Our enemies will take advantage of anything that advances developments in the direction of a publicly fascist state that targets and scapegoats the Other. One of the least discussed in the immigration debate is the link of anti-immigration groups to anti-life beliefs. Many of these “experts” on immigration reform have obtained funds or have other connections to organizations and people that advocate anti-life measures, such as population control, sterilization, abortion and euthanasia.

Not long ago I received an e-mail from [tag]John Seager[/tag], President of [tag]Population Connection[/tag] informing me that I was wrong assuming that his group has anything to do with eugenics in a recent post I did, Texas The Anti-Brown State, on Aztlan Electronic News. Poor Mr. Seager, I guess he didn’t get a chance to read Richard’s post, “Ya can parley with a Mescan, but ya’ can’t win” (John Wayne). In his e-mail, Mr. Seager wrote:

I hope you’ll take a closer look at Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth). We are not now, nor have we ever been, a eugenics group, by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve provided below the text of an op ed we distributed last year that should give you some sense of our perspective.

I’m sure you want to make sure, as we do, that the information you put forward is as accurate as possible.

I understand Seager’s concern about his organization being considered as a eugenics group. When one mentions “[tag]eugenics[/tag]” to many Americans, they associate it with [tag]racial purification[/tag] policies used by Hitler and Nazi Germany, which included implementing practices of racial hygiene, human experimentation, and the extermination of undesired population groups. Therefore, just mentioning “eugenics” such notions as racial purity, racial superiority, and the heritability of information, virtue, or vice comes to mind. But before we get on to politics, lets follow the theory of eugenics as it developed into the idea of population control, creating a frightening snowball effect throughout the world.

Although eugenics is associated with Hitler, but the truth is, eugenic thinking has been part of Western intellectual history since the 1860’s. [tag]Francis Galton[/tag], one of Darwin’s disciples and cousin, used his cousin’s work to create Eugenics, a term that he coined which means, “the cultivation of race.” Galton believed that the ruling classes ought to take it upon themselves to guide the development of the human genetic heritage by thinning out the weaknesses in a species, since nature couldn’t do it. Galton said:

I do not see why any insolence of caste should prevent the gifted class, when they had the power, from treating their compatriots with all kindness, so long as they maintained celibacy. But if these continued to procreate children inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.

Under the philosophies of Galton, Eugenists began building their cause. By the turn of the 20th century, such ideas were commonplace. In fact, in the US, the American Breeders Association (ABA) devoted itself to exploring issues that would have interested Sir Francis Galton. With a committee focusing on the presumed hereditary differences between human races, the ABA popularized the themes of selective breeding of superior stock, the biological menace of “inferior types,” and the need for recording and controlling human heredity. At one time, 33 states had a domestic policy of eugenics, sterilizing over 60,000 citizens who were considered unfit to reproduce. A bitter pill must be swallowed; despite all the admiration [tag]Margaret Sanger[/tag] has received for establishing the American birth control movement and being the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became [tag]Planned Parenthood[/tag] Federation of America). The truth is, she was a member of both the American Eugenics Society and the English Eugenics Society and a proponent of eugenics, which she pushed the idea of “race hygiene” through “negative eugenics.” Even though the current Planned Parenthood Federation of America does recognize this view unacceptable and outmoded, it is hard to argue against historical fact. In her book The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger wrote:

There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great problem of the feeble-minded. That is, as the best authorities are agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to their descendants. Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics from every country indicate, is invariably associated with an abnormally high rate of fertility. Modern conditions of civilization, as we are continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding-ground for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile.
…
The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives. The male defectives are no less dangerous. Segregation carried out for one or two generations would give us only partial control of the problem. Moreover, when we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential source of an endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.

It is clear that Sanger advocated the mandatory sterilization of the “insane” and “feeble-minded.” Ultimately, Sanger concluded that: “only 13,500,000 will ever show superior intelligence.” Thus, only 13.5% of the population would be allowed to reproduce. Meanwhile, the rest would be incarcerated for orderly disposal.

After the discoveries of the Nazi atrocities shortly after World War II, Planned Parenthood acted as a conduit for the entry of the eugenics movement into the post-war world. Sanger toned down her racist rhetoric from “race betterment” to “family planning” for the benefit of the poor and racial minorities, the organization’s prime goal of controlling population growth rate among “undesirables” never really changed.

Planned Parenthood would contend that this would be an effort to discredit the family planning movement because Sanger was not perfect mode. True, this should NOT diminish her legacy as the central force in the birth control movement; however, it does raise some questions. Given the facts of many American icons, how do we judge historical figures? And, how do we separate their personal views and action to their contributions to American society?

From Eugenics to Environmentalism
Population control has always been historically connected to the eugenics movement. Margaret Sanger’s eugenically tradition continued and maintained late into the twentieth century. Either John Seager is not aware of his organization’s history or he is trying to revise his organization’s own history. After the war, eugenicists instituted various strategies to cover up the continued joint development of the German, American, and English eugenic agendas. Therefore, the principal vehicle for Malthusian fears became, instead, the threat of environmental catastrophe. This new shift culminated in 1968.

In 1968, one of the most powerful ventures that marked this new line of outlook was [tag]Garrett Hardin[/tag]’s essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin argued that if people are granted to right to reproduce freely, their children would all be given equal rights to a limited commons, the world would be locked “into a tragic course of action” leading to environmental destruction. Hardin believed that only private ownership of vital resources and an inegalitarian distribution of the right to reproduce could avoid the “tragedy” which he predicted was the inevitable result of a democratic and egalitarian society. Hardin also argued that projects as the welfare state and land reform in developing countries were pointless because the problem with what Hardin called “a commons in breeding” was that the impoverished had too many children and made excessive claims on public resources:

If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own ‘punishment’ to the germ line – then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families.

It is this article that embodies the way in which post-war environmentalism became a vehicle not only for the more ideological aspects of Malthusian thinking, but also for eugenic convictions. The central point in “The Tragedy of the Commons” was that only private property could protect the environment against over-population, a claim that has become a cardinal view of contemporary neo-liberal dogma. The passion with which this conviction has been accepted by conservative policy institutes and multinational corporations is evidence that this ideology is not the fundamental reason to conserve nature or control population growth, but their loophole to legitimize an unrelenting process of privatization and enclosure.

In the same year, Zero Population Growth was founded in 1968 by Stanford biologist [tag]Paul Ehrlich[/tag], author of The Population Bomb, which was commissioned and published by the Sierra Club. It was not until 2002 when ZPG changed their name to Population Connection. In 1968, in his book, Ehrlich predicted:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…

To counter this plague of global starvation, Ehrlich advises overtly authoritarian measures: “We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” By 1978, an eminent biologist was claiming that “ecology’s first social law should be written: ‘All poverty is caused by the continued growth of population.’” Whether or not Ehrlich actually believed the overpopulation fables that he peddled, they still provided the ruling class with an immediately exploitable threat.

Although Ehrlich’s inaccurate predictions should have qualified the man as a certifiable phony, his claims were still given credence by certain factions of the elite and government think tanks. In George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin noted that during George H. W. Bush’s congressional career, Bush founded and chaired the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. Bush’s task force subscribed to a [tag]neo-Malthusian[/tag] view about population control and provided Ehrlich with an audience.

Comprised of over 20 Republican Congressman, Bush’s task force was a kind of Malthusian vanguard organization, which heard testimony from assorted “race scientists,” sponsored legislation, and otherwise propagandized the zero-growth outlook. In its 50-odd hearings during these years, the task force provided a public forum to nearly every well-known zero-growth fanatic, from Paul Ehrlich, founder of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), to race scientist William Shockley, to the key zero-growth advocates infesting the federal bureaucracy.

Thomas Robert Malthus is the 19th century cleric and professor of political economy who believed a population time bomb threatened the existence of the human race. He viewed social problems such as poverty, deprivation and hunger as evidence of this “population crisis.” Malthus believed that charity and other forms of benevolence only exacerbated the problems. His answer was to restrict population growth of certain groups of people. His theories of population growth and economic stability became the basis for national and international social policy.

Ehrlich suggested a “tough foreign policy,” which comprised of terminating food aid to “starving nations” who declined to comply. Ehrlich further suggested that domestic population control include “the addition of … mass sterilization agents” to America’s water and food supplies. Such ideas were given serious credence, which is not surprising, considering the make-up of Bush’s committee.

One of Ehrlich’s fellow traveler is [tag]William Shockley[/tag], who already had created a substantial amount of controversy by endorsing his already refuted thesis that black people were mentally and cognitively inferior to white people. In the same year that the GOP task force provided him with a congressional platform, Shockley wrote:

“Our nobly intended welfare programs may be encouraging dysgenics – retrogressive evolution through disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged… We fear that ‘fatuous beliefs’ in the power of welfare money, unaided by eugenic foresight, may contribute to a decline of human quality for all segments of society.”

Just because ZPG has changed its name, this does not allow John Seager to revise the organizations eugenic past. Mr. Seager, by just saying it doesn’t make it so.

It is in this environmental language that most Malthusian or dysgenic fears about immigration are now being expressed. Former member of ZPG and founder of the anti-immigration organization, Federation for American Immigration Reform ([tag]FAIR[/tag]), [tag]John Tanton[/tag], is claiming that the degradation of our environmental resources can be blamed either to the reproductive pressures in the Third World or to the reproductive tendencies of immigrants and their descendants. What makes Tanton dangerous, he is a “self-described progressive, ex-Sierra Club member, Planned Parenthood supporter and harsh critic of neoclassical economists.”

In Tanton’s view, society would have to reconstitute itself to promote conservation over growth.

As early as the ’50s, he avidly read reports from the Population Reference Bureau, and by the time Ehrlich’s book was published, he and Mary Lou had already started work on the first Northern Michigan chapter of Planned Parenthood. “I believed in the multiplication tables,” says Tanton. “Since I was a physician and could do something about birth control, it struck me that this was where I could make my contribution to the conservation movement.”

It seems Mr. Seager also has a memory lapse regarding his predecessors because Tanton was not just one of ZPG’s most active members, he also was the organization’s president in 1975.

Even though, John Seager talks about applying a “global approach” when it comes to immigration by supporting female literacy, access to birth control and family-planning services in the developing world, their Mission Statement on addressing the immigration issue is very reflective of a neo-Malthusian ideology with the new rhetoric of “sustainable development.”

We, therefore, call on the United States to focus its foreign aid on population, environmental, social, education, and sustainable development programs. Changing political conditions present opportunities to work cooperatively with other nations to address the root causes of international migration.

The “Sustainable Development” Facade
When the environmental wing of the anti-immigrant forces emerged from the zero-population movement of the 1960s and 1970s, sustainable development became a term that was designed to sound like something everyone wants. Sustainable development, as defined from the Our Common Future report (known as the Brundtland Report), is development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The promises was to defuse the longstanding tensions between environmental protection and economic growth; and during the ’90s, nearly everyone favors it, including individuals, firms, national and local governments, militaries, and the range of non-state actors. However, sustainable development has been stripped of its critical content and has been transformed and reconfigured for compatibility with the larger priorities of the post-Cold War era.

Sustainable development appeals to those preoccupied with the tendencies of capitalist development to lay waste to the world in its haste to convert anything and everything into commodities, which could be sold for a profit. Advocates of sustainable development seemed to reason within Western traditions that see humans as stewards of Nature, with responsibility for its protection. Competitive capitalism has long required explanations for why people are impoverished and expendable and through sustainable development. However, whenever a global environmental crisis emerges, Third World poverty or world hunger instantly becomes an issue to economists, demographers, planners, corporate financiers, and political pundits.

Today, population activists do realize the value of poverty reduction; however, their center is on the value of family planning. As population growth rates fall around the world, demography is focusing once again on ‘quality’ concerns such as the differential fertility of competing ethnic groups and the problems surrounding an aging population. While eugenic ideologies and practices have changed over time, they have hardly gone away.

Little has been done to challenge the problematic assumptions, language and perceptions that make American environmentalism particularly susceptible to eugenic influences. Notions of natural and cultural purity blended together reinforce make racism and ethnic prejudice more acceptable in the process and are leading to a resurgence of nativism.

Biological Determinism
Biological determinism is much in current these days as the media bombards us with ideas that we are, in the end, mainly a function of our genes or hormones. Gender and sexuality are being re-centered in the body rather than in social relations. The fact that we as a society are obsessed on our body’s aesthetics in hopes of achieving physical perfection is a manifestation of the idea of finding the ideal body type that took place in the heyday of eugenics in the 1930s.

According to Betsy Hartman, aesthetic is taking a variety of forms – from paying blond, blue-eyed Ivy League women to be egg donors to the pages of fashion magazines. One of the most forms is the growing prevalence of eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia among young women searching for an elusive physical perfection, sense of control and in some cases hyperathletic physical efficiency. Hartman writes:

Although eating disorders have complex causes, we should not underestimate the legacy of eugenics in breeding the psychological monster of perfectionism that terrorizes so many women. The current mass marketing of hormonal birth control pills like Seasonale that have the ‘liberating’ side effect of stopping your periods also plays on the eugenic aesthetic of a clean, efficient female body.

Through neoliberal ideologies and policies, complementary eugenics is closely tied to the shrinking of the welfare state that casts more and more people as drains on the economy and the state – not just the poor and people of color, but also elderly people and people with disabilities. Therefore, it is not surprising then that one can recognize signs of negative eugenics in population control measures and technologies aimed at impoverished women. Even though complementary eugenics can be found in neoliberal ideologies, conservative ideologues have manipulated the fears of scarcity in order to cast impoverished people as burdens and to foment racist assaults on immigrants and people of color.

This climate helps foster and legitimize eugenic thinking. According to conservative population growth lies at the heart of most environmental problems such as energy use, the depletion of natural resources, and deforestation. The prevailing notion of carrying capacity claims that population growth naturally entails increased resource consumption. This prepares the groundwork for blaming the poor for the destruction carried out by big landowners, transnational companies, and mega-projects financed by multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, whose purpose is to export natural resources to feed consumption and production in the US.

Organizations like Population Connection take out the political, economic and social dynamics of the equation, which govern the relationships between human beings and nature. Blaming powerless women from countries such as Mexico will not stop the negative impacts of unsustainable patterns of production and spending that feed the dominant economic development model. John Seager may not fit into the typical mold of an anti-immigrationist like Tanton, but the goal he is trying achieve is same just the message is reframed.

Stereotypes and labels prevent understanding of the intensifying immigration debate in the US. The debate is sharply divides into two sides. On one side, there are those who believe that immigration should be controlled but at levels that reflect the reality of both emigration pressures outside the country and labor needs within it. On the other side of the immigration debate, there are those who believe that immigration flows should be dramatically restricted. These groups are commonly described as being immigration restrictionists.

Although immigration restrictionists share a common agenda, they do not operate as a unified political bloc. Anti-immigration forces comprise of partisans both political parties as well as supporters of parties and movements on the political left and right that fall outside mainstream political thinking.

Contrary to popular belief, thanks to the media, many restrictionist groups are really not espousing the rhetoric that is often heard from citizen militias, white supremacists, and more nationalist institutes, which is explicitly dedicated to “preserving our common heritage as Americans.” Many of them are framing their views in the policy language of environmental protection, access to jobs, anti-corporate sentiment, and population control.

True most immigration restrictionists are found within the political right, but there are some who can be found within the political left. Because much of the argument is dominated by xenophobic rhetoric and calls for draconian border controls and legislation, there is a common belief that anything else should be viewed as liberal ideology, such as ideas about population control, environmentalism, and labor issues.

John Seager’s views are in line with a neoliberal ideology, so it is not surprising that Seager is taking great pains to refrain rhetoric that sound xenophobic and racist, which is being voiced by groups like FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). In Seager’s recent article, he has provided the both the religious- and pro-life right reactionaries with additional reasons for them to continue kicking up bogus hysteria that every liberal in the US are hysterical screeds that have little regard for the sanctity of life.

Globally, at least 350 million couples lack family planning services. Here in the United States, one-third of all births are unplanned. And the Bush administration’s family-planning failures, from its global gag rule against abortion to ideologically driven abstinence-only programs, contribute directly to millions of unwanted and unplanned births. If we could cut in half the number of unwanted births in the U.S. alone, we’d have about 5 million fewer births over 20 years.

It’s vital to focus on thorny technical issues such as tax credits, energy alternatives and emissions trading programs. These efforts are especially important here in the United States, where less than 5 percent of the world’s population produces about one-quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

So it is not surprising hear strongest proponents within the anti-immigration camp – paleoconservatives, traditionalists and social conservatives – criticize Seager for espousing secular and liberal ideas. But if one were to look closely where he really stands, his views are not much different from the strongest proponents of immigration who are found within the ranks of the Republican Party.

John Seager is endorsing market-based corporatist approaches to environmental and social policy. [tag]Emissions trading[/tag] to reduce their production of heat-trapping [tag]greenhouse gas emissions[/tag] amounts to an elaborate shell game that threatens to undercut the goal of stemming global warming. Living here in Texas, I have witnessed the failure of this environmental policy that was put in place by then-Gov Bush. Emissions trading does little to solve pollution problems and only proves that buying and selling carbon dioxide credits will deliver only illusory emission reductions, invite fraud and result in disproportionate health and economic impacts on poor communities. The only thing being sustained are the profit margins for big landowners, transnational companies, and mega-projects financed by multilateral institutions.

The problem we are currently having is the perception of “neoliberalism” – a term that’s particularly confusing to people in the US who associate liberalism with socially progressive policies. The theory of neoliberalism:

…the view that individual liberty and freedom are the high point of civilization and then goes on to argue that individual liberty and freedom can best be protected and achieved by an institutional structure, made up of strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade: a world in which individual initiative can flourish. The implication of that is that the state should not be involved in the economy too much, but it should use its power to preserve private property rights and the institutions of the market and promote those on the global stage if necessary.

As policies of “free trade,” open capital markets, and unrestricted and unregulated investment are enforced, the inconsistencies of capitalist development become more intense. The recent rhetoric of “sustainable development” and “globalization” cannot entirely obscure how the new economic regime is exacerbating, rather than resolving, social and environmental problems in the Latin America, while accelerating economic and ideological polarization.

The reason families are on the migrating more now as never before is due to commercial agricultural development that continues to withhold and deprive people secure access to fundamental productive resources. These resources increasingly are being exploited by transnational corporations for the use and profit of developed nations. The Malthusian argument that migration must be curbed in the interest of maintaining the lifestyles of the affluent ignores the realism that both migration movement and the lifestyles share a single origin. The alternative is structural change. Only in a society in which resources are more equitably apportioned will we be able to go beyond Malthusian politics of “population control” to a true consideration of human reproductive rights and needs.

• HB127: Requires state agencies to ask customers whether they are legal U.S. residents and report the cost of services provided to illegal residents.
• HB38: Requires proof of legal residency in the U.S. to obtain professional licenses.
• HB40: Applicants for medical assistance must prove their legal status.
• HBs578, 691, 1377: Applicants for a marriage license must swear they are not marrying as a way to circumvent immigration laws.
• HB28: U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants would be ineligible for state services and state jobs.
• HBs104, 141, 159, 39: Eliminates undocumented immigrant students’ ability to receive in-state tuition rates.
• HBs858, 905, 907 1012, 1256: Allows state and/or local police to enforce federal immigration laws.
• HB904: Prohibits cities from setting up day labor centers.
• HBs931, 932: Requires proof of legal status for a driver’s license and a citizenship label on driver’s licenses.
• HB29: Imposes a fee on money undocumented immigrants send to Central and South America.
• HCR11: Resolution calling on the Texas attorney general to pursue lawsuits to collect money from the federal government to repay the state for the cost of undocumented immigrants.

Currently, the bills are in State Affairs Committee, which is lead by state Rep. David Swinford, R-Dumas. Understanding how much of a hot potato this issue is, Swinford plans to get the attorney general’s, Greg Abbott, advice about whether the bills are constitutional before sending the bill forward.

“If they’re unconstitutional and we go through this whole process and they get taken to court and thrown out, well, that’s kind of a waste of time and energy,” he said.

It is clear who is behind this measure. Groups, such as the Federation of American Immigration Reform ([tag]FAIR[/tag]), who has two goals: (1) “To end illegal immigration” and (2) “to set legal immigration at the lowest feasible levels consistent with the demographic, economic, social, and environmental realities.” They believe immigrant women of childbearing age are a significant source of the country’s so-called “illegal immigration crisis.” Texas House Bill (HB) 28, sponsored by Rep. [tag]Leo Berman[/tag], R-Tyler, is very interesting because if Berman gets his way, it will be considered the test case before the US Supreme Court that would eventually establishes if the “and the jurisdiction thereof” clause of the 14th amendment applies to children born in the US who do not have a parent who is a citizen or resident alien.

In an AP article written in December, Berman said, “Texas can no longer afford to lure illegal immigrants to give birth on U.S. soil by promising citizenship and access to lucrative public benefits.” This explains why HB28 is loaded with vicious, mean spirited goodies that make the KKK look mainstream. Should the bill become law it would: deny employment to American born children of undocumented parents, deny services such as retirement and unemployment insurance, deny primary education, secondary education and higher education and, of course, deny any sort of public assistance such as health care, disability, welfare, food stamps and public housing. All withheld to American born children.

Berman and others like him in the Texas legislator assert that immigrant women are risking their lives just to enter the US to give birth to “anchor babies,” who can then sponsor other relatives before they reach the age of 21; hence the term “[tag]anchor babies[/tag].” They also contend that “anchor babies” and their families create a strain on the country’s social service programs. The irrational stance of anti-immigrant advocates echoes that of 1990’s welfare reformers. Both assume that childbearing by immigrants or poor women of color creates a cycle of poverty and dependence on the government. Immigrant women and women on welfare are depicted as irresponsible mothers and fraudulent freeloaders.

This is a false assumption. Back in December, a report was published by the Texas Comptrollers Office, “Undocumented Immigrants In Texas: A Financial Analysis of the Impact to the State Budget and Economy,” which found that [tag]undocumented immigrants[/tag] contributed $17.7 billion to that states economy and that state revenues collected from undocumented immigrants exceeded what was spent on services for them by $424.7 million.

The Comptroller’s report estimates that undocumented immigrants in Texas generate more taxes and other revenue than the state spends on them. This finding is contrary to two recent reports, FAIR’s, “The Cost of Illegal Immigration to Texans” and the Bell Policy Center’s “Costs of Federally Mandated Services to Undocumented Immigrants in Colorado”, both of which identified costs exceeding revenue.
…
The Comptroller’s office estimates the absence of the estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants in Texas in fiscal 2005 would have been a loss to our Gross State Product of $17.7 billion. Also, the Comptroller’s office estimates that state revenues collected from undocumented immigrants exceed what the state spent on services, with the difference being $424.7 million ….

The largest cost factor was education, followed by incarceration and healthcare. Consumption taxes and fees, the largest of which is the sales tax, were the largest revenue generators from undocumented immigrants.

It is interesting that Berman is still moving forward despite the finds of the Texas Comptrollers Office. It just goes to show nativists will stop at nothing to rid this country and state of anything Brown, regardless is there are numerous research that contradicts their argument.

Today’s immigration debate extends beyond the aim of restricting the rights and humanity of immigrants: it’s mission is ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing defined by the conservative think tank the Council on Foreign Relations is:

[E]thnic cleansing nonetheless defies easy definition. At one end it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population exchange while at the other it merges with deportation and genocide. At the most general level, however, ethnic cleansing can be understood as the expulsion of an “undesirable” population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these.

Under this definition, then, the slow dispersal and annihilation of North America’s indigenous population was indeed ethnic cleansing. In their efforts to gain and secure the frontier, American settlers “cleansed” most Indians from their lands, even though the process was slow and, until the nineteenth century, carried out mainly under private initiative….

Ethnic cleansing has taken many forms. The forced resettlement of a “politically unreliable” population-one conquered and incorporated into an empire yet still likely to rebel-dates from the eighth century bc. (emphasis mine)

Although many people associate the term with violence, it is hard to argue against the appropriateness when it comes to the current immigration debate given the groups who are lobbing for these bills.

Over the last decade, the population-immigration argument has been forcefully and deliberately made as part of a bigger agenda by anti-immigration, it has become a focus of population control advocates such as Population-Environmental Balance (PEB) and The Social Contract Press. FAIR has a very interesting history, it was created after John Tanton split with the eugenics group known as Zero Population Growth, better known today as Population Connection. Worse, the anti-immigrant groups have been masquerading themselves as environmentalists so they can penetrate liberal environmental groups like the Sierra Club. They have used Orwellian names such as Carrying Capacity Network and Population-Environment Balance. This is not some conspiracy theory.

Historically, immigrants have been targets of environmentalists, some of whom linked with the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, Immigration Restriction League, to advocate for immigration controls. The eugenics movement considered undocumented immigrants and people of other non-white races to be biologically inferior to whites.

The “Hispanic Paradox” is that the country’s political culture cannot function without scapegoating migrant laborers either. America’s fear of immigrants is not new. In the 1920s, Congress passed Immigration Act of 1924, which placed immigration quotas that barred Asians, Italians, Greeks, and Jews. These quota laws, passed after lobbying by the Ku Klux Klan, Immigration Restriction League and others, codified the eugenics theories of Madison Grant, whose work focused on the supposedly inferior skull sizes of Jews and other immigrants.

The reason that overpopulation is primary threat to the finite resources of the planet was made popular through Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s book “The Population Bomb” that was published in 1968. The book predicted that disaster for humanity would happen “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” due to overpopulation and the “population explosion.” Now, the [tag]nativists[/tag] are using this theory to distort the public conscious in order to push their anti-immigration agenda.

Before Garrett Hardin died in 2003, he was the significant link between the population and environment groups and the anti-immigration movement. He wrote many books and popularized the term “Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin was a peculiar figure among members of the Republican party who supported Planned Parenthood and an environmentalist who believed in population control.

Fear of overpopulation is a warped lens, which views the lives of the poor as faceless numbers by creating artificial boundaries among people. It breeds racism and sexism, denies history, and reinforces Western parochialism about countries outside the US. In a 2003 issue of the Social Contract Press, Wayne Lutton wrote:

Overseas screening of visitors, immigrants, and refugees is likewise inadequate. In a system rife with fraud, prospective entrants to the U.S. submit certification of health. Inspections by visa officials and at U. S. ports of entry are cursory, often taking less than 5 seconds. These procedures are rarely able to detect foreigners carrying contagious diseases and parasitic infections, nor identify persons with other personal problems, such as mental illness, mental retardation, alcohol and drug addiction, and many other major health problems, including heart and kidney disease, diabetes, and cancer.
…
Exposure to imported illnesses not only endangers Americans’ physical well-being, it costs taxpayers billions of dollars. Additionally, funds diverted to cover the medical expenses of foreigners, are leading to severe cutbacks in services available to U. S. citizens in areas enduring especially high rates of immigration.

How is this any different from what was going on back in 1920s? None, absolutely none. Mexican immigration was numerically insignificant from 1900 to 1909 and those who were here primarily took agricultural jobs in the Southwest. Despite the anti-immigrant lobby, growers and industrialists — who extracted super-profits from the Mexicans’ cheap, unskilled labor—testified before Congress of the value of Mexican workers, successfully stalling restrictive legislation. In part due to this capitalist lobby, the 1924 Immigration Act did not set quotas for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. As World War I ended, the 1921 recession exacerbated a competition between white and nonwhite workers.

It was at this time, the press and politicians began to whip up anti-Mexican sentiments. Congress put the “Mexican problem” on the agenda. Every year from 1926 to 1930, Congressmen proposed bills expanding the quotas to the nations of the Western Hemisphere, clearly with Mexico in mind. Both the anti-immigration and capitalist pro-immigration lobby employed similar racist stereotypes to make their arguments. Both considered Mexicans a biologically inferior race, with natural tendencies towards docility and ignorance.

The anti-immigration lobby argued that these biological characteristics made Mexicans unfit for U.S. citizenship. Racist sectors of the labor movement claimed these supposed traits were “ruinous” to the U.S. standard of labor. The pro-immigration lobby argued that these very characteristics made Mexican immigrants “harmless” to US society. Furthermore, they argued, Mexicans “did jobs that no one else would take.” Do those arguments sound any different from the current arguments being made today. No!

The Sins of the Past Repeats Itself
The US government began to use the newly formed Border Patrol to discourage legal Mexican immigration. The informal, fluid migration that characterized the earlier period was replaced by one in which Mexicans not only took literacy tests and paid a head tax, but also were subjected to humiliating public medical examinations, which included bathing and hair removal. Such procedures were banned with European immigrants.

In California, state officials and local health authorities participated actively in efforts to restrict Mexican immigration throughout the 1920s and to expel both Mexicans and Filipinos during the 1930s. With the outcry from nativist groups, who argued that Mexicans created overwhelming social problems, took jobs away from Whites, and represented an undesirable racial group, public health officials helped to craft the anti-Mexican discourse and at the same time led efforts to segregate, exclude, and repatriate Mexican immigrants. Kenneth L. Roberts wrote in the Saturday Evening Post:

“and see endless streets crowded with the shacks of illiterate, diseased, pauperized Mexicans, taking no interest whatever in the community, living constantly on the ragged edge of starvation, bringing countless numbers of American citizens into the world with the reckless prodigality of rabbits.”

In 1927, Grizzly Bear wrote in the journal of the Order of the Native Sons of the Golden West:

“It is evident that, unless an end is put to the influx of Mexicans, this country will have merely substituted a low-grade Westerner for a European immigrant, with a new race problem thrown in. … The effect of this Mexican influx on the already over-burdened taxpayer should be considered. Los Angeles County … is the dumping ground for poverty-stricken Mexicans.”

During a Congressional hearing on the “Mexican Problem,” Rep John C. Box of Texas said:

“Unless the tubercular and venereal Mexican is cared for through the public health department he is likely to become a public health problem of sufficient size to affect the general public health.”

The bills filed in the current Texas legislature are filled with the same [tag]xenophobic[/tag] [tag]racism[/tag] that was written in the early 20th century. If the bills pass, like the Minutemen, [tag]Texas[/tag] will be in the business of [tag]mainstreaming hate[/tag].

Since the 1920s, capitalist politicians have attempted to manipulate the immigration pool, in particular from Mexico, in order to meet the imperialist system’s economic and political needs. They use the tactic of deportation to terrorize the Latino community and strip it of political and labor rights, and whip up racism to stigmatize Latinos as an “illegal” people.

Think it is made up? Think the US will only deport the “illegals”? Think again vato! It is time to wake up learn your history, ignorance is not a bliss. Use the Internet while it is still accessible to you and me to do your historical research. Still don’t believe it, then explain why in 2005, the state of California passed the Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program, which officially recognized the “unconstitutional removal and coerced emigration of United States citizens and legal residents of Mexican descent” and apologized to residents of California “for the fundamental violations of their basic civil liberties and constitutional rights committed during the period of illegal deportation and coerced emigration”.

What will it take for Texans and the rest of the country to realize that our government is defaulting on its promissory note to us. When will we realize we have been given a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds. Now is the time to make real on the promises of democracy! Now is the time to make justice a reality!

The sins of our past, is repeating itself and people are still wondering around in a haze. IT IS TIME TO WAKE UP!!!

Within the Hispanic community, there are some who don’t feel they really need to be involve because they are viewed as “others” or if we really want to go with the demeaning labels, mojados, wetbacks.

Spring resident Martinez, 39 [and born in the U.S.], said that “when people think of Mexicans, they don’t think of people like me.” They think of the immigrant and the laborer, not someone who went to college and listens to pop radio.

Here in the US, Hispanics is not considered as a race, but an ethnicity. From the biological point of view, races simply do not exist. From the cultural and political point of view, however, the concept of “race” is extremely important. Mexican national identity has been constructed in terms of the idea that Mexicans are the product of a creative mixing of Indians and Europeans. In Miriam Jimenez Roman’s article entitled “Africa’s Legacy in Mexico: What is a Mexican?,” Roman writes:

in the interest of a national identity based on a mixture of indigenous and European cultural mestizaje. In practice, this ideology of “racial democracy” favors the European presence; too often the nation’s glorious indigenous past is reduced to folklore and ceremonial showcasing.

Mexican Americans were considered an ethnicity minority only after the end of the U.S.-Mexico War of 1848 and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when Mexico ceded the territory that today is California, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Utah, and Arizona, and also approved the prior annexation of Texas.

The treaty promised US citizenship to former Mexican citizens and all Native Americans -who were Mexican citizens – in the ceded territories.

Since 1848 Native Americans and Mexican Americans have struggled to achieve political and social equality within the United States, often citing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as a document that promised civil and property rights. Although the treaty promised U.S. citizenship to former Mexican citizens, the Native Americans in the ceded territories, who in fact were Mexican citizens, were not given full U.S. citizenship until the 1930s. Former Mexican citizens were almost universally considered foreigners by the U.S. settlers who moved into the new territories. In the first half century after ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, hundreds of state, territorial, and federal legal bodies produced a complex tapestry of conflicting opinions and decisions bearing on the meaning of the treaty. The property rights seemingly guaranteed in Articles VIII and IX of the treaty (and in the Protocol of Queretaro) were not all they seemed. In U.S. courts, the property rights of former Mexican citizens in California, New Mexico, and Texas proved to be fragile. Within a generation the Mexican-Americans became a disenfranchised, poverty-stricken minority.

It must be noted, these events took place before the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Shedding Indigenous Roots For “Whiteness”
Anglo-Americans never considered Mexicans their racial equals and, moreover, regarded them as mixed peoples. In 1897, a federal district court upheld the right of Mexicans to naturalize under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Ricardo Rodriguez, a native of Mexico who had lived in Texas for ten years, petitioned to become a naturalized U.S. citizen. Government attorneys argued against his eligibility on the grounds that Rodriguez was “not a white person, not an African, nor of African descent.” U.S. District Judge Thomas Maxey wrote:

“as to color, [Rodriguez] may be classed with the copper-colored or red men. He has dark eyes, straight black hair, and high cheek bones.”

Knowing that Mexicans were considered mestizos, the judge had a hard time making his ruling, however, Judge Maxey concluded that because Rodriguez knew “nothing of the Aztecs or Toltecs, [h]e is not an Indian” and therefore Rodriguez was given citizenship. Since then, many communities like their counterpart in Mexico have been trying to “deinidianised” after the Revolution of 1910 by ceasing to identify themselves as Indians. However, in the US, Mexicans were still considered a race as Mae Ngai notes:

by the late 1920s, a Mexican “race problem” had emerged in the Southwest, impelled by contradictions wrought by the burgeoning of commercial agriculture, an all-time high in Mexican immigration, and the formation of a migratory, landless agricultural proletariat and of segregated communities.

Even the 1930 Census Bureau, Mexicans were considered as a separate race, as persons born in Mexico or with parents born in Mexico and who were “not definitely white, Negro, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese.” It was not until the 1940, with the help of Mexico and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the US finally gave in and reclassified persons of Mexican descent as “white.”

In 1929, during the height of a nativist movement, business leaders created the LULAC. It was during this time, the US was at the height of the nativist movement.

When the United States of North America annexed a third of Mexico’s territory following the Mexican War, nearly 77,000 Mexicans became U.S. citizens. For generations, these citizens were to be plagued by a prejudicial attitude which would result in overt acts of discrimination and segregation which in turn brought about the curtailment of many of their civil rights, privileges, and opportunities. The sign, “No Mexicans Allowed” was to be found everywhere.

Prejudicial attitude and discrimination acts in Texas had reached such extreme proportions that Mexican Americans started organizations as defensive measures against such un-American practices. Outstanding among these were three organizations: The Order of the Sons of America with councils in Sommerset, Pearsall, Corpus Christi, and San Antonio. The second was The Knights of America in San Antonio. And the third was The League of Latin American Citizens with councils in Harlingen, Brownsville, Laredo, Penitas, La Grulla, McAllen, and Gulf.

It was during this height in America’s darkest period, discrimination against Mexican Americans ran wild. According to LULAC:

Discrimination against Mexican Americans was awful. One of the best kept secret in American history is that in those years there were more Mexican Americans hung then the total number of blacks that had been hung during the civil war.

It was during this time, Mexican Americans were caught between being a “noble savage” and less than a second class, Hispanics had no other reason but to denounce their heritage just to survive.

In those days, Mexican Americans had to be real careful anytime they gathered. If they gathered in large numbers, they would cause suspicions and faced charges of communism. Yes, there were many that felt insulted and considered LULAC members as a bunch of “vendidos.” They could not understand why LULAC members would go out of their way to embrace an anglo society that had been so cruel to Mexican Americans. However, the founders of LULAC had seen many Mexican American organizations flourish and disappear within a couple of years, and without accomplishments. LULAC founders were determined not to let this occur to LULAC. Therefore, the founders of LULAC, in order to avoid suspicions of un-American activities and a safe haven for its members, forewent many of their convictions. Many of the official rites which LULAC adopted had never be adopted by any other Mexican American organization. Adopted was the American Flag as the official flag, America the Beautiful as the official song, and The George Washington Prayer as the official prayer. Also, adopted were Robert Rules of Order as the governing rules during meetings and conventions.

So why do some Mexican Americans look down on foreign born Hispanic? It’s no secret that many older Mexican Americans resent being lumped together in the “minority” status with immigrants who, they believe, have not suffered the degree of discrimination and exclusion they have. Perhaps some Mexican Americans remember the days when Mexican Americans insisted on their status as whites in the days before affirmative action. Or perhaps some Mexican Americans still have the old caste system ingrained for centuries where the more indigenous you are, the more backward and traditional they are seen. As more young Hispanics are beginning to accept their indigenous roots and as Mexico, Central and South American indigenous groups are excreting their rights, we have to wonder if Hispanics Americans and foreign born Hispanics can find common ground.

It always seems like whenever something goes wrong in the United States, immigrants are the first to be condemned or suspected. Basta!

Beginning last year, the wing-nut experiment in extralegal policing by the [tag]xenophobic[/tag] dumbfuck version of the Nazi stormtroopers – Minutemen – began “patrolling” the borders from lazy, shiftless, drug smuggling South-of-the-Border varmints. If that is not bad enough, they are now found “other ways” to take care of the [tag]immigration[/tag] problems; they have decided to chasing day laborers at pickup sites.

The muscle for outright [tag]oppression[/tag] of anyone who hasn’t savored the wingnut kool-aid is already being rehearsed in the form of racist paramilitary groups like the [tag]Minutemen[/tag]. To show that the US is “getting tough,” last December, the anti-[tag]reconquista[/tag] brigades in the House passed their draconian legislation, [tag]H.R. 4437[/tag]. If passed by the Senate, the new law will now make felons of all undocumented immigrants as well as persons who assist them. Pat Buchanan’s wet dream come true.

Worst yet, these fascist assholes, wrap themselves around the American flag, crying foul if anyone dares to call the racists. Congressman [tag]Tom Tancredo[/tag] (R-Colorado), the [tag]Lou Dobbs [/tag]of the House, wrote one of his fascist op-ed propaganda pieces in the L.A. Times:

People who say it’s racist to want secure borders are insulting the intelligence of the American people, and such charges betray an empty arsenal of serious arguments.

Tancredo and his rag-tag trigger happy white, jack-booted, skinhead army continues to beat the drum that securing the borders isn’t racist. But it is wingnuts lunitics like Tancredo that treat assholes running around with weapons as real patriots. Is it a coincidence that racist-affiliated right wing groups like the Minutemen are being mainstreamed at the same time that time that other members of the racist-affiliated right wing are trying to restore the reputation of Joe McCarthy? Some pundits have argued that internment camps were and are a good idea while pieces of race-baiting, academic jihadist shit like David Horowitz have constructed an entire bogus database, DiscoverTheNetwork.org, connecting anyone left to terrorism. That is just the tip of the “race-baiting iceberg,” there are subtle messages being spread widely and effectively distributed by think tanks, academics, radio pundits and right-wing politicians, who have created an industry that interprets whiteness in an unprecedented context – in which many whites feel uncomfortably surrounded by “minorities.” Take the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR), on their website one can find propaganda bullshit trying to knowledge fear with their faux public-policy observations, such as their xenophobic view on Los Angeles Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa – Meet the Mechista Weasel who Wants to Be L.A’s Next Mayorista. On AmericanPatrol.com, the group urged people to “help keep this Mexican nationalist out of the L.A. Mayor’s office,” in last year’s mayoral race. As I stated before, the anti-illegal-immigration movement is sweeping the country like wildfire. Some of the more asinine comments about groups like the Minutemen have been compared as a Neighborhood Watch program.

Over twenty years ago, a researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston coined the expression the “Hispanic paradox” the tendency for Hispanic people to have lower than average rates of some chronic illnesses despite the fact that many of them live in relatively poor social or economic conditions. At the core of the anti-immigration debate resides an apparent paradox. As Merriam-Webster defines it a paradox is an idea, thought, or accepted notion that may be contrary to the truth.

The “[tag]Hispanic[/tag] Paradox” is that the country’s political culture cannot function without scapegoating migrant laborers either. America’s fear of immigrants is not new. In the 1920s, Congress passed Immigration Act of 1924, which placed immigration quotas that barred Asians, Italians, Greeks, and Jews. These quota laws, passed after lobbying by the Ku Klux Klan, Immigration Restriction League and others, codified the [tag]eugenics[/tag] theories of [tag]Madison Grant[/tag], whose work focused on the supposedly inferior skull sizes of Jews and other immigrants.

To begin with, immigrants have contributed to the United States experience of its last economic boom and this country can continue to recover from its current crisis thanks in part to their contributions as well. There is a tendency to argue that immigrants take from this country much more than they give. This is myth created by many neo-cons to create anti-immigrants sentiments. Here are some facts about the jobs we are stealing:

• 162,000 work in nation’s miscellaneous agricultural industry;
• 161,000 are maids and housekeepers;
• 132,000 are grounds keepers;
• 174,000 are construction workers;
• 114,000 are production workers;
• 194,000 of the nation’s cooks, and
• 153,000 of the nation’s janitors.

It is easy to marginalize and demonize them economically and socially. The most comprehensive study on this subject has been done by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS clearly establishes that legal and illegal immigrants combined contribute more than 10 billion dollars to the U.S. economy annually. They also found that immigrants are necessary to avoid inflation and to keep prices low. Without immigrants, a tomato might cost $5; a hamburger $20; a filet mignon $50; and Americans would have to pay two or three times more to rent or buy a house. The NAS also have suggested the United States needs more immigrants – who of course pay taxes and create jobs – to support the rapidly aging baby-boomers.

War does not always take the form of tanks and bombs. They self-righteously bombarding the airwaves of some faux “invasion” of the United States by undocumented workers, sending fear to the suburbs by evoking images of drug use, crime, and forked-tongues. Americans are “smothered” by their own media. So, how much you want to bet that the suburban wingnut would have a problem with out of state scumbags descending on their neighborhoods fully armed?

Mi gente, this is their war on all of us, and it is a class war that seeks to divide this nation into two classes: Rich and poor. And if you are poor you will also have no rights. Ask yourself this, do you really think things will get better? If you are one of the many just trying to get by, I am sorry my friend you are like many of us Xicanos. You can kick out all the [tag]Latinos[/tag] but you will never belong in their demographic. Make no mistake about it, those now in power do not care about you! How much more suffering will we have to endure at the hands of these dirty greedy bastards who have no morals, conscience, or values other than benefiting themselves?

They talk about crime and taking jobs away. It is not the immigrants who are outsourcing American jobs, its the Wal-Mart Republicans. The Republicans continue to succeed in propagandizing to the American public into believing that they and they alone can keep America secure, there’s no reason why the “War on Terror” should ever have to end. In fact, by giving the right-wing a monopoly on “keeping America safe” it would make sense for them, in terms of maintaining power, to allow just enough terrorist attacks against the American civilian population, or at least the perception of its imminence, to keep up a level of hysteria without also making themselves seem incompetent.

While all this happy horseshit is being flung against the wall, almost completely ignored are the atrocities occurring in Iraq.

America is beginning to default on its promissory note insofar as democracy is concerned. We have been given a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds. Now is the time to make real on the promises of democracy! Now is the time to make justice a reality!