Illegal immigrants are a demographic group; militia members are not.
No, crime in general is, legitimately, something for people to worry about. And racist radicals whipping up a climate of hatred and scapegoating is, legitimately, quite another thing for people to worry about.
Or Oklahoma City, Murrah Building. Not va year ago but it was ugly. But the Secret Service says the death threats on the President are at an all time high. Last I heard was more than 30 a day.
You know, I wasn’t even going to mention the irrelevance of Timothy McVeigh for fear of it being called a straw-man argument, but someone clearly called my bluff, so I’ll do it now. Timothy McVeigh is not representative of “militia crimes.” Timothy McVeigh was not a member of any militia at the time of his bombing, nor did he carry it out in the name of a militia. He at one time was briefly associated with a militia; that does not make the Oklahoma City bombing a militia crime. That’s like saying that “the communists” killed JFK, because Lee Harvey Oswald was once a member of the communist party. The hellstorm of media coverage of militias after the bombing was typical ill-informed media panic-bullshit-journalism, designed to ooh and ahh people with the specter of a nonexistent boogeyman.
Look into John Tanton and the so-called “Center for Immigration Studies.” Pretty much every organized anti-immigration group has fairly direct and traceable links to groups such as the KKK.
“White nationalism,” if defined as the wish to legally and socially make those who are not heterosexual white Christians into second-class citizens, is already a mainstream element in American politics, and is a major reason why there is an “immigration issue” to begin with.
No, it’s not - it’s just an opinion piece from someone else who wants to smear people who dislike having people illegally in the country. There has been no hard evidence presented of any significant rise in white nationalism. This is a manufactured threat - a scare piece.
Your Democracy Now! piece is simply channeling Glenn Beck, only from the left.
It’s not a cite for that; it’s a cite for the fact that some important movers in the anti-immigration movement, such as John Tanton, have been racists and pretty clearly motivated by their racism. Also for the fact, incidentally, that when that came out, some others in the movement seemed rather surprised and quickly dissociated themselves from it. All that was back in the 1980s, but remains highly relevant to the thesis of Rowley and Soohen’s documentary.
As for a recent rise in White Nationalism, or at least in the militia/“patriot” movement more broadly, see here.
I draw that distinction because the WN and militia movements, while there has always been considerable Boolean intersection between them, are not the same. E.g., Bo Gritz, a formative influence on the militias, disavows racism.
However, according to the report linked above, that is starting to change:
Just so I’m clear, you’re opposed to all immigration restrictions? If memory serves, that was the situation prior to the 20th century, but I’ve heard relatively few people arguing for open borders these days. Most proponents of immigration reform remain immigration-restrictionists of some sort.
No. I find the economic arguments persuasive. With America’s deindustrialization-by-outsourcing and the decline of labor unions over the past several decades, working Americans have enough trouble finding good-paying jobs, without being undercut by cheap/desperate immigrant labor. I would, however, support some sort of amnesty and citizenship-tracking for (most of) those already here illegally; their illegal status just complicates things (e.g., makes them reluctant to cooperate with authorities even when necessary, and makes it easier for employers to get away with paying them illegally low wages and treating them any old how), while deporting them en masse obviously is not a practical option. But I would definitely oppose any “guest worker” program; that’s just a way of letting the corporations have their cake and eat it.
That’s what makes this debate so interesting: Some Americans oppose immigration (legal and illegal) on racial/cultural grounds, some on socioeconomic grounds, some on environmental grounds; and the different groups have to decide whether and how to work with others whose fundamental views they find abhorrent. (I am not convinced, BTW, that significant numbers sincerely oppose illegal immigration on law-and-order grounds; generally that’s code for some other concern.)
This particular “rise on the right” is a little different than the one we saw under Clinton. Supposedly mainstream Republicans are echoing some of their talking points, such as the Birther rubbish.
Right and every pro-immigration group is funded by Jewish groups or promoted by Jewish owned media (ie. Kevin MacDonald’s argument) to reduce the prospect of discrimination.
What is your point? An association with the KKK is a mark against the anti-immigration movement; an association with Jews is not a mark against the pro-immigration movement.
I do know that there’s a hell of a lot of anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by Muslims in Europe. I think that most of the vandalism of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in places like Germany and France is done by Arab and African immigrants. Jews in Europe definitely seem threatened by Muslim immigration but I don’t know about America; I don’t hear much about that kind of stuff happening here and all of the Muslims I’ve known have been pretty decent people, but they’ve also been mostly educated, upper class folk. The immigrants to Europe are probably of the poor, uneducated and irate variety, not the school-attending, doctor-becoming kind.
BrainGlutton, do you understand the difference between illegal-immigration and immigration? You seem to conflate the two an awful lot, both in your OP and in your ensueing ‘cites’ :rolleyes: