By Juan Santos -Associate Writer

The Hidden Terror of HR4437: No Compromise in the Movement for Migrants Rights

Immigration: A Nation of Colonists – and Race Laws

The Ghost of George Wallace: Immigration and White Racism

We won't need a yellow star.
 

The Hidden Terror of HR4437: No Compromise in the Movement for Migrants Rights

What We Must Learn Now from the Black Civil Rights Movement

"I'm not an American. I'm one of the twenty-two million Black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million Black people who are the victims of democracy--nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So I'm not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver--no, not I. I'm speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare." -- MALCOLM X

They’re lying to us. They want us to keep playing their way. To keep waving American flags. To keep trusting them to do the right thing.

We dare not. Millions of people’s lives are at stake.

Racist lawmakers on the Republican ultra-Right now assure us – after they were deeply stung by the protests of millions, and after we won the hearts of 62% of the US population – that they want to drop the provisions in new immigration laws that would make migrants felons.

?Y que?

Some three to six million people would still be arrested and deported.

The Republicans and Democrats alike have decided the arrests would be for misdemeanors – not felonies.

That’s so they don’t clog their courts, a point that was made with crystalline clarity on the House floor when HR4437 first passed in December. It has nothing to do with “compassion” or authentic “inclusion.” They want us to imagine that not being labeled “felons” will make us safe.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Here’s why.

Every immigration proposal still on the table authorizes local police to enforce federal immigration law, just like agents of La Migra, the Border Patrol. The National Immigration Law Center makes it plain:

"State and local police with no immigration law training could claim new authority as enforcers of criminal law to decide when someone who 'looks foreign' or 'sounds foreign' has violated federal criminal immigration law."

Everyone with brown skin would become a stigmatized “suspect.” The only difference is we would be suspects in a misdemeanor – not a felony.

But the penalty for the “crime” would remain the same - for those without papers it means deportation. FOX News tells us that under the Hagel - Martinez “Compromise” that was backed by the Democrats and by organizations like the National Council of La Raza:

"Illegals (sic) in the United States less than two years would be required to leave immediately. If caught once, they would be subject to a misdemeanor, and if caught twice they would be charged with a felony. About 2 million to 3 million people fall into this category."

Under such “compromises” millions of migrants will be deported, their families split apart and uprooted. The “compromise” approach endangers not only migrants, but all Brown people. It will open the door to a new ethnic cleansing, one surpassing the ethnic cleansings of Mexicans the US government carried out during the Great Depression, when 350,000 Mexicans and Chicanos were deported, and during Operation Wetback, when 1,300,000 of us were deported in the mid-1950s.

Imagine – at a minimum - that everyone who’s marched for migrants rights in recent weeks were deported. That will give you a picture of the magnitude of pain and chaos the rulers want to inflict.

Not that life post-“compromise” would necessarily give the impression that mass roundups were underway. More likely, it would all happen quietly, millions arrested, one by one: out of sight.

Call it a slow death, the kind suffered today by impoverished African Americans in the wake of the first Civil Rights Movement. It is imperative that our new movement not suffer the same fate.

This is how it worked then, and what they’re aiming for now.

When outrages like open Jim Crow segregation could no longer be counted on to keep African Americans “in their place” in the context of the world-wide anti-colonial rebellions of the 50s and 60s, the powers that be tried to buy off a sector of Black people in the US by giving them new opportunities; a substantial Black middle class arose almost overnight.

This is the equivalent of the “carrot” of “legalization” and “citizenship” in our context today.

For the rest of the Black nation, stranded in the ghettos, Jim Crow was followed by an even harsher master – mass incarceration. One by one young African Americans have vanished, locked into prison, until the ones added up to millions, each rendered silent - until the silence of the terror and rage in the ghettos of America has grown so loud it has turned the nation deaf.

A similar fate would await the millions, who, under a “compromise,” would face nothing less than mass deportation, mass, legal persecution.

Same trick: different decade.

A sister disappears; a father, a mother...

Here’s the rough numbers.

If every one of the 650,000 cops in the US were authorized to arrest only one migrant once every 3 months, within two years 3 million of the migrants left without papers would be gone. In four years half the migrant population of the US would be gone. No mass roundups, no mobilization of the SS or the National Guard. Just quietly, one by one, until the ones add up to millions, and until the millions add up to silence.

And in that silence, the terror and rage that has engulfed the ghetto would engulf the barrio as well. Then, in a replay of the African American experience following the Civil Rights Movement, our middle class “leaders” will wonder aloud where the “victory” went, never admitting that their “compromise” was not our victory, but our defeat. Never admitting they had helped to seal the fate of millions, and helped advance the surge toward a fascist state in the US.

Don’t imagine that the powers that be don’t understand what they are doing. Even the Minutemen understand it, as evidenced from this all-in–caps-communication from one of their number…

TAKE AWAY WHAT THE ENEMY HAS IT'S (SIC) EYES ON

...AND MAKE HIM CHOOSE FROM THE ALTENATIVES (SIC) WE DECIDE TO OFFER...CONTROL THE OPTIONS

…2.) USE THE RULE OF LAW TO "FEIGN RETREAT"...IN OTHER WORDS...PRETEND TO SACRIFICE THE FELONY ISSUE, BUT STILL MAKE IT SO!

WHAT DO I MEAN?

THE BOTTOM LINE IS: WE WANT THESE PEOPLE....WHO ARE STOPPED BY POLICE TO BE DEPORTED RIGHT?

WELL....THE RULE LAW (SIC), RIGHT NOW, IS THIS: ANY ILLEGALS CAUGHT ON THE BORDER IS (SIC)....DETAINED AND DEPORTED!

WHY SHOULD IT BE ANY DIFFERENT?

MAKING A FELONY (SIC) REQUIRES TOO MUCH "COURT TIME" WITH LAWYERS INVOLVED...RED TAPE...

DON'T YOU SEE? IT IS A TRAP THAT THE ENEMY HAS GRABBED!

KEEPING IT A CIVIL OFFENSE, MISDERMEANOR (SIC)...AND SIMPLY APPLYING THE RULE OF LAW AT THE BORDER TO REFLECT INTERIOR ENFORCEMENT WITH LOCAL POLICE IS MUCH MORE WHAT WE WANT!

ALL WE NEED TO DO, AS I HAVE SAYING (SIC) IS...REFORM ENFORCEMENT!

…TIGHTENING THE NOOSE, SCORCHING THE EARTH...WILL FORCE THE ENEMY TO LEAVE, VOLUNTARILY!

15 MILLION ILLEGALS, DEPORTED COMES OUT TO BE LIKE 8 THOUSAND ILLEGALS EVERY DAY NONSTOP FOR 5 YEARS!

THE NAZIS, WHO DID NOT NEED DUE PROCESS...TOOK ALMOST 10 YEARS TO ROUND UP LESS THAN THAT...PRIOR TO THE FINAL SOLUTION...

However poorly articulated, this Minuteman understands the situation clearly. The powers that be are parading an illusion of “due process” before us, and trying to appear as something less than punitive, while they set the stage for a radical ethnic cleansing, American style.

To achieve this, they are using the time tested method of divide and conquer, the same tricks they used to derail the first civil rights movement, and to destroy the lives of millions of African Americans, while keeping their system safe from any rebellion from below by establishing a Black buffer caste who, they hoped, would come to have an investment in being real “Americans.”

That’s the same bait they hope today’s movement will take. But we must understand that what’s gotten us this far is our will to resist. It is our will to resist that spoke most plainly to our would-be persecutors, not flags, not even our dreams. The government that trained and financed the death squads of Guatemala, El Salvador, and, yes, Mexico, cares nothing for our dreams.

We must stand united - un pueblo unido – holding close the bravery and audacity that has caused our movement to sweep the nation and the world into wakefulness.

The answer to this dilemma – to the trap they have laid for us - is clear and simple.

No compromise.

No trading the life of one for the life of another.

And as of May 1st, the day of the general strike…

No more American flags.

Immigration: A Nation of Colonists – and Race LawsBy Juan Santos

You hear it everywhere. Even from Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, author of the vicious anti-migrant legislation that has polarized the US.

“We are a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws,” he says.

And like almost everyone else, he’s got it wrong.

The original Europeans in what is now the US were not immigrants, but colonists. And the US is not a nation of immigrants - it is a white colonial settler state, like South Africa under Apartheid, the former Rhodesia, Australia and Israel.

And like those states the US has always operated on a sometimes hidden, sometimes overt system of Apartheid. Like those places, the US is a nation of colonists – and race laws.

It is a place where white colonists arrived, seized the land, and dispossessed, exterminated or attempted to exclude the original “non-white” peoples – all of them.

They did so at the point of a gun - by open terror and genocide, which was the precursor and the necessary pre-condition of European “immigration.” And, of course, they didn’t only use guns and overt terror. Where “necessary,” they operated by “law.”

Let me prove the point.

It’s simple. We all know the facts.

In the US, Native Americans were dispossessed, subjected to mass murder, and locked on separate, Apartheid-style “reservations.” So it stands today.

Africans were enslaved, and once “freed,” they were subjected first to Jim Crow, then, when that proved no longer advisable, Jim Crow was transformed into the mass terror of mass incarceration and permanent Apartheid-style ghetto-ization. So it stands today.

The Indian nation of Mexico was conquered in a racist war of aggression by the US in 1848. The only debate in the days of “Manifest Destiny” was not whether to seize Mexican / Indian land, only how much of it to seize, and what to do to keep the Mexicans out of what had been stolen.

Two choices were before them. These were the terms of the debate: take the whole nation and lock the people on reservations, or take as much land – with as few Mexicans – as possible. Thus the border was established through a race war, through brute and overtly racist violence. The border is an Apartheid Wall. So it stands today.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States.

The Act claimed that “the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory” of the US – the same racist rhetoric used today against other Brown people. Like HR4377, the current notorious immigration bill, the Chinese Exclusion Act made it illegal for “any Chinese laborer to come, or… to remain within the United States.” So it stands today. Only the immediate target of the law has changed.Every group the US has sought to eliminate or exclude has been a people of color.

The logic is simple.

Allow entry or citizenship for those who can be “assimilated” into the colonists’ culture – those who can become loyal colonists themselves – and exclude the “Other” - those who are the targets of colonialism – those whose land, cultures, bodies and souls must be sacrificed for the colonists to remain dominant and for their system to function.

Immigration law has always been race law in the US.

As far back as 1790 the Federal government ruled that the right to become a naturalized citizen was reserved to "free white persons."

So it remained until 1952. Until then the Supreme Court repeatedly determined exactly which migrants might be considered “free” and “white,” as applicants of various ethnic backgrounds sought to become citizens.

Today, “The Nation of Immigrants” theme is struck to avoid the historical and cultural truth. Europeans – who could be assimilated to colonial culture – were allowed entrance en masse.

But there was a “stark division,” as Haney Lopez reminds us, based on skin color.

“This stark division necessarily also carried important connotations regarding, for example, agency, moral authority, intelligence, and belonging,” he writes. “To be unfit for naturalization--that is, to be non-White--implied a certain degeneracy of intellect, morals, self-restraint, and political values; to be suited for citizenship--to be White--suggested moral maturity, self assurance, personal independence, and political sophistication.”

In other words, those “unfit” for citizenship were the colonized. The description Lopez offers for the “unfit” matches precisely the characteristics ascribed to colonized peoples by European imperialists and settlers for hundreds of years.

It also matches the racist stereotypes offered today of immigrants from areas south of the US border with Mexico, who Congressman Sensenbrenner has referred to as degenerate “alien gang members terrorizing communities.”

But the racial subtext around immigration is not a subtext. It is the text itself.

Before Europe could “immigrate,” someone else had to be removed. Before there was land to settle it must be stolen. Before anyone could be “free and white” someone else had to be “non-white” – and enslaved. Before “Americans” could become “Americans,” “Latin Americans” – who are overwhelmingly Original Americans – had to become something else – “Latinos,” “Hispanic,” the not-Native – the Alien.
 

The Illegal Alien.

In a stunning bit of triple think the Natives, who knew no borders, became “Aliens,” while Europeans became “Americans,” and “Americans” became “Natives,” while the Original Americans became “foreign” infiltrators and lawbreakers bent on who-knows-what brand of “terrorism” against “innocent” colonists, or if you prefer, “Americans.”

Or “Settlers.”

Or is it “Afrikaners.”

Take your pick.

The Six Nations Confederation - the Iroquois, or Hau De No Sau Nee - wrote in their classic Basic Call to Consciousness that colonialism means “to be controlled from afar,” that “colonialism is the process by which we are systematically confused,” and that confusion is “an agent of control.”

Like this. “We are a nation of immigrants, and laws.”

But sometimes someone slips, forgets the double talk, and makes the agenda clear. They don’t mean for us to overhear, but they can’t help themselves.

In his mercilessly racist article Are We Really a Nation of Immigrants?, Lawrence Auster slips. He writes, “…throughout its history the United States has been a member of Western civilization—in religion overwhelmingly Christian… in race… overwhelmingly white, in language English. Why shouldn’t those little historical facts be at least as important in determining our immigration policy as the pseudo-fact that we’re all ‘descended from immigrants?’” (FrontPagemagazine.com).

Auster, and David Horowitz’ Front Page Magazine, want one thing; they know what it is, and they’re willing to tell you. They want a white nation. They slipped.

The many who write diatribes and hate mail on the theme of “What part of ILLEGAL don’t you UNDERSTAND?!” also slip.

We understand “illegal” perfectly well.

Conquest of territory in wars of aggression is illegal under international law. The US occupation of most Native land and all of the occupied sections of Mexico is illegal. The presence of the conquering people, the usurpation of the land itself is illegal. The colonists themselves are illegal aliens.

But, for the Right, it’s not really about some imaginary adherence to a just, neutral system of “law.”

It’s about race law and white privilege. And race law, codified on paper or not, is deeply codified in white people’s expectations about their place in society, and some of them are getting dangerously edgy about having “their” land – their turf – stepped on by Brown people.

On the web site of the anti-Mexican hate group Save Our State, a correspondent calling themselves “USA Today” writes:

“To be honest we are heading for a Balkinization and a racial cleansing

“I know its not politicly correct to say so but I think lots of folks see it coming and I'll bet the vast majority of Americans would have no problem with genocide as a last resort to save this country , Usually when you back somebody into a corner they will defend themselves by any means ........get it ?

“Does this sound like something you would hear the nazis say? sure it is but I spend lots of time scanning the forums and blogs and its coming from normal , everyday people that are just about fed up with the whole mess.

“I know a large number of Germans didn't agree with hitler but they didn't exactly act against him either.

“Just keep pushing and pretty soon you'll find the American people in a corner.

“On that day, Beware.”

People who think like this are the social, cultural and political base of politicians like Jim Sensenbrenner. They are classic colonists, with the colonizer’s outlook. For them, mere “immigration” is impossible. Their “forefathers” conquered the land, so those coming here must be out to “re-conquer” the land – to take it back from them.

These are the true inheritors of the American Dream, a dream which, for the colonized, has been nothing but a nightmare.

They intend to defend that nightmare – no matter what it takes. That’s what “immigration reform” and “immigration control” are really all about.

Colonialism.

And the race laws that defend it.

RETURN

The Ghost of George Wallace: Immigration and White Racism

When the late Alabama Governor George Wallace - surrounded by armed guards - stood on the steps of the University of Alabama to prevent a young Black woman from entering the University of Alabama, he declared, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” He also inspired a man who would later stand at the US / Mexican border, armed to the teeth, to prevent other brown skinned people from entering someplace he didn’t want to them to enter - the United States.

A year ago Jim Gilchrist brought the mainstream media to a frenzy as they reported on his Minuteman Project, a group of racist vigilantes who’d traveled to the border – guns in hand – to stop the immigrant “invasion” and the “re-conquest,” they said, of the US Southwest by Mexicans.

Later, Gilchrist ran for the US House of Representatives as a member of American Independent Party – the party founded by Wallace, the arch-segregationist.

Like Wallace with the Dixiecrats of his day, Gilchrist has plenty of allies in Congress – chief among them Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, best known for advocating that the US “take out” the Muslim holy city of Mecca with a nuclear weapon. Tancredo is also known as the head of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, where, chillingly, he leads 91 members of Congress.

Tancredo and his crew don’t like migrants - when the Denver Post profiled an undocumented high school student with a 3.9 GPA, the Congressman tried to have the boy deported.

Tancredo’s Caucus is also credited with pushing through Congress the passage of the now-notorious Sensenbrenner immigration bill – the one that, if approved by the Senate, would make all people in the US who lack papers into instant felons, a criminalized, stigmatized and profoundly vulnerable under-caste.

The Congressman is consistent. After taking out Mecca, it would seem, Tancredo holds that undocumented immigrants "need to be found before it is too late. They're coming here to kill you, and you, and me, and my grandchildren."

The Minutemen love Rep. Tancredo, and they do not leave the man to suffer alone in his profound paranoia.

Minutemen co-leader Chris Simcox would have us believe that "…we need the National Guard to clean out all our cities and round them [migrants] up. They are hard-core criminals. They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughters and they are evil people."

The temptation, of course, is to dismiss these people as mere crackpots. The problem with that analysis however, is clear. These people have power.

They’ve dominated and defined the debate on immigration for the past year – at least until this past weekend, when well over a million – even two million people - marched in opposition to their xenophobic and persecutorial dementia.

Southern California activists have seen that racist dementia up close, time and again, as we confronted the Minutemen and their allies in an effort to keep things from ever getting this far.

We saw it in the eyes of breakaway Minuteman leader James Chase in the darkness of the southern desert at midnight, he armed with a shotgun; we with nothing but our bare hearts.

We saw it in the eyes of Minuteman supporter Hal Netkin as he slammed his car into a crowd of mostly Chicano protestors as Jim Gilchrist addressed the California Coalition for Immigration Reform. Gilchrist joined the Coalition, which has been identified as a racist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Painted as American a hero by the likes of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gilchrist has been accused by a former campaign volunteer of integrating Nazi activists into his campaign for Congress.

He lost the special election, despite his endorsement by Sensenbrenner ally Tancredo.

But he put fear into Republican politicians – fear that incumbents would face vote draining, immigrant bashing third party candidates in November if they didn’t take a hard right line against migrants.

They feared Gilchrist sympathizers like the rightist California group Save Our State, which has regularly drawn organized Nazis to their protests, and which uses the exact rhetoric used by open white nationalists and supremacists – such as calling Mexican culture a “cesspool.”

The corporate media, informed time and again of Nazi, white nationalist and militia connections to the anti-migrant movement, has continued to paint the anti-migrants as part of a mainstream.

Gilchrist himself has claimed he has “240 million” supporters, despite the fact that the anti-immigrant movement as a whole could field only 700 activists for its “National Day of Protest” this year. They were outnumbered 10 to 1 wherever they turned across the country.

Even so, Tancredo, Sensenbrenner and the extreme, racist, right wing elements they represent were on the verge of a major legislative victory.

They were so close they could taste it.

Until Sunday.

Until La Gran Marcha in Los Angeles.

Then their dominance cracked.

They were on the verge of a walled off country. On the verge of migrants hunted down, rounded up by La Migra and the police – of brown skinned people disappearing in the streets and penned in concentration camps they call “detention centers.” They were on the verge of passing a cruel law that would make all migrants without papers felons and make all Brown people suspects in a hostile nation. They were on the verge of a new ethnic cleansing of America.

And even though the mass protests of recent days have deeply shaken them, they still might win.

Sensenbrenner says he’s not intimidated.

Gilchrist, of course, is promising his followers “absolute” victory.

He says the things more seasoned power brokers won’t say. Although they’re on the same side, he says the Sensenbrenner bill doesn’t go far enough. He wants a wall from sea to sea. He wants the National Guard at the border.

He called the families who marched together “throngs of illegal alien bullies” and dubbed the mass demonstrations for basic human rights a “classic insurrection.” He pledges to stand, “stoically unmoved” - one might imagine like George Wallace on the steps of the university, facing down a lone young African woman, armed thugs in tow.

The future will be decided in the days to come. As senators debate their take on migrants, they will continue to put their fingers to the wind, to see just how far they can go without profoundly alienating their middle class allies and without provoking rebellion from below. Senate Republican leader Bill Frist plans to let two bills be debated there, including his own draconian take-off on the Sensenbrenner bill, and a softer bill, one still steeped in imperial logic, but that is not overtly fascistic.

As the debate begins this week, at least 20 LA area high schools are planning a massive walkout, on the birthday of Cesar Chavez. A national network of migrant support groups will lay out a strategy for more vast demonstrations like La Gran Marcha.

They must not stand alone. You must stand with them.

If you don’t, the dream of George Wallace’s ghost may yet come true – a racist, even fascist USA. Today, tomorrow and forever.
____________
Juan Santos is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.

RETURN

We won't need a yellow star.

The color of our skin will mark us as suspects, as felons, as threats to "the homeland." Any cop will be free to stop us at any time, under any pretext, to check -- not for dope -- but for our “papers.”

At first it won't seem like much. Quietly, at first, a few of us will begin to disappear, just like some 60 thousand immigrants of Muslim and Arabic descent have disappeared since the onset of the Patriot Act; without a word. Like them, we will become targets of the so-called “war on terror.”

First it will be dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands.

Mothers will disappear walking to the corner store. Fathers will never come home from work. Children will be left behind, sobbing in apartments empty of food, warmth, money and life. The neighbors will be afraid. The tens of thousands could readily become millions.

The picture painted above is nothing but hard headed realism. Legislation now before the US Senate would make every undocumented person in the US a felon and authorize every police department in the country to arrest people on immigration charges.

The size of the Border Patrol would, in effect, increase by 60 times, from the current 11,000 Migra agents to 663,546 enforcers. If each authorized officer in the US arrested one undocumented migrant once every three months, within five years over 11 million migrants would be gone – an ethnic cleansing without parallel in US history.

This is the future they have planned. Certain neighborhoods -- the Gulfton District or the North Side in Houston, Pico Union and Boyle Heights in LA, the San Francisco Mission District -- will be targeted. Almost everyone in them will be considered a "felon," or someone who has aided the "felons." They won't be able to be able to tell us apart. "A Mexican is a Mexican," is what they will say.

In certain neighborhoods concrete barriers will block the streets. Police and La Migra will arrange themselves in hunting parties together. Like clockwork, a police cruiser will turn the corner near your place, once every 60 seconds. No one will breathe. The children will have nightmares.

This isn’t just emotional rhetoric. It’s happened before; in the Gulfton District in Houston in 1990 and ‘95, and in Pico Union in LA in 1990. This is how it’s done. The barrio will be besieged, taken over from within.

They want to build detention camps for us. They are debating it now. They want to label us felons, but deny us a trial. They’re debating it now. They want to build a wall -- they want us to die, tongue swollen and hallucinating, without water in the desert. They are debating it now.

These are the human impacts of planning already underway. New border fences are an integral part of current legislative initiatives.

On Feb. 6, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that the Fiscal Year 2007 federal budget would allocate over $400 million to add 6,700 additional detention beds for migrants, part of a10-year Homeland Security strategic plan, code-named ENDGAME.

According to a Homeland Security document on the plan, ENDGAME aims to carry out goals “articulated in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798." Homeland Security is seeking the ability to "remove all removable aliens," including “illegal economic migrants, aliens who have committed criminal acts, asylum-seekers or potential terrorists."

Mr. Bush and the Christian fascists in power have found their scapegoat – and it is us. We are the new Jews in a new Germany in a new century. They call it the New American Century, a New World Order, a “unipolar” Reich – a White America over all.

E Pluribus Unum: the many eradicated; reduced to One. White. Nation.

This is the pretext. They call us "invaders." We represent a "destabilizing factor" for the "nation." They say we are dirty, just like they said the Jews were dirty -- and disease ridden.

They say our neighborhoods and our culture are "cesspools." They want to keep their culture “pure.” They say we “steal” the jobs that they have in fact shipped overseas, and that are nowhere to be found. And now they're calling us "terrorists,” just like they called our ancestors “savages.”

After decades the nation’s long-suppressed racism is finding an open voice once more, and they are openly strategizing about how to best appeal to the unconscious racist sentiments just beneath the surface among a broader public.

US Congressman Tom Tancredo warns about us: we (Mexicans and migrant peoples) "need to be found before it is too late. They're coming here to kill you, and you, and me, and my grandchildren."

It’s a matter of “spin.” One strategist on the right wing web site RedState.org tells them how to spin it. He says that to deal effectively with us our enemies must “focus on terminology.”

“People who are in this country without proper documentation,” he writes “are foreign infiltrators. These foreign infiltrators operate clandestinely within our country. They are no different than the foreign infiltrators who destroyed the world trade center and attacked the Pentagon. Except that they haven't done anything yet.”

“…Once you have the terminology correct,” he continues, “it is easy to define a solution to discourage foreign infiltration. First, treat any foreign infiltrator as a prisoner of war. Turn them over to the military… No hearings, no public defenders, no backlogged courts, no squandering of American tax dollars protecting the non-existent civil rights of foreign infiltrators.”

The strategizing isn’t empty: these Minutemen fantasies are on the verge of becoming national reality.

Republican House Judiciary Committee Chairman Sensenbrenner’s HR 4437, The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, recently passed the US House of Representatives. Its most extreme and punitive provisions are being upheld by the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate.

This legislation would do just what the RedState strategist ordered.

Key elements of the Sensenbrenner bill include:

~Making it a felony to be in the U.S. without legal documents. Under current law this is a simple civil violation. Millions of us would be classified as "felons" and subject to immediate detention and deportation, often without so much as a hearing. Access to the courts will be severely restricted if legislation currently under consideration is approved.

How can they tell who’s a felon? The felons will have brown skin. Fifty million of us. All of us will be suspects. What will they stop us for? Anything they please. After all, they already stop us for anything they please.

~ Making it a federal crime to “assist” our people who are without documents. Those who leave water in the desert to save the lives of migrants would become felons. Millions of teachers, doctors, priests, nurses, attorneys and others who give any kind of help or services to undocumented people will also become felons – overnight - and could face five years in prison and have their assets seized by the government.

Giving a ride to someone without the proper “papers” could lead to felony charges. It remains unclear if renting an apartment or selling a car to someone without “papers” would become a felony.

Cardinal Mahoney of the 5 million member Los Angeles Diocese of the Catholic Church has declared he will order his priests to defy this law, if it is passed.

~Expanding police powers over immigrants. Police departments would be granted greater power to check legal status, a move that would increase the number of immigration enforcement agents by 60 times the current number. Local law enforcement agencies would be paid for detaining our people and turning us over to federal authorities.

These provisions will turn police into bounty hunters, the moral equivalent of Cazamigrantes, and highlight their role as a modern version of the Night Riders that once terrorized communities of color.

~ The construction of five double-layer border fences--totaling 698 miles--in California and Arizona.

Over 4,000 people have died trying to cross the US/ Mexican border since fences in California forced people to cross at points in the Sonora desert into Arizona.

~ Requiring employers to collect Social Security numbers and other data on workers and turn it over to the Department of Homeland Security, which would then verify worker’s "legal status" and store the data. All workers would, in effect, need a government clearance before they could have a job, any job.

~ In a related development, the U.S. government announced in February 2006 that it plans to pay Halliburton $385 million to build new “detention centers” to imprison us.

This is a chilling and potentially deadly development in a nation that kidnaps and spirits captives to secret prisons in Europe and which runs torture centers in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo – torture centers which are condemned and denounced the world over.

In concert with the specter of mass deportations, pogroms, and widespread, race-based scapegoating, new “detention centers” strikes a chord eerily close to concentration camp.

As one writer questioned “Just what will happen in these detention centers, built to lock away undocumented people whose legal rights have been disappeared, and who have been cast as "hordes," "invaders," and a threat to national security? “

On the ultra-Right, anti-Mexican shock groups such as the National Policy Institute, Minutemen leaders, and others are calling for our mass deportation.

The Minutemen’s Jim Gilchrist has called for the National Guard to be deployed at the Mexican / US border. Gilchrist’s partner and rival in the Minutemen, Chris Simcox, makes the agenda clear, saying, "Oh, Jesus, it is unbelievable. I mean, we need the National Guard to clean out all our cities and round them up. They are hard-core criminals. They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughters and they are evil people."

While there is no mention of using the National Guard under the federal legislation currently under consideration, clear steps leading toward a police state for people of indigenous descent are being advanced – and the record shows that when the Euro-colonialist leadership of the US chooses to attack us, mass deportation of migrants and Chicanos alike is the weapon of choice. It can happen here. In fact, it has.

Over 1 million of us were deported during the racist “Operation Wetback” in the year 1954, alone.

Before the mass deportations during the Great Depression a Congressman from Texas testified in formal hearings that a strict quota system should be imposed on Mexicans because we are "germ-carriers, inassimilable, a people who are with us but not of us, and not for us." We are, he said "… incapable of development away from” a condition of “moral and financial pauperism,” and that our influence was causing “the breaking down of [the] social fabric...."

If this rhetoric sounds familiar, it should. It is the unchanging rhetoric of white nationalism.

That such rhetoric is being used again by the highest authorities in the US should be cause for deep alarm, especially in the context of the Patriot Act and other dramatic moves toward legalized fascism in the US.

That the State is acting on this rhetoric to create a felonized, legally scapegoated racial and cultural under-caste calls for uncompromising action aimed at our self defense as a People.

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Juan Santos is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. He can be reached at JuanSantos@Mexica.net

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