by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger
Riding the media blitz that followed the DREAM Act's recent defeat, Senators Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) unveiled their own comprehensive immigration reform bills just before Congress adjourned last week. The bills are enforcement-heavy, party-line bills that were immediately referred to committee, where they are expected to languish for some time.
The recent signing of Arizona's harsh anti-immigrant bill reminded me of another law passed a while ago. Commonly called the Bennett law, it aimed to make the teaching of English mandatory in all public and private schools. Like Arizona's law, it constituted a response to large immigration, ignited by nativist sentiment.
The Bennett law reacted to similar anti-immigration feelings as those present in Arizona today. To many Americans, immigrants were unwanted foreigners taking away American jobs. They spoke a foreign language and came from a foreign land. They did not speak English and were accused of refusing to do so. They had a different culture and stayed together amongst themselves; assimilation did not seem to work with them. They seemed less loyal to the United States and more loyal to their homeland. At core, they seemed "un-American."
I am speaking, of course, about German immigrants in Wisconsin.
I have to admit that I sometimes despair of the political judgment of my own Democratic party. We started the Obama Presidency proposing a stimulus many economists predicted was too small to create the jobs needed, and failing to take on the big banks aggressively enough even though they were the most unpopular institutions around, other than al Qaeda. We cave way too often to unpopular corporate interests when we should just pick a fight and let the Republicans filibuster (see the financial reform bill right now). It's the culture-of-caution Democratic politics I described in painful detail in my book.
The good news, however, is that Republicans seem hell bent on saving us from electoral defeat by a dumbness that just seems built into their DNA: continually showing the American people how extremely right-wing they are. This will still be a hellishly tough election for Democrats to do well in, but the Republicans are at least keeping us in the game.
Their incumbent Governor of Texas is thinking about seceding. Their Senate candidates for highly targeted races like Nevada and Kentucky don't like Social Security, Medicare, or Civil rights laws. The guy who would become the chair of the energy committee in the House, backed up by the Republican study group and many other Republican leaders, apologizes to BP. The man who would be the Republican Speaker of the House wants to raise the retirement age for Social Security to 70 years old, and considers the financial meltdown of 2008 and the resulting loss of several million jobs to be as trivial as an ant. The anti-immigrant nativists in Arizona are stirring up Hispanic voters. In successive Supreme Court nominations, Republicans in the course of playing to their base, insult first Latinos and now blacks by attacking civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall. Every one of these things, when voters are reminded that Republicans are saying them, will be repulsive to both swing and Democratic base voters.
The historical retrenchment here in remarkable. Attacking Thurgood Marshall, questioning civil rights laws, wanting to do away with Medicare, Social Security, student loans, and all forms of government programs is an amazing thing. When Republicans start talking about stuff as far out as secession, they remind us once again that no issue and no amount of progress in American life is ever truly settled.
As the Republicans increasingly far out base forces Republican politicians more and more to the right, it does make it easier for Democrats to win. But Democrats are nowhere near out of the woods. Their biggest danger remains that Democratic base groups most likely to be offended by all those Republican right shenanigans are discouraged and not tuned into the election. Democrats also have to worry about angry working class voters who aren't right-wing tea party Republican types, but who may just feel like they want to send a message by voting for the Republicans.
It remains imperative for Democrats to embrace taking on the deep and persuasive corporate corruption of Washington. It is not enough to remind people how kooky the Republicans have become, Democrats have to become fierce advocates for change and reform, for a government that isn't in thrall to the banks and BP and the insurance companies. When they do that, the contrast with the ever more extremist pro-corporate all the time Republicans becomes ever clearer.
So thanks again, my Republican friends. You've given me hope that Democrats can win again. Now the Democrats need to be bold enough and tough enough to take advantage of the gifts they have been given.
President Barack Obama announced on Tuesday that he would be deploying 1,200 National Guard troops to the Mexican border to beef up security along the Río Bravo. This surprise move has garnered criticism from immigrant rights supporters, who argue that it will dehumanize and endanger immigrant and Latino communities.
The media has a substantial influence on the shape of public opinion, and it is important to understand how the landscape of media is changing, as well as how news coverage portrays issues, individuals and groups of people. The Project for Excellence in Journalism through Pew Research Center recently released two studies, one examining where local news comes from in Baltimore, and another looking at coverage of Latinos in the news. Pew Research Center also released findings from an important new study on race relations, which we will discuss further in the upcoming Public Opinion Monthly report. To see more analysis of public opinion pertaining to race relations, please see the Public Opinion Monthly November Roundup.
Where is the News Coming From? A recent study by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism examined the “modern news ecosystem” of Baltimore to gain an understanding of how people get news about their communities and the role of alternative news sources such as blogs and new media. In this study, they found that traditional media outlets – print, television and radio – are producing fewer new stories and doing less original reporting, but new media has not, as yet, picked up the slack. Fifty-three media outlets producing local news were identified, and six news threads were studied. More than eight in ten local news stories were redundant, only 17% of the stories included new information.
Over the next few decades, the United Sates’ Latino population is estimated to triple, comprising about 29% of US residents. At the same time, voters of Latin descent made up 7.4% of the electorate. In a continuing effort to better understand the attitudes and values of Latinos as expressed in survey studies in the past, we rounded up below findings from recent months.
The Pew Hispanic Center released today a new survey of Latinos focusing especially on young people who are ages 16 to 25. The survey explores the “attitudes, values, social behaviors, family characteristics, economic well-being, educational attainment and labor force outcomes of these young Latinos”. We will look more carefully at this study in one of our upcoming blog postings, but we wanted to bring attention to the racial identification of Latinos in this survey, in case it’s taken out of context in the various coverage of the study. Three out of four Latinos don’t identify themselves as white in the race question (“What race do you consider yourself to be: white, black or African- American, Asian, or some other race?”), or they volunteer that their race is Hispanic or Latino, although based on the U.S. Census these terms are used to describe ethnicity. This finding is consistent with what we see in studies of Latinos every day. The questions usually asked and response choices offered to identify the respondent’s ethnicity and race are not aligned with the way Latinos think about race.
For some perspective on the wisdom of the Democrats who are opposing health care reform, let's go the elections last Tuesday. New polling analysis from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Women's Voices Women's Vote is pretty powerful, and I recommend it to all the Democrats who voted no on the health care bill and every single one of their political consultants: the bottom line, friends, is that everything you do to depress Democratic voter turnout in your district is another nail in your coffin.
On May 30, 29-year-old Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter Brisenia Flores were shot to death, purportedly by a group of far-right anti-immigrant activists who broke into the Flores home by posing as police officers. On Friday, Shawna Forde, anti-immigrant activist and Executive Director of the Minutemen American Defense, (MAD) along with accomplices Jason Eugene Bush and Albert Robert Gaxiola were arrested on two counts of first-degree murder and burglary charges related to the Flores murders.
The Wire will be brief this week, as I'm attending New America Media's Expo and Awards at the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. I'll be speaking about New Media and accepting an award on the behalf of the Sanctuary group at ProMigrant.Org.
As the U.S. moves closer and closer to enacting immigration reform, the situation on the ground is evolving as well. Nothing is static for an issue that touches so many people across so many communities. This week's wire follows up on trends observed last week: holding mainstream media accountable, enforcement tactics, and immigration's positive effect on the economy.
We are living in unsure times, filled with drastic transitions that shift our perspectives from day to day. In one sense, immigration is about groups of people shifting in size and moving from place to place. It is also about the formation of new groups, how we live through the transitions, and who we are on the other side. For this week's Immigration Wire, I'd like to look at how different social groups are dealing with issues related to immigration-and all of its accompanying cultural shifts.
Hate does not emerge in a vacuum writes the editorial staff of El Diario/La Prensa [translated by New America Media]. Nor could it thrive there, we might add. While many collude to bring about positive change, they face opposition from others who have coalesced to propagate negativity on a large scale. As of late, it is the Latino community catching the hate that has been unleashed upon the immigrant community. El Diaro/La Prensa gives the gruesome details:
Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters
Weekly Voting Rights News Update
By Erin Ferns and Nathan Henderson-James
Massive voter registration drives, recent passionate immigration debates, and the contested presidential primaries are finally bringing one of the nation's fastest growing populations into the democratic process, despite decades of low voter participation rates and recent voting rights attacks based on anti-immigrant rhetoric. Recognizing their rapidly increasing voting power - which is catching up with their "raw demographic power," particularly in the closely contested states of Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada - both presidential candidates are actively pursuing Latino voters. However, advocates caution a powerful lesson must be learned from voter suppression schemes executed in recent elections in order to ensure this former "sleeping giant" of electoral participation will have access to the polls in November, and most importantly, have their votes counted.
While most expected that Barack Obama would win South Carolina's primary, nobody said he would crush Hillary Clinton by a 28-point lead (a more than 2:1 margin.) The polls were even less accurate than in New Hampshire, where Clinton eked out a surprise 3-point victory on January 8th. Bill Clinton's attempt to marginalize Obama as a "black candidate" failed - as the Illinois Senator did far better than expected among whites, and tied Clinton among white men. In part because black women strongly supported Obama, there was no real gender gap - which raises the question: if Democrats want to win this year, why nominate a candidate whose primary base is old white women and few others?
As the race moves to Super Duper Tuesday on Steroids, Obama has a shot because Bill Clinton has returned to dominate his wife's campaign. Voters want "change" over "experience," and while they liked the 1990's do not want a Clinton dynasty. But Obama must target Latinos to win - especially in California - and his latest endorsements could make the job slightly easier. While South Carolina gave Obama a landslide victory, exit polls showed that voters there did not place a premium on Iraq. If the War becomes an issue on February 5th, Obama's chances in California will be strongly enhanced.
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