Lynchin' Meat
by digby
Well, it looks like it's going to be a disgusting race to the bottom on immigration. According to this Democracy Corps poll (pdf), a majority of Americans, not just Republicans, quite intensely loathe all immigrants now and want to deport all the illegals because they are stealing all of our hard earned health care and other services. Greenberg and friends have determined that Democrats must be encouraged to run as hard as they feel they need to against the illegal hordes, pushing "enforcement only" rhetoric and generally pimping racist, xenophobic attitudes with everything we've got or they will lose the election. They call this letting the people know they "get it."
They make a few feints toward some sort of flaccid "path to citizenship" and maybe these "people" should be allowed some brief emergency treatment in a hospital if they're bleeding all over the sidewalk, but they don't advise Dems to make too much of it because so many people believe that the Mexican invasion is at the heart of all their problems and it will just confuse them. (But lest you think they aren't going to hit Republicans too they very explicitly say that the Democrats should excoriate Bush for letting all those awful Mexicans in here in the first place, so that's good.)
Get ready, my friends. This is going to be an ugly, despicable racist campaign the likes of which we haven't seen in many, many moons. It shouldn't surprise us. The Republicans are cornered and don't have anything to fall back on except tickling the bigot id, so they've successfully used their wingnut tom-toms to pump this issue into full fledged paranoid, nativist hysteria.
The Democrats are advised by people whose imaginations stalled back in 1980 when they woke up one morning and discovered that a lot of angry white guys wouldn't vote for a party that allowed black people in it. The highly successful Democratic politics they've run over the past 25 years have been devoted to getting them back. (And it's worked out very well, you must admit. Why fix what ain't broke, eh?)
And, of course, the political candidates themselves have signed on to the "don't make trouble" strategy so they'll be happy to ape even the most heinous GOP talking points if it will keep them from having to take even the slightest risk. (That's what the Democratic consultants term "winning a mandate.")
The fact that all these enforcement-only measures (which our politicians are advised to flog with the zeal of converts) will alienate and suppress the Latino vote in certain contests that are likely to be close is apparently not even a practical consideration. Neither is the idea that we might try to educate people to the truth that immigrants, legal and otherwise, actually contribute far more than they take out of our system. Far be it for leaders to try to educate and set the record straight. Certainly they should never be expected to set an example or stand by their principles or even be decent human beings when they can just ride the demagogic themes being pimped by right wing talk radio gasbags --- and win!
Seriously, imagine what this thing is going to sound like after six months of the two parties trying to one-up each other on who's "tougher" on immigration. I'm literally getting queasy about this.
Update: David Neiwert has been documenting some of the "enforcement" that's already taking place around the country. Here's just one. More at the link.
On Tuesday, July 26, between 30 and 35 children, some as young as three months old, were left stranded when federal agents arrested 119 immigrant workers at the Petit Jean Poultry plant in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. No provisions were made for these children as their parents were carted 70 miles away to a detention center to await deportation.
Many of these families, now forcibly torn apart, had lived and worked at the company for years. Of those detained, 115 were from Mexico, two were from Honduras and the other two were from El Salvador and Guatemala.
This surprise raid caught the town’s mayor, the Clark County sheriff, and the plant manager by surprise, and no provisions were made to care for the children or to alert relatives. The federal agents failed to even contact the Department of Human Services, the agency that is usually responsible for abandoned children.
“A lot of those families had kids in day care in different places, and they didn’t know why Mommy and Daddy didn’t come pick them up,” Arkadelphia Mayor Charles Hollingshead told the Associated Press.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman claimed Friday that every one of the immigrants had lied to the agents, telling them they had no children. He later changed his story, admitting that the detainees did tell the agents that they had children left behind. Still, the agents did not allow the detainees to contact their families to make arrangements for their children.
Jose Luis Vidal told the Associated Press that his sister and brother-in-law left behind children aged ten, five and one when they were deported to Laredo, Mexico
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I suppose a country that celebrates torture and indefinite imprisonment for suspected enemies should also be expected to go this route. Why wouldn't it?
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