[Dryerase] Alarm!--Anti-immigrant racism & gov't repression
The Alarm!Newswire
wires at the-alarm.com
Mon Sep 9 16:01:38 CDT 2002
Anti-immigrant racism and government repression
By Michael Novick
The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor
On August 24, the latest in a series of nazi rallies in DC drew over
500 swastika-clad marchers protesting Jews and immigrants to the steps
of the US Capitol building, protected by thousands of DC and US police.
The rally by the West Virginia-based National Alliance—the fastest
growing and most influential racist group in the US—followed on the
heels of a wave of anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic violence across the
southeast. Hate crimes have increased four-fold in Fairfax County,
Virginia since last September 11. Similarly, hate incidents jumped
seventy-six percent in Montgomery County, Maryland. “Since September
11, the majority of hate violence and terrorism within this country has
been committed against people of color and religious minorities by
white racists,” says Douglas Calvin, Executive Director of the Youth
Leadership Support Network in the DC area.
In July, a Beckley, West Virginia anti-immigration rally was sponsored
by David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White
People (NAAWP). In Martinsville, Virginia the Rebel Brigade of the
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan held their second cross-burning and white
unity rally of the year. In Herndon, Virginia the Ahmadiyya Muslim
Community Center suffered repeated vandalism, while anti-Semitic flyers
promoting the neo-nazi National Alliance were distributed after an
event at Beth Emeth Synagogue. In Alexandria Virginia, a man was
charged with a hate crime after he tossed a brick through the window of
an Afghan man’s car, striking a passenger. The World Church of the
Creator led an anti-immigrant march in rural Georgia earlier in the
summer.
Such attacks have not been limited to the southeast. In June in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, a homeless Black man was chained to a fence and set on fire
by a man with white supremacist tattoos. In July, two white
supremacists were found guilty of plotting to blow up Jewish and Black
landmarks around Boston in what prosecutors said was a scheme to foment
“racial holy war.” In the San Francisco Bay Area in May, arson fires
struck both an Oakland synagogue that had received an anti-Semitic
letter, and the Antiochian Orthodox Church, which serves a largely Arab
American congregation. In Joliet, Illinois, three white supremacists
were charged with arson and a hate crime in connection with the
torching of a garage and two vehicles belonging to a predominantly
black church.
Attacks on Jewish synagogues and racial profiling of Arabs are signs of
a resurgence of racism worldwide, according to a July report by the UN
Commission on Human Rights. The UN report attributes this resurgence to
the rise of nationalist parties calling for reduced immigration, the
September 11 attacks and rising tensions in the Middle East. The report
did not identify any countries by name, but referred to frequent
instances of racial profiling at airports and more than 200 racist
propaganda internet sites as other examples of discrimination.
“Combined with the security measures designed to combat terrorism, the
measures against immigration now give the impression that an iron
curtain is falling between the North and the South of the planet,” the
report said.
The US context for such bigoted violence has been established by the
repressive actions of the government directed against immigrants and
people of color. Consider that in August 2001, police accountability
activists had forced the issue of racial profiling onto the front
burner politically and forced police departments across the country to
acknowledge the problem and begin to propose solutions. At the same
time, immigrants rights advocates and organized labor were pressing for
a new amnesty, and even the right wing Bush administration was
considering legalization for millions of undocumented Mexicans. After
9/11, the situation changed dramatically in the direction of
anti-immigrant governmental racism and repression. Peter Kirsanow, a
Bush appointee to the US Civil Rights Commission, raised the
possibility in July of internment camps for the mass detention of Arab
Americans. Kirsanow told a Commission hearing in Detroit on July 19
that if there was another terrorist attack on the United States “and
they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade
Center, you can forget about civil rights.” He said that “not too many
people will be crying in their beer if there are more detentions, more
stops, more profiling, there will be a groundswell of public opinion to
banish civil rights.” Meanwhile Attorney General John Ashcroft is
pressing not only for making mass internment a practical possibility,
but also for incorporating all local police forces in immigration
enforcement. Anti-immigrant groups have seized on such government
rhetoric and measures to push their agenda.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has seized on the
post 9/11 security situation to call for greater cooperation between
local police and federal immigration. “It is critical that federal
immigration authorities enlist the assistance of tens of thousands of
local police departments who are in the best position to spot illegal
or suspicious behavior in their own communities.” The State of Florida
and the Justice Department agreed July 2 that thirty-five “experienced,
seasoned law enforcement personnel” could receive formal training from
the INS on various aspects of federal immigration laws and the
enforcement of those laws. After completion of that training, which
began July 9, the officers will be assigned to seven regional “domestic
security” task forces across Florida. Rules for using police to enforce
federal immigration laws in certain situations went into effect August
23. The rule defining when local police agencies would be asked to
enforce immigration laws, which refers to a “mass influx of aliens,”
has intentionally been left vague, according to Ronald W. Dodson, a
supervisory special agent with the INS. This was to allow local and
federal authorities the flexibility to respond to an immigration
emergency, not “the routine traffic across the southern border by those
people trying to enter without inspection,” he said.
Another way local agencies have been incorporated into stepped up
anti-immigrant repression is in incarceration. According to Alisa
Johnson, writing for the Village Voice, the INS is desperate for more
cells for its ever-expanding population of detainees. Nearly 900
facilities around the country provide “beds” for the INS, and in
interviews over the years, according to Johnson, several county
sheriffs and wardens have described such detainees as a “cash crop.”
The number of INS detainees—people being held administratively as they
await the outcome of deportation proceedings—tripled since 1994, from
an average daily population of 5532 to nearly 20,000 last year. The
proposed $6.3 billion INS budget for fiscal 2003 slates more than $50
million for the “construction of detention facilities.” This new wave
of detainees is in addition to people prosecuted, convicted and sent to
federal prison for breaking immigration laws. Last week the Justice
Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics announced that the number of
people prosecuted for immigration offenses in federal courts more than
doubled from 1996 to 2000, growing from 6605 defendants to 15,613.
Yet this “routine” mass incarceration may be supplanted by something
more drastic. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was
charged by President Reagan to practice for the imposition of martial
law and the internment of so-called aliens and radicals. Bush has
returned FEMA (headed by former campaign manager Joe Allbaugh) to the
forefront of national security, in May 2001 designating it as the
agency in charge of terrorism response. Bush’s “National Strategy for
Homeland Security” places FEMA under the Office of Homeland Security.
In August, the Los Angeles Times reported Attorney General John
Ashcroft’s announced desire to create “camps for US citizens he deems
to be ‘enemy combatants’”. According to Ritt Goldstein in the Sydney
Morning Herald, a right wing web-site, NewsMax.com, has reported that
FEMA is pursuing a “crash effort” to build “temporary cities to handle
millions,” supposedly those fleeing weapons of mass destruction. It
added that FEMA had been given a deadline of having the cities “ready
to go by January 2003.’’ And in a subsequent posting to the NewsMax.com
website, a copy of FEMA’s project particulars noted that those
contractors seeking to participate in the program ``must demonstrate
capability of establishing group housing developments (designing,
developing, constructing, and acquisition of property) and maintenance
of complex(es) for periods exceeding two years.”
Such threats must be taken seriously because the government has been
abandoning the rule of law and judicial oversight in its anti-immigrant
and anti-terrorist actions. In June, responding to a court order
requesting the figures, the Justice Department admitted it is still
holding at least 147 people rounded up as part of the investigation
into the September 11 terrorist attacks, and that eighteen are not
represented by lawyers. The government did not reveal how many people
had been detained or are still being held without being charged. A
Justice Department official said the government can hold people as
material witnesses to a crime without ever charging them with an
offense. In July, the Justice Department inspector general’s office
reported that 458 complaints had been received under the USA PATRIOT
Act in which the sender suggested a connection to possible civil rights
abuses. Eighty-seven of the complaints were judged to be under the
office’s jurisdiction. Of these, the Inspector General opened only nine
formal investigations.
The case of US citizen José Padilla, the suspect in an alleged
radioactive “dirty bomb” plot, shows that such extra-judicial measures
are not restricted to immigrants. “The last time I looked at the
Constitution, he still had constitutional rights,” his court-appointed
attorney Donna Newman told CNN. The Padilla case should be a
“constitutional concern for everybody,” Newman said. “He was taken and
will now be detained in a military prison.” While US District Court
Judge Michael Mukasey said he would consider Newman’s motion, it was
unclear what jurisdiction, if any, the court has in the case now that
Padilla is in the custody of the US military. Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld said that Padilla—who also goes by the name of Abdullah Al
Muhajir—may never face trial. “Our interest is not in trying him and
punishing him,” Rumsfeld said. “Our interest is in finding out what he
knows.” In a meeting in his Cabinet room, Bush said, “This guy
Padilla’s one of many who we’ve arrested…. The coalition we’ve put
together has hauled in 2,400 people. And you can call it 2,401 now.
There’s just a full-scale manhunt on…. We will run down every lead,
every hint. This guy Padilla’s a bad guy and he is where he needs to
be: detained.”
If Bush succeeds in launching a full-scale war on Iraq, such repressive
acts, as well as racist attacks against immigrants, are certain to
increase, as they did dramatically during his father’s Gulf War, when
attacks against Jews, Arabs, and those mistaken for them, were
widespread. The need for an assertive defense of immigrant rights,
civil liberties and peace has never been greater.
Endnote: Michael Novick is author of White Lies, White Power
(http://www.commoncouragepress.com/novick_white.html link for website)
and publisher of Turning the Tide, a periodical magazine of People
Against Racist Terror in Culver City, California. He is also a member
of Los Angeles Anti-Racist Action, Anti-Racist Action is an
international movement of people committed to exposing, opposing and
confronting racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry. To
find an ARA chapter near you, visit
http://www.antiracistaction.ca/contactinfo.html.
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noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in
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