Meet the New Racism: Same As the Old Racism

Vigilante groups like the Minutemen and lone actors have taken it upon themselves to fix what Dobbs obsessively calls our “broken border.” On April 22 of this year, a 17-year-old Texas Hispanic high school football suffered serious injuries after an assault by two white men, one an active neo-Nazi skinhead, according to Harris County authorities. 

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, 17-year-old Keith Robert Turner, and 18-year-old David Henry Tuck, 18, targeted their victim when the young Hispanic man tried to kiss a young Hispanic girl Turner and Tuck believed to be Caucasian. The pair burned their victim’s neck with cigarettes, gashed his chest with a knife and stomped his head with steel-toed boots, while shouting anti-Hispanic slurs. They then stripped him naked and sodomized him with a patio umbrella pole. 

 Tuck, the skinhead, kicked the pole “so far in that [it] caused major organ damage.” The unnamed victim remains in serious condition.

So-called mainstream anti –immigration activists are already forging ties with hate groups and encouraging violence to pursue their cause. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that on April 3. Border Guardians founder Laine Lawless, who once started a press conference by burning a Mexican flag before the Mexican Consulates in Tucson, Arizona, fired off an e-mail to Mark Martin, head of the Western Ohio unit of the National Socialist Movement. Titled "How to GET RID OF THEM," the e-suggested offered suggestions for terrorizing illegals. “Steal the money from any illegal walking into a bank or check cashing place," she suggests. " . . . I hear the rednecks in the South are beating up illegals as the textile mills have closed. Use your imagination," she wrote later. "Discourage Spanish-speaking children from going to school. Be creative,” she concludes. Meanwhile, cowards in the media like Dobbs have repeatedly refused to acknowledge the involvement of Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, former militia activists and other fanatics in the anti-immigrant movement or to report on anti-immigrant violence.

Immigration, properly considered, should be an economic issue and not a racial or cultural one. The same free trade policies that drive Mexican campesinos off the land and move Indians to flee Central America depress wages in the United States, and de-industrialize our cities, all for the benefit of economic elites and at expense to the global working class. Anglo workers and Mexican immigrant workers share more than their common humanity: they are robbed by the same forces of greed and exploited by the same robber barons. Rather than closing the border, the Anglo public, the media and our politicians need to open their eyes to the human toll of globalization and of not free, but unfair, trade. The great battle to be fought in America today is not between Mexicans and Anglos, but between rich and poor.

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