The Resurrection of Bilbo

Steve Gilliard on the Republicans' latest nativist spasm:

So what people, especially liberals tempted to fall for the anti-immigrant-"pro worker" line should understand that the GOP is pulling the oldest trick from the playbook. It is anti-immigrant and it is sad that children of immigrants like Tancredo and King are using the same arguments used to vilify their ancestors 100 years ago.

When Tancredo talks about America being overrun, he's just repeating the eugenicist arguments made in 1924.

In the end, it is a fear-based argument which plays on race. The racist right and their allies are playing up fears of a "flood", which is code word for brown people living here. You cannot say it is an economic argument, because in the end it just isn't. We aren't talking about worker protections and wages, but a flood of people "stealing" our jobs. Remember, this is a country which outsources jobs to India and calls it a good thing. If job protection was really an issue, people would talk about large companies relying on illegal labor. Does Microsoft hire union cleaners? I doubt it, but Microsoft is cleaned every night.

But instead it's about the unsightliness of day labor, the complaints about people coming here to have their kids born and wanting to strip citizenship from them, deporting families with minor American citizens and a wall along the borders. How is this sound immigration policy? It isn't. It's a thinly disguised racial control policy.

Since I've been doing my annual Confederate "Heritage" Month posts at Old Hickory's Weblog, I've got them old times there that aren't forgotten on the brain. But this "deport the 11 million illegals" thing really reminds me a lot of the solution that many whites, including some of the leading antislavery activists, had in mind for solving the "Negro problem" after slavery: colonize them back to Africa. Support for this scheme among free blacks was almost nil. The notorious Missisippi racist Senator Theodore Bilbo proposed sending all American blacks to Africa after the Second World War. The spirit of Bilbo, a Democrat in the Jefferson Davis mode, now posseses the Republican Party.

| +Save/Share | |