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January 6, 2009
Former Anti-Immigrant Activist Confesses
Citizen Orange has an excellent interview -- denominated a "confession" -- with an anti-immigrant activist. The post includes video clips. Check it out!
KJ
January 6, 2009 | Permalink
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The "confession" in the interview was about racism in the anti-immigrant movement. Did you watch the video? are you, as your post suggests, confessing to being a racist? What is the point of your posts besides to attack and be insulting?
Posted by: immigrationprof | Jan 6, 2009 5:29:24 PM
There is a large anti-illegal immigrant movement and a much smaller anti-immigrant movement. Professor Johnson's attempt to conflate the two and to tag both groups as "racist" is a fascist rhetorical device. First, prohibit use of the term "illegal immigrant" and replace it with the term "immigrant" so that anyone who is against illegal immigration is "anti-immigrant." Second, tar all those who are "anti-immigrant" as "racist," even though some of those individuals are anti-ILLEGAL immigration and even though some of the true "anti-immigrants" are not racists, but simply want further restrictions on legal immigration to the United States. For example, under current immigration law a permanent resident parent can (slowly) immigrate his or her unmarried daughter even though the daughter is living with the father of her three United States citizen children (all of whose births were paid for by U.S. taxpayers). This is bad public policy on several levels. I am against this type of legal immigration. Does that make me a racist? The racist label is intellectually dishonest when used (as in this instance) as a means to stifle debate. Frankly, I expected more from the Dean of relatively prominent law school.
Posted by: Thomas Wheeler | Jan 7, 2009 12:12:38 AM
UC Davis is not a relatively prominent law school.
Posted by: Stephanie Greer | Jan 8, 2009 8:51:39 AM
The Thomas Wheeler comment hits the mark. Professor Johnson dishonestly uses the "anti-immigrant" label when he knows (or should know--he is the Dean of a law school for Christ's sake!) that the ire of so-called "anti-immigrant" groups is directed toward unchecked illegal immigration. Paraphrasing the trial judge in "My Cousin Vinny," is UC Davis an accredited law school?
Posted by: David Smith | Jan 8, 2009 8:51:40 AM
Thomas Wheeler reminds me of a character from the old Monty Python days. There was a skit in which John Cleese plays a man who works for a firm that provides arguments for a fee. A customer comes in and pays for an argument, and John Cleese simply takes up a contrary position to everything the customer says......Cleese:"I can't argue unless you pay"......"Customer: "I just paid!"...... Cleese: "No you didn't".....Customer:"Yes I did!".....Cleese:"No you didn't".....etc., etc..
I am confident that when I turn on my computer every morning, I can go to this site and be entertained by Wheeler simply naysaying everything and anything that is posted on this blog. What his comments lack in thoughtfulness and intellectual acuity, they make up for in consistency and meanspiritedness.
As to his above posting, (and to his credit, this is one of his more thoughtful responses), I would point out a few facts that he doesn't seem to grasp. I do not believe that Prof. Johnson is arguing that all people with anti-immigrant or anti-illegal immigrant positions are racist, but that all or most racists are anti immigrant, legal or otherwise. However, if one extrapolates the positions of anti-legal or illegal immigrants to their logical conclusions, the net effects of those positions will have consequences that are inherently racist, or at least biased and discriminatory toward the immigrant community as a whole.
Now, if Wheeler, as he states above, has problems with specific aspects of our current immigration laws, then welcome to the club. The whole point of re-working our current immigration laws, (CIR), is to improve them. Nobody that I know of with any intellectual honesty is advocating that the laws be shifted entirely in only one direction, right or left. Should Wheeler avail himself of the opportunity to read one of the CIR bills, such as the STRIVE Act, he would realize that he would have to read very far into the bill to find anything in it that shifts anything to the left.
Wheeler perhaps "dost protest too much," when he insists that he is not a racist, and since I don't know him personally, I'll try against all odds and evidence to the contrary to keep an open mind about that. He also insists that it is intellectually dishonest to stifle debate on this issue, and I can certainly agree with him about that.
I think that nobody would presume that Wheeler lacks passion on this issue, and that can be a positive force for change. I am hopeful that he will, should he continue to contribute to the debate on this issue, try to craft his arguments constructively, as he does to some extent in the above posting, and limit his "auto responses" that invariably tend to be negative and not at all in the spirit of honest debate.
I would also suggest that he limit his attacks on the integrity of the professors that run this blog, and instead concentrate on attacking them on the intellectual areas of his disagreement with them. They have been gracious enough to him by allowing him to post derogatory rants against literally everything that they post. Perhaps he would attract more bees with honey than with vinegar, but even if that is not his style, he can attract more thoughtful responses to his own thoughts and positions by limiting his vitriol, and sticking to the talking points.
Posted by: Robert Gittelson | Jan 8, 2009 8:58:29 AM
Some people could have a similar 'confession':
When you get wrapped up in it [the anti-immigration law movement] and you recognize that the statistics say that eighty percent of illegal immigrants are from...are Latino or Hispanic what ends up happening, and it's not always conscious - what ends up happening, in your head, most illegal immigrants are Hispanics, therefore we like illegal immigrants.
//////
It's not exactly news that there is out-group bias in the 'illegal-immigration movement' and in-group bias in the 'immigrant rights movement'. Whether they really believe it or it's primarily to discredit the other side, 'pro' people like to say it's almost all ethnic/racial. But there is also nationality bias on both sides. And there is authentic rule of law sentiment. Xenophobia is often brought up but I have also seen xenophilia on immigration blogs. It's sometimes accompanied by a view that anyone/anything American is generally inferior. Bias is easy to detect in both those who think immigration can be a cure for practically everything and those who think it's related to everything bad. We need more neutral voices, those who dispassionately view it as mainly just a number, an increase in population. Somehow that most fundamental angle gets lost and the debate is rarely expressed in terms of pro-net immigration people are essentially saying we need a higher population in the U.S. Maybe because that's a hard case to make we get more extraneous arguments and demagoguery. The lower immigration arguments also focus too much on the extraneous. They really don't need to emphasize inherently touchy subjects like culture and national identity, especially when that opens them up to demagogic counterattack and distracts from the basic policy goal. But those who get hot enough to speak out tend to care most about the hot button issues so they can't resist. They didn't need to make illegal presence a crime and it galvanized the opposition. But they couldn't resist.
Posted by: Jack | Jan 10, 2009 9:18:43 AM
SO HOW LONG until the AILA-MALDEF-Laraza-Sherry-Jacoby crowd comes out with a video confessing that they are all anarchists who want to see the U.S. destroyed?
Posted by: Jimmy | Jan 11, 2009 12:22:41 PM
"We call things racism just to get attention. We reduce complicated problems to racism, not because it is racism, but because it works."
--- Alfredo Gutierrez, political consultant, as quoted by Richard de Uriarte, The Phoenix Gazette, March 14, 1992 (quoted in The ProEnglish Advocate, 1st quarter, 2002).
http://www.thedustininmansociety.org/info/tru...
Posted by: Nancyf | Jan 12, 2009 7:23:22 AM
