By Nina Masters

I came to Arizona knowing the immorality and injustice of SB 1070. I left understanding the individual lives torn apart by this law, the children living in fear of men in uniform dragging their parents, uncles, or grandmothers away from them before their very eyes. This trip cemented my conviction that those in this country without documents are human beings. They are simply trying to make a better life for themselves and their children.

Pursuing the American Dream, the promise of hope, they are not criminals and do not deserve to be criminalized as part of a white nationalist agenda. Hearing the heart-wrenching accounts of children my age who have been through more fear, injustice, and suffering than anyone should endure makes me ashamed of the country that I live in. I have realized that by not actively helping these humans—humans who are treated like animals – I am complicit in the racist actions of Sheriff Arpaio, Russell  Pearce, and all of the men and women like them.

I came to this trip nervous, not having experience in community organizing but only having a background in research on the anti-immigrant movement.  I would have been lost without the guiding ideas of the other students on this trip—students who have dedicated years to fighting racism, discrimination, and upholding social justice.

I honestly feel like the most affecting part of this experience was not walking through the desert near the border, seeing the inside of the Florence Detention Center, or even debating Joe Arpaio: it was witnessing these perspective-altering experiences with a group of like-minded individuals who had already implemented change in their communities.

I was incredibly inspired by the motivation of those around me, the ways in which they tackled problems and never gave up. In car rides between our visits, the group always brainstormed and proposed ways to bring our new knowledge back to our communities, to organize and educate and ultimately defeat this unfair law on the opposite coast.

These five days changed me in a very profound way. I cannot go back to New York and be content doing nothing. Witnessing the pleas for help from sad-faced teens, hardened adults, and young children, who know to run and hide when the police appear, provoked the deepest feeling of guilt I have ever experienced.  We brushed in and out of these people’s lives, spending only five days in this harsh, anti-immigrant climate. These innocent, well-meaning people struggle every day to live out the American dream. They may be lacking documentation but their motives are in the right place.

Five days ago I expected to see the “political climate” in Arizona and assess how communities were reacting to SB 1070.I didn’t think I would come home different, deeply compelled to end these people’s suffering.  I cannot forget the stories, the tears, and the faces of those whose lives have been broken by the militarization of the border. And now I will not stop until I have exhausted all of my power trying to prevent this country from getting away with scapegoating the newest “outsider.” These people are not aliens, they are not animals, and I cannot let them be treated as such.

Our neighbors to the south are caught in a whirlwind of despair while drug lords continue to set the country ablaze with gunfire. The stories coming through the pipeline depict a nation overrun by vicious animals with political agendas. It strikes me odd that this chaos has all but erased the fact that a great chunk of Mexico was recently left in ruins in the wake of Hurricane Alex.

I find it further disturbing that much of America feels it in our best interest to cage the animals and let them sort it out on their own turf. The same cult would have us go knocking door-to-door throwing every “illegal looking” soul over the fence, right into the mouths of the starving jackals.

A solution to Mexico’s highly sensationalized drug war will not be produced in this mindset.

What’s more, narrow conversations produced by commercial media will keep many in a comfortable state of neglect.

Amidst hot winds

Blowing smoke and casting veils

The unwarranted precedent of ownership stands to protect its prize

With tongues like brushes painting out the proof

If only unconsciously generating sangre in puddles

The greedy seedy thrones of negocios hide their lies

Flashback to accords made to keep trade cheap

Nursing struggle in the fields of hope

Farming future friendly fire

James Lee

Today’s hostage situation at a Discovery Channel building in Silver Spring, Maryland indicates an alarming re-emergence of racially-tinged population control arguments. The scene played out violently when a man stormed the Discovery Channel offices and took three hostages. Early news reports indicate that the attacker was killed when he was shot by law enforcement which caused an explosive device on his body to detonate.

A list of demands for the Discovery Channel was posted on the website SaveThePlanetProtest.com, which were reportedly written by the alleged attacker James Jay Lee. In the irate statement, Lee refers to human beings as “filth” and demands that the Discovery Channel “stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants.”

Demand number five states:

“Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH!”

Demand number seven on his list orders the Discovery Channel to:

“Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people’s brains until they get it!!”

Neo-Malthusian theory was born when Thomas Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798” in which he stated that the discrepancy between the rate of population and the rate of food growth would lead to a permanent food shortage for humans.

Malthus’ works gained influence in 19th Century England and was used to justify ideologies that essentially blamed the victims of early industrial development — a development that swallowed up, displaced and destroyed populations, and which was itself highly artificial and environmentally destructive — for their own misfortune.

“Ironically, this attack comes amid a renewed commitment and declaration by environmentalists to build a democratic and diverse environmental movement,” said Rebecca Poswolsky, field organizer at the Center for New Community.

This silver lining comes in the form of a pledge that acknowledges that immigrants and refugees are also spearheading movements for ecological and economic renewal, and are allies rather than adversaries in the fight for environmental sustainability.

In a recent report called, Apply the Brakes, and a subsequent film titled, The Green War on Immigrants, the Center for New Community raised red flags about neo-Malthusian ideas around population gaining legitimacy in mainstream environmentalism.

The thick piety and self-righteousness, the assumed privilege and power of that culture was once again on public display in D.C. Saturday as hundreds of thousands of “disaffected” and “aggrieved” whites and their proclaimed leaders sought to re-stake their inherent claim to God’s blessings in a nation allegedly subsumed by “darkness.”  “Darkness.”  They would never understand just how revealing were their own racially-tinged words.  They would never comprehend how deeply offensive was their rancid attempt to hijack the mantle of Dr. King and a movement grounded so deeply in faithfulness grown out of suffering and death.

Christianity in America has always been of two realms—that of the dominant culture, the “Christendom” ever-interwoven with assumed and maintained power, and that of the peoples of faith who daily engage in the struggle for life, dignity, freedom, hope, community, equality, and justice.  That the first wish now to be seen as the second would be laughable were their angst—and their shallow openness to religious and racial demagoguery—not so dangerous.  As their real or perceived power continues to erode in the face of dramatically changing demography and global power realignment these  “Christendom Christians” will seek to maintain their status at any cost.  Reports of their reactions in locales across the country already fill the daily news, “restoring honor” they believe is due them.

In 1885 Josiah Strong, a Congregational minister credited as a founder of the Social Gospel movement in the U.S., published Our Country—an aptly named tome for our own day in the din of the tea-full uprising, where white-held “We want our country back” placards prevail.  While the Social Gospel movement has been understood (and criticized) as a historic expression of liberal, reformist Protestantism, its own racial edges belied the historic drive of Christian dominance, when the world would “…enter upon a new stage of its history—the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled.”  Even the reformists could not escape the pull of Manifest Destiny, the thread of piety, politics, and power that would reflect their honor of a God made in their own image, the thread bared again last Saturday in Washington.

Faithfulness turns dominant worlds upside down.  It is in the underside of history, where the impact of the dominant is most felt, that God is most resident.  Among the destitute, the hopeless, the homeless, the landless, the outcast, the oppressed, the struggling.

Beckoned or not, God is present there, far too engaged to have been Beck-oned to Washington, to hate-filled airwaves, to “safe zones” of white folk, to disingenuous political platforms.  May it ever be so.

By Taisha Hawkins

“ Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become action. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become your character. Watch your character, for IT becomes your destiny. ” -Unknown

Imagine if an imagination was all you needed: to begin, to finish, to follow through.
What if all your tomorrow consisted of was your development in thought from today?

That’s where dreams come from…
You think it in your head, you see it through your eyes, then show others through your action.
And just like that, history repeats itself.

Today is a good day to dream. If you don’t agree, try asking someone who can’t.

Success only occurs when preparation meets opportunity, but NOTHING can birth without being conceived first.

Dreams in Arizona have been swept away: not only from the undocumented, but the youth that follow.
Not because dreams were never conceived, but because they have been aborted.

What if your skin’s pigment had everything to do with your way of life?
Imagine living each day like it’s your last.
Imagine having to risk your life crossing a desert just to create one for your children.

What if your ethnicity/culture just wasn’t good enough to be considered the “American Way?”
Imagine having a racist Sheriff endorse the slaying of your people, who have committed no wrong; amnesty was null and void.
Imagine being denied your ethnic history in schools and chastised only to be underpaid.

Everything begins with just a thought. Have you thought about it?
Can you imagine? You don’t have to, all of these things are going on.

Right here in America!

Paul Watson is the doughy captain and star of the show. To most viewers he’s nothing more than an eccentric animal rights activist. Most people probably consider him harmless (unless you’re hunting whales of course). But there’s a lot more lurking under the façade of this wacky eco-activist.

Watson is severely at odds with environmentalists striving for inclusive solutions to environmental problems.

The outlandish tactics exhibited on the show extend to Watson’s involvement in the environmental movement. As the chair of the Sierra Club from 2003-2006 and founder and president of the Sea Sheppard Conservation Society, Watson has wielded tremendous influence as an environmental leader.

Now, he is leveraging that influence to condemn a renewed effort to make environmentalism more democratic.

This was on full display when Watson shot off a nasty response to fellow environmentalists about the short film The Green War on Immigrants. The film exposes the growing infiltration of the environmental movement by white nationalist forces, and a corresponding pledge provides the opportunity for environmentalists to speak out against it.

In the opening lines of Watson’s reply he states, “The Green War on Immigrants. What war is this? I missed the declaration! Sounds like another round of green bashing rhetoric from the humanist crowd again.”

Guess he won’t be signing the pledge to take a stand against bigotry.

Unfortunately, Watson isn’t alone. There is a segment of the environmental movement that has zeroed in on overpopulation and immigration as the primary causes of environmental degradation and as a result aligned themselves with white nationalists.

In fact, this division was at the heart of a failed hostile takeover attempt within the Sierra Club, and was allegedly the reason Watson left the Club.

Watson was one of three endorsers of an anti-immigrant ballot, formerly referred to as Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization (SUSPS), brought before the Sierra Club board in 2002 that was strongly backed by outside anti-immigration groups. Doug Lafollette and Ben Zuckerman, (now vice president of the anti-immigrant group Californians for Population Stabilization) were the other two.  These three, along with their allies, controlled a third of the board at the time. If three more anti-immigration directors were elected to the Board in 2004, the SUSPS faction would have gained effective control of the national organization.

The victory by the Sierra Club stands as an example of successfully countering bigotry in the environmental movement.  Although Watson and his cronies were defeated and the anti-immigrant ballot initiative did not pass, Watson and others have not strayed from their anti-immigration stance.

This was clear in Watson’s reply when he wrote, “What percentage of immigrants are [sic] interested or even involved in ecological movements or organizations?  Hell, what percentage of the overall population is involved?”

If Watson is so concerned about the lack of involvement in ecological movements, why is he wasting his time performing publicity stunts on his reality show (like the time he said he was shot but actually lied about it) instead of advocating for more people to become environmentalists?

It makes sense for the environmental movement to be more inclusive of all peoples; it can only make the movement stronger. So when limelight-addicted individuals like Watson vehemently fight inclusiveness, it points to a disturbing agenda.

Environmentalists who do not agree with the likes of Watson are steering us towards productive discussions about ecological renewal that include all people regardless of where they come from.

By Brendan Francis

During the week of August 9, 2010 along with 12 other people, I traveled to Arizona to learn more about the immigration movement from all sides and what I could do to help counter hatred towards immigrants. We traveled to Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona to meet with different individuals and hear their views on the immigration debate.

We had a lot of experiences in this short week but what stood out to me the most was the fear that resonated in the eyes of most of the Latinos immigrants we met.

The immigrants I met with were overall very peaceful and hard working people who simply live for their families.  Those qualities helped me identify and relate to them better.  When we traveled to a community where many undocumented immigrants resided, I was able to understand half the things they said and I could hear the passion in their voices when they described why they were here, as well as the fear in their voices over the potential deportation of their family members.  I was really able to feel for them.

I spoke with a 19-year-old mother who explained how she and her baby  daughter were citizens but her parents were not.  They have seen people deported over and over again.  The teenage mother has faced discrimination and racist sentiment while being educated in Arizona and even faces racism while trying to go to college.  The main thing that stayed with me was the baby.

The little girl was nine-months-old.  She was as pure and innocent as a human can be.  She has no idea what the climate of the state is now or even what SB 1070 is.  She doesn’t know that NAFTA weakened Mexico’s economy she doesn’t know that her grandparents are undocumented. She doesn’t even know what it means to be undocumented.  She doesn’t know what Mexico, the US, brown, black, or white is.  She just knows how to smile and laugh.  It didn’t matter who played with her or what they looked like; she was peaceful and happy with all.  That stuck with me the most.  Her innocence should be the model of how this country treats all people.  That is what I hope to bring to this world with my organizing.

Unfortunately, the response by school officials made it clear that they were not ready to acknowledge the demographic changes in this small city of 68,000 with minorities making up a third of the population. Sticking to the status quo has become the practice of the school district leaders.

This election cycle brought new hope for changing up the political environment. Many in the Somali community were encouraged to watch two respected people in their community step forward and run for the school board in order to help shape more inclusive educational values.

These role models are a sign of astounding progress for the refugee community and a signal that these individuals have a lot to contribute to all the residents of Saint Cloud.

Although the candidates didn’t win school board seats this time around, the number of votes they received really motivated the community at large.

For a majority of the refugees in the community, this was just the first or second time to practice their American democratic rights and for one of the candidates, Mohamed Yusuf, it was a dream in the making.

Losing the election in no way hinders the efforts of these tireless community leaders in advocating for the inclusiveness of Somali children and filling the achievement gap in Saint Cloud public schools.

“The festivities around the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird set me thinking about that glassy, hot world. I feel more proprietorial about that book than most because it’s set in the 1930s in a small Alabama town called Maycomb and I grew up in a small Mississippi town called McComb. A few things separated the 1930s from the 1950s. Most of the white men and some of the ‘colored’ men had fought in the Second World War, so they’d had their horizons stretched. Dirt roads were being paved and supermarket chains such as Piggly Wiggly and A&P were appearing on the sides of courthouse squares.

In 1954, when I was the same age as Scout, a case called Brown v Board of Education of Topeka appeared before the Supreme Court. Overnight, segregation in public schools was declared unequal and thus unconstitutional. Southern whites went crazy. A year later, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on a bus, triggering a bus boycott by Negro riders.

Nobody minds that Atticus actually lost the case. But fiction shouldn’t eclipse the true story of another Southern lawyer whom Harper Lee would have known. In 1955, a young lawyer from the hills of north-west Alabama was chosen to sit as a federal District Court judge in Montgomery. Standing 6ft 3in with a handsome, craggy face, at 37, Frank M. Johnson Jr was the youngest federal judge in the country. The quietly determined lawyer began his judicial career by casting the decisive vote that declared segregated public transport unconstitutional, thus ending the bus boycott that had lasted for 381 days.

It seems like old history now, but the same year (1961) that Miss Lee won the Pulitzer prize for her novel depicting white bigotry and black injustice set in the 1930s, Judge Johnson was ruling that blacks registering to vote in 1960 would fill in the same forms as whites and that the bus stations had to get rid of their ‘white’ and ‘colored’ waiting rooms and water fountains. A few years later, he would order Governor George Wallace, a law-school classmate, to permit the Selma to Montgomery march led by Martin Luther King to take place. Wallace would call him ‘an integrating scallawagging, race-mixing liar’. King called Johnson ‘the man who gave true meaning to the word justice’.

Judge Johnson paid a high price for his vision. Death threats by the Ku Klux Klan. Ostracised from his community. His mother’s house bombed in the belief that it was his. But he never waivered in his belief that, in the eyes of the Constitution, all men are created equal. He carved out the legal frontiers that changed the South and thereby changed America. His is the story of a man as wise and good as Miss Lee’s Atticus. Sometimes, truth is more remarkable than fiction.”

Reprinted with permission from Country Life.  Carla Carlisle’s blog on farming, politics, literature, and life can be found every Tuesday at www.countrylife.co.uk/blogs.

Originally published on Buzzflash on Wed, 08/25/2010

The Christian Action Network, a long-time anti-gay/National Endowment for the Arts organization is back on the scene with ‘Islam Rising,’ a film, it claims, ’exposes the dangers of radical Islam to the Western world.’

Months before the current controversy over the building of an Islamic community center a few blocks from Ground Zero brought a host of professional anti-Muslim bigots out of the woodwork, a small group, long associated with a bevy of Religious Right causes, was marketing its own brand of Islamophobia. Welcome to the world of the Christian Action Network.

Throughout the past two decades, the Christian Action Network CAN), founded in 1990 by Martin Mawyer, has been a relatively marginal, yet occasionally effective, Religious Right enterprise. During the early-nineties’ epic congressional battles fought over the conservative movement’s efforts to de-fund the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the CAN received a fair amount of notoriety. These days, the Christian Action Network is involved in what they would probably describe as an even more epic battle: The fight against the Islamization of the Western World.

“CAN has always operated on the fringes of the Religious Right,” Rob Boston, Senior Policy Analyst for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, told me via an email. “Its budget is about $1 million a year, which is pretty small by Religious Right standards. Over the years, it has focused on various issues – the NEA, gays and now Islam bashing. Martin Mawyer tends to alight on whatever issue he thinks will be most lucrative.”

Back in the day, the most memorable stunt the Forest, Virginia-based Christian Action Network came, as Jack Fritscher wrote in an essay called “What happened When: Censorship, Gay History, & Mapplethorpe”, when Mawyer “tried to set up a display of sexually explicit ‘offensive’ art by [Robert] Mapplethorpe, [Andres] Serrano, and mystic-photographer Joel-Peter Witkin in the Capitol Building. Mawyer was banned from the building before [it] opened, and then was closed down by House Speaker Thomas Foley after fifteen minutes of fame in another location. Mawyer claimed he was being censored; Foley ruled Mawyer was violating house rules on lobbying in the Capitol.”

Mawyer thought he had it all figured out: flashing a few Mapplethorpe photos or pictures of Serran’s “Piss Christ” would convince legislators that tax-payer money – through the NEA — was  supporting this work, and voila, the end of the NEA.

To continue reading this article visit Buzzflash.com

He loves to tell anyone who will listen that he and his parents came to America as legal immigrants. He also loves to promote the English language and bash undocumented immigrants. Eddie lives in Tennessee and has been very involved with trying to get English-only legislation passed in the state, most notably pushing legislation that would make English the only language available for people who take a drivers license test.  In March of this year, Garcia testified in favor of the English-only bill.

Garcia is also an advisory board member of ProEnglish, a group formed by white nationalist John Tanton who still sits on the group’s board for directors. Tanton is the father of the modern day anti-immigrant movement. He has warned of a “Latin onslaught” and has also stated, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”

Tanton founded other anti-immigrant organizations such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Eddie Garcia, in recent months, has expressed extreme anti-immigrant hate on ProEnglish’s and his own Facebook pages. On May 4 of this year, Garcia, who at that time ran the ProEnglish Facebook page stated, “Yea, I’ve had it. I am sympathetic with the issues of people during the last two days of flooding in Nashville, but to hear of non-English speaking immigrants WHO HAVE BEEN HERE OVER 3 years that THEY ARE wondering why there aren’t Spanish speaking or Arabic speaking emergency personnel to help is ABSURD!LEARN ENGLISH …and you WON’T have any issues….FOR GOD’s SAKE!!”

Here, Garcia bashes immigrants who were wondering why there weren’t multilingual rescue workers to help them during the terrible flooding in the Nashville area at that time. A supporter responded to Garcia’s rant by stating, “OH, you are so right Eddie!!!!! They have no reason to complain about translators. There’s a fix for that!!

This week however, Garcia took his immigrant bashing one step further by comparing undocumented immigrants who come to America to rape. On August 20 Eddie wrote this on his Facebook page, “Yet another vivid and CLEAR example of the raping of America by illegal immigrants and the disgust that illegals who are here continue to demand rights and that their presence is acceptable.” […] “Not saying that EVERY illegal is a member of a gang or drug dealer, but they are WITHOUT A DOUBT a criminal by virtue of their ILL…EGAL ENTRY in the USA.”

For Garcia to compare undocumented immigration to rape is a step too far. Rape is an extremely violent and psychology damaging crime that can be in no way be compared to immigration and the accusation that immigrants are harming the United States.

Disturbingly, this type of hate speech has become commonplace among anti-immigrant leaders like Garcia.

The well-being of many immigrant workers is largely affected because they are expected to do the most dangerous jobs and are the most disadvantaged when claiming their rights. In most cases of course, fear is present. The fear of reprisals from employers or even fear of the government.  There are several cases I have heard about in which workers are fired after a few days of being injured even though they have worked for the company for several years.  Most of the accidents in the workplace are not being reported to OSHA and other government agencies.  With injuries going unreported, companies proudly show zero accidents for a month in which they probably had several.

I have heard on several occasions about safety team workers or management that pressure workers not to report any information about workplace injuries.

This was the case with Ramon, who after being involved in an accident in July 2010, was told not to report the accident by his supervisor because the incident would have raised the monthly premium of the company’s insurance.

In another instance, a worker named Jose slipped on the floor due to an accumulation of grease and broke his arm.  The management verbally harassed Jose until he signed a letter to indicate that he was quitting his job. They told him if he did not sign the letter he would be fired and would be unable to find another job.

Juan, another worker, also slipped due to the grease and was badly injured.  When Juan was in a lot of pain, the management forced him to sign a document in English (a language he does not understand) that indicated he would accept that the injury was his fault.  The management threatened that if he did not sign this document they would not be able to pay him for his medical treatment. He was later fired.

In another case, Pedro was injured due to repetitive motion required by his job and suffered from severe pain. He was offered by the company a low sum of money if he still continued to work for the plant or they would double the payment but he would have to quit.

On several occasions I have noticed that after the workers have gained courage to file for workers compensation and gained legal help, they face another problem – their financial situation.  Because workers are desperate they agree to settlements with companies that are not even close to being fair.  After all that they must face another very difficult obstacle. Finding a new job.

By Efrain Ramirez

I never thought that I had enough water in me to be able to cry everyday. It really felt like I was mourning the death of someone. This trip to Arizona hasn’t been an educational experience; it’s been an emotional rollercoaster that took a heavy toll on me. It was one of the hardest experiences of my life. This trip really started years before, even before I was born.

My mom is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. She crossed the border 20 years ago. Before that, she had a baby girl who died a few days after birth and from that point my mom knew she didn’t want to have any children in Mexico. She wanted a better future for children – children who hadn’t been conceived yet. She has crossed the border three times in her life. The last time she crossed was in 2001. We went to Mexico to see her family for the first time in 10 years and since then she hadn’t seen her family until two months ago via Skype.

This trip has reinforced what I have learned from my mom and from Spanish new media. I wanted a firsthand experience; I didn’t want to hear any more stories. However, this trip has hit me in my heart. From the meeting with Isabel Garcia and hearing about deaths at the border really moved me. I knew about the deaths but seeing those crosses, some of them saying ‘Desconocido,’ it really struck me.

After that, heading to the border and seeing the environment that my mom went through, that moment struck me. My mom had to endure this. It gave me a greater sense of appreciation for her sacrifice, what she had to do to cross that border just to give me a better life. This appreciation was reinforced when we went to meet with undocumented residents. To hear all the stories of different people and what they have gone through, really made me think of my mom. I saw my mom’s story.

I spoke to them and talked about my mom’s experience and what she did. I told the people I met that they shouldn’t regret coming to this country despite the hatred. I said, ‘one day, when your children grow up, they will tell you thank you, thank you for your sacrifice and your hard work. Keep fighting for your children cause they will be grateful and to cherish every moment with them. Don’t regret your decision and thank you for what you did for your children.’

I wanted to give them a little support because I felt this is all I could do at the moment.

When I was at the Florence Detention Center, I couldn’t look at the people being detained. I couldn’t because I didn’t want the people to view me as a person who came to look at them as if it was a zoo. They were looking at me because they knew I was Latino and they were talking about me. I just didn’t want to stand there and see them; I wanted to set them free, free from that hypocritical, tyrannical prison.

This trip was hard on me. After the first day, I started to regret coming on the trip. I just wanted to run back home. This feeling kept following me. I just wanted to go back home and tell my mom, ‘thank you for everything, your sacrifice was worth it.’

Photo: Immigrant Rights Protest at the Broadview Detention Center in Illinois. Credit Carrie Sloan via Flickr.

The good news is we can take a stand against the greening of hate.

Some already have. Take for example the community members in the Bronx who were fed up with anti-immigrant bigotry and exposed a powerful New York foundation for funding the anti-immigrant movement. The Weeden Foundation was confronted by over 100 community members in front of its Manhattan headquarters in a protest organized by the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition (NWBCCC). According to the group’s press statement, members were protesting “the Weeden Foundation’s funding groups that scapegoat immigrants for ecological problems.”

Today, hundreds of environmentalists are taking a pledge to resist the growing infiltration of their movement by white nationalist forces, including those under the umbrella of the John Tanton Network. Organizations such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), NumbersUSA, Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR), Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), Carrying Capacity Network, Apply the Brakes Network and Negative Population Growth (NPG) are scapegoating immigrants for rising pollution, urban sprawl, carbon emissions and even the BP oil spill as a way to build support among environmentalists for repressive anti-immigrant legislation.

It’s time for all of us to take a similar stand, and share a vision that acknowledges immigrants and refugees as partners in movements for ecological and economic renewal.

The urgency of the climate crisis means there is no time to lose.

Watch the video, take the pledge, and pass it on.

It’s good for America. And good for the environment.

This may sound like a good occasion to get versed on the immigration issue, but it’s quite the opposite.

CAPS is listed as a state contact on Federation for American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) website, where it is misleadingly described as “an environmental activist organization that views immigration control as a key element of population stabilization.”

FAIR is a hate group founded by white nationalist John Tanton. Tanton has a history of advocating for racial eugenics, the pseudoscientific study of racial supremacy.

CAPS has additional ties to white supremacy that are undeniable. Its media director, Rick Oltman, was identified in a Council of Conservative Citizens’ (CofCC) newsletter as a member. The organization is a descendant of the old White Citizens Council. CofCC’s statement of principles reads:

“We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into the United States that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority in our lifetime […] We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.”

Oltman also shared a stage with Virginia Abernethy, a self-described white separatist, at a Council of Conservative Citizens conference. He was at the time the Western Regional Coordinator for FAIR, and in 2004 he received a Person of the Year Award from American Patrol, another anti-immigrant hate group. The award was for his work passing Proposition 200, a highly controversial anti-immigrant law in Arizona.

Rick Oltman’s name appears regularly on the white nationalist website VDARE.com, named for Virginia Dare, allegedly the first white child born in the U.S. colonies.

This event on environment, population and immigration is the new frontier for folks like Oltman and anti-immigrant groups such as CAPS.

Many leaders with ties to white nationalism, after successfully embedding themselves in the immigration issue, are now infiltrating the environmental movement. Their goal is to link immigrants to every environmental issue, from everyday litter to natural and man-made disasters. CAPS is positioning itself as an “environmental” group whose purpose is to stop immigration into the U.S.

Hiding anti-immigrant views in environmental concerns isn’t new for the leadership at CAPS. Ben Zuckerman, Vice President of CAPS’ board and Richard Lamm, a board adviser, attempted  a hostile takeover of the Sierra Club’s board in 2004 and failed. The takeover attempt was one of repeated attempts of anti-immigration ideologues to redirect the Sierra Club to match their own agenda.

The overlaps between the anti-immigrant movement and white nationalism are numerous, and the public should always be mindful of this is any discussion on immigration or the environment.

Discussions are necessary and welcome, but not when white nationalists are sitting at the table.

That some twenty percent of the population (a significant increase since January 2009) think the President is a Muslim is but one indicator of the breadth of this fight and the success of those waging it.  Religion, race, birth status, and the “legitimacy of citizenship” are at the very heart of the recent surge in attacks on Obama, and are at the core of the battle not only on immigration, but also on the “status” of all peoples of color.  Making the President “The Other”—the One unlike the “us” of the dominant white Christian population—makes it so much easier to make “The Other” of all peoples of color and of all those of differing religious beliefs.  Welcome to 1840 America.

In this retro-country immigrants and refugees are the economic and cultural enemy.  African Americans are largely condemned to incarceration, economic undergrounds, and violent death. Poor people are unseen.   Muslims are treated as terrorists.  “They” are collectively “The Other,” as is the President himself.  When the hatred and bigotry sticks at the top, it poisons the whole of the body politic.

The sordid collection of nativists, bigots, racists, and white/Christian nationalists who seeded this battle some years ago now enfolds tea partiers and Republican “leaders,” fueled by the Rupert Murdoch media empire.  The late Sam Francis, a white nationalist associated with the Council of Conservative Citizens, could not himself have imagined the speed by which this battle has been mainstreamed.   When Senate Minority Leader McConell panders to Islamaphobes by lamely stating that he takes “the President at his word” that he is a Christian, the message is clear: the President says he is one of “us,” but who knows for sure?

Some thirty years out from a majority population of color, white fear is palpable and increasingly dangerous, and efforts by the now-dominant culture to preserve its power and place threaten the very foundations of the country.  Birthright citizenship? Gut it.  Religious freedom? Restrict it.  Rights of the minority? Quash them.  Equal opportunity?  Limit it.   Whither Barack Obama in the days ahead, crafting and creating “The Other” is but prologue to the coming decades of potentially crippling political turbulence.  With “The Other” as foil, economic, social, racial, and natural crises are easily ignored, and a political culture of inaction becomes the stagnating norm.  Welcome to 2010 America.

For the past two years the writers on Imagine2050 have relentlessly advanced analysis, discussion, and debate on the emerging crisis of American identity as manifested particularly in the intractable political firestorm over immigration and race.  Warning flags have been posted.  Still, “The Other” is increasingly defined and defiled.  And the country is paying dearly for it.

What’s disconcerting about this isn’t the growing, media-perpetuated confusion about the President’s faith, but the negative connotations  asserted in this poll. Of those 18% who believe Obama is Muslim nearly all disapprove of the job the President is doing. With the debate over the proposed mosque in lower Manhattan and the protests that went on over the weekend it’s clear the anti-Muslim sentiment is on the rise. Muslims are being demonized and this perception of Obama as a Muslim is shroud both in racism and religious intolerance. The wide racial divide can clearly be seen with the number of whites whose perception of a Muslim Obama rose from 11% to 21% in just over a year, yet there was virtually no change in blacks’ views on the President’s religion or faith.

Quite simply a white president wouldn’t be questioned about his or her religion. John Kennedy’s Catholicism wasn’t questioned nor was Bush identifying as a Methodist. Why then, if not race, is President Obama questioned about his faith?

A somewhat small percentage  claim President Obama mentions his faith too infrequently or that he relies too little on his religious beliefs when making policy decisions hence their confusion. Yet  those polled also said they are opposed to too much political involvement on the part of churches. Close to 61% say it’s important that politicians have strong, agreeable religious beliefs.

Are we to guess that by “agreeable” they mean Christian? This poll represents a continued and blatant racial divide. President Obama shouldn’t have to continually defend his religion or his race. Nor should the irrational fear and prejudice against Muslims be tolerated.

ONE MEMBER of his own UMP party has compared President Sarkozy’s crackdown on illegal Roma camps to “rafles”, the roundups of Jews in Nazi-occupied France. Romania’s Foreign Minister Teodor Baconschi has cautioned against stigmatising an entire ethnic group and fomenting xenophobia, while a spokesman for the European Commission has warned that group expulsions may well be illegal.

Following July riots sparked by the deaths of itinerant youths, Mr Sarkozy ordered the dismantling of 300 illegal Traveller and Roma camps as part of a broader campaign against crime. But the move has all the hallmarks of electoral grandstanding in the face of plummeting ratings. To date 51 camps have been dismantled, and Thursday saw the first charter flights taking 79 Roma back to Romania on a voluntary repatriation scheme. Some 700 of France’s estimated 15,000 Roma are to be expelled by the end of the month.

The row brings to mind the Dublin 2007 deportations of 100 gypsies whose grim camp beside the M50 appalled everyone from rights groups to road safety campaigners. Threatened with compulsory exclusion they eventually took up the offer of a free flight home when it became clear staying was not an option.

Continue reading at www.irishtimes.com.

As a jaded observer of  the livestock industry, I just sighed when I learned the scale of the current salmonella-tainted egg recall: 380 million eggs, distributed under 10 different brands in 17 different states, all from a single producer — Iowa-based Wright County Farms. Another day, another industrial-ag gaffe imperiling the health of millions.

USA Today reports that as many as 1,300 people have already been sickened by the tainted eggs. According to a recent GAO report, companies recover only about 36 percent of targeted products in a typical recall. That means that literally millions of people stand just an undercooked egg or an unwashed hand away from a nasty case of salmonella.

But then William Neuman’s New York Times piece hipped me to the name of the owner of Wright County Farms: one Austin “Jack” DeCoster. That’s when my sigh became a gasp.Jack DeCoster is one of the most reviled names in industrial agriculture. I first heard of him back in 2007, when I visited Hardin County, Iowa, for a story on the ravages of industrial hog production. One day, as a group of disgruntled farmers gave me a tour of their CAFO-scarred county, they muttered darkly about DeCoster. They said he had been run out of Maine for the egregious practices of his vast egg factories, and that he had set up shop in Iowa with massive, highly polluting hog factories. He was cited as the owner of several operations as we passed foul-smelling concentrations of hog buildings, sometimes as many as eight plunked down together in a cluster, each containing thousands of hogs and each draining mass quantities of waste into a single fetid “lagoon.”

Continue reading at grist.org.

The 640 miles of fence that have been built to date took four years, an average of $4.5 million per mile of taxpayer money, and have not proven an effective form of border security. On the contrary, this fence has caused more problems than it has solved.

For starters, immigration has not stopped. The only thing this fence has done is force the foot traffic through the more dangerous parts of the desert, causing a staggering number of deaths – 150 so far this year. In the Arizona desert alone, 59 bodies were recovered in July 2010, the highest number since July 2005.

The number of deaths along the border since 2001, 1,650, has eclipsed the number of US troop deaths in Afghanistan, 1,200, over the same period of time.

The precious border is also infamous for the rift it has caused among the indigenous tribes living along the border. The descendants of the “people of the desert” have witnessed this fence rip apart – quite literally – their lands, their families, their culture. The Tohono O’odham tribes, natives of the land, are now being harassed by Border Patrol agents, and treated like strangers on their own land.

Last, but certainly not least, the U.S. Congress, deep in its post 9/11 hysteria gave the Department of Homeland Security authorization to bypass all federal, state and local laws – environmental and otherwise – along the border in order to build the fence. Without regard to environmental protection or public health and safety, Section 102 of the Real ID Act has allowed for 36 federal laws to be broken, effectively destroying the natural habitat of hundreds of wildlife species, most of which are endangered or threatened.

Over 40% of the land along our southern border is protected public land, and this reckless infrastructure has meant dire consequences for vast expanses of pristine lands, including wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, and national forest lands, among others. Several species of wildlife have been known to migrate seasonally, and some have been observed, even photographed, stranded by the callous fence. In its Wild versus Wall documentary, the Sierra Club has denounced the disastrous consequences of the fence.

And do not think for a second that these environmental catastrophes are bad news for animals only. People are also being caught up in the mix. The wall has caused severe flooding in Nogales, Arizona burying homes and businesses under 6 feet of water and causing two drowning deaths.

The border wall has proven ineffective, costly and dangerous for animals and people alike. And yet the government, unfazed by the carnage, is implementing plans to build another layer to the fence.

Sounds like more bad news for all involved.