-racist reasons – e.g., to protect the wages of working-class Americans from immigrant competition; or to protect America’s environment from overpopulation pressure – how should you respond to these racists? Welcome them as strange bedfellows, or shout “Get off my side!”?

Ignore them as irrelevant. As Argent Towers points out, these are marginalized groups with no power to speak of.

Sure, Democracy Now! is going to try to play this up as if it were a big deal, but that is just jockeying to try to put the anti-illegal immigration side on the defensive. They simply assert that white militias are on the rise, but don’t give any hard data to back it up.

Business as usual, IOW.

Regards,
Shodan

[BrainGlutton]

@Shodan

Not very much. Opposition to illegal immigration is based on whether or not the immigrant is here legally, not his or her ethnicity.

Highly debatable.

[BrainGlutton]

E.g., I think it’s highly unlikely the Minutemen would exist, if the illegal-immigration pressure were coming from Canada instead of Mexico. There would be hostility, of course, for economic reasons (not for law-and-order reasons), but nothing on the scale we’ve been seeing in the past decade.

[Chen019]

@Simplicio

It works both ways. I’d say association with White Nationalist’s and the like do more damage to the anti-immigration movement then the anti-immigration movement helps White Nationalists. In CA, for example, pressing for anti-immigration legislation in the 90’s is usually blamed with destroying the GOP in that state, in part because the electorate saw it as racist (despite voting to approve the relevant proposition, no one will ever accuse the American electorate of being overly consistent).

Hehe, CA is the classic example of a state being destroyed by poor immigration policy:

California’s financial unraveling has prompted a long-overdue debate about taxes, regulation, and government spending, but the state’s media and government continue to ignore what could be an even greater problem: the irreparable damage to California’s human capital that nearly 30 years of unrestrained illegal immigration has achieved…

In 2005, the California K12 school system was 48.5 percent Hispanic, compared with 30.9 percent white. By now it is above 50 percent Hispanic. Two-thirds of kindergarten students were Hispanic, most of them unable to speak English.

For a closer glimpse of what’s in store for California, look at the Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest in California and the second largest in the country. Of its roughly 700,000 students, almost three-quarters are Hispanic, 8.9 percent are white, and 11.2 percent are black. More than half of the Latino students (about 300,000) are “English learners” and, depending on whether you believe the district or independent scholars, anywhere between a third and a half drop out of high school, following significant attrition in middle school. A recent study by UC Santa Barbara’s California Dropout Research Project estimates that high-school dropouts in 2007 alone will cost the state $24.2 billion in future economic losses.

Even those who graduate aren’t necessarily headed to success. According to one study, 69 percent of Latino high-school graduates “do not meet college requirements or satisfy prerequisites for most jobs that pay a living wage.” It is difficult to see how the majority-Hispanic labor force of the future can provide the skills that the sophisticated Los Angeles economy demands. Already studies show that as many as 700,000 Los Angeles Latinos and some 65 percent of the city’s illegal immigrants work in L.A.'s huge underground economy.

The unhappy picture in Los Angeles is replicated to one degree or another across much of California and is taking a huge toll on the state’s economic competitiveness and long-term prospects. California’s educational system, once easily the best in the country, is today mired in mediocrity near the bottom among the 50 states as judged by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests in math, science, reading, and writing. And for the first time in its history, California is experiencing an increase in adult illiteracy. In 2003, it had the highest adult illiteracy in the United States, 23 percent nearly 50 percent higher than a decade earlier. In some counties (Imperial at 41 percent, Los Angeles at 33 percent) illiteracy approaches sub-Saharan levels.

Perhaps even more important than the collapse of educational achievement among the lower strata is a deterioration of the higher education that was for decades the basis of California’s preeminence in science and technology. California currently ranks 40th among the 50 states in college-attendance rates, and it already faces a significant shortage of college graduates. Studies have shown that the economy will need 40 percent of its workers to be college-educated by 2020, compared with today’s 32 percent. Given the aging white population (average age, 42), many of these new graduates will have to come from the burgeoning Latino immigrant population (average age, 26). By one estimate, this would require tripling of the number of college-educated immigrants, an impossibility if current trends hold. The state’s inability to improve the educational attainment of its residents will result in a “substantial decline in per capita income” and “place California last among the 50 states” by 2020, according to a study by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.

The mediocre education system, along with the unfriendly business climate and confiscatory tax regime, is driving educated, middle-class Californians out of the state. Between 2000 and 2005, more people with college degrees left California than came in, according to research by the Hewlett Foundation. Since then this trend has accelerated, and the state lost 2.2 million members of its young, educated, tax-paying middle class between 2004 and 2007. IRS data show that of recent migrants from the Golden State to places like Texas and Oklahoma, who average 29 years of age, 58 percent have received at least some college education and 53 percent own their homes.

In short, we are witnessing a highly advanced and prosperous state, long endowed with superior human capital, turning into the exact opposite in just one generation. What can be done to stop this race to the bottom? The answer is simple: California and Washington need to enforce existing immigration law. Unfortunately, it is difficult to convince the public that this is necessary, so deeply entrenched are myths about illegal immigration.

One myth is that because America is a country of immigrants and has successfully absorbed waves of immigration in the past, it can absorb this wave. But the argument neglects two key differences between past waves and the current influx. First, the immigrant population is more than double today what it was following the most massive previous immigration wave (that of the late 19th century). Second, and much more important, as scholars from the Manhattan Institute have shown, earlier immigrants were much more likely to bring with them useful skills. Some Hispanic immigrants certainly do integrate, but most do not. Research has shown that even after 20 years in the country, most illegal aliens (the overwhelming majority of whom are Hispanic) and their children remain poor, unskilled, and culturally isolated they constitute a new permanent underclass.

Perhaps the most disingenuous myth about illegal immigrants is that they do not impose any cost on society. The reality is that even those who work and half do not, according to the Pew Hispanic Center cannot subsist on the wages they receive and depend on public assistance to a large degree. Research on Los Angeles immigrants by Harvard University scholar George J. Borjas shows that 40.1 percent of immigrant families with non-citizen heads of household receive welfare, compared with 12.7 percent of households with native-born heads. Illegal immigrants also increase public expenditures on health care, education, and prisons. In California today, illegal immigrants’ cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be $13 billion half the state’s budget deficit.

The state should stop providing welfare and other social services to illegal aliens as existing statutes demand and severely punish employers who break the law by hiring illegal immigrants. This would immediately remove powerful economic incentives for illegal immigration, and millions of illegal aliens would return to their countries. Instead, with President Obama in the White House and the Democrats controlling Congress, an amnesty for the country’s 13 million illegal immigrants may be soon to come.

Milton Friedman once said that unrestrained immigration and the welfare state do not mix. Must we wait until California catches up with Mexico to realize how right he was?

National Review Online: Stop Illegals, Save CA

[RickJay]

@BrainGlutton

Highly debatable.

Your own post is not a cite.

Seriously, you’re worried about militia groups? Wasn’t this the big scare in 1996?

[BrainGlutton]

@RickJay

Your own post is not a cite.

The excerpt from Christopher Hitchens’ book is, however.

@RickJay

Seriously, you’re worried about militia groups? Wasn’t this the big scare in 1996?

What, you think they just wised up and disbanded? 'Fraid not.

[athelas]

And just what activities of substance have they actually been doing? Terrorizing minorities, or putting up poorly-designed websites?

[Der_Trihs]

@Chen019

Hehe, CA is the classic example of a state being destroyed by poor immigration policy:
< snip >

Ah, and how convenient it is that Proposition 13 gutting school funding isn’t mentioned. Not to mention the general problems with keeping the state government funded; instead it talks about “the unfriendly business climate and confiscatory tax regime”.

It’s all due to those evil, evil immigrants and evil liberals.

[Argent_Towers]

Alarmism about militias is far more ridiculous than alarmism about illegal immigrants.

How many people in the US have been killed by militia members in the past year? And how many have been killed by people who are in this country illegally? (That includes people killed by illegal aliens driving drunk, as well as gang/drug related murders and other street crime.) I’m not a statistician but I suspect the latter number will be higher - unless there was some massacre carried out by militias in Montana or Michigan that I’m unaware of.

[sleeping]

@athelas

Terrorizing minorities, or putting up poorly-designed websites?

They’re not mutually exclusive, you know. When someone can’t center a JPG for shit and all their links are broken, that’s pretty terrifying.

@Argent Towers

How many people in the US have been killed by militia members in the past year? And how many have been killed by people who are in this country illegally? (That includes people killed by illegal aliens driving drunk, as well as gang/drug related murders and other street crime.) I’m not a statistician but I suspect the latter number will be higher - unless there was some massacre carried out by militias in Montana or Michigan that I’m unaware of.

Illegal immigrants are only characterized by the status of their entry into a country. They are not unusually prone to violence, despite what right-wing demagogues want you to believe. OTOH, militia groups (anti-govt, WN, whatever) are by definition more supportive of violence than the average person–else, why would they hoard guns and feel the need to create para-military unit?

[BrainGlutton]

@Argent_Towers

Alarmism about militias is far more ridiculous than alarmism about illegal immigrants.

How many people in the US have been killed by militia members in the past year? And how many have been killed by people who are in this country illegally? (That includes people killed by illegal aliens driving drunk, as well as gang/drug related murders and other street crime.) I’m not a statistician but I suspect the latter number will be higher - unless there was some massacre carried out by militias in Montana or Michigan that I’m unaware of.

:rolleyes: I have no doubt the number would also be higher if for “illegal aliens” you substituted “white people” or practically any other demographic group.

[Argent_Towers]

:rolleyes: Whatever, the point remains. This isn’t about demographics like “white people,” it’s about very specific groups of people: militia members, and illegal immigrants. There is a shitload of crime being committed by illegal immigrants. (Have you ever read about MS-13? Read about it.) This is, legitimately, something for people to worry about. Militia activity is trivial in comparison.