ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 19, 1996 TAG: 9603190038
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RODOLFO F. ACUNA
PEOPLE WHO blame the economy for the current anti-immigration hysteria remind me of my mother, who used to blame alcohol for my uncles' frequent drunken binges.
``Your uncles are good men,'' she would say. ``It's the alcohol that makes them act that way.'' I was raised as a Catholic, and alcohol was always the excuse of choice. I didn't start to question this pattern until I got older and realized that my mother was only avoiding the truth. It was easier for her - and for my uncles - to find a scapegoat than to apologize for or admit to their bad manners.
So it is with anti-immigrant hysteria: it's not the economy, stupid! It's just plain racism. It's not an aberration. It's not going to disappear in better times. And it's not a Republican ploy that the Democratic Party will put a stop to.
This is not the first time that bigotry has masqueraded as a public dialogue on the issue of immigration. This debate reached a climax in the 1920s, when two immigration laws established the principle of national origins. It set numerical quotas for immigrants that varied according to one's country of origin. The result ensured northern European dominance in this country for decades.
Since then, the world has fought a war against fascism and the United States has experienced a civil-rights movement that heightened public sensitivity to racism. Now the need to blame the alcohol is even more compelling than in the 1920s. Except perhaps for Pat Buchanan, people can't get away with being openly bigoted.
But race is indeed still fueling the immigration backlash.
Since the 1965 Immigration Act, which abandoned the previous U.S. policy of controlling immigration by national origin, millions of Latin Americans (mostly Mexican) and Asians have visibly changed the racial composition of the United States.
Sometime early in the next millennium, the majority of Americans will not be white. Already more than 40 percent of the city of Los Angeles is Latino, 40 percent is white and the rest is African American, Asian American, and other people of color.
Nativists now dub Los Angeles the Third World capital of the United States. And as the city has changed, it has become a birthplace of official racist proposals, from the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 to current legislation that would deny public education to the children of undocumented workers and amend the Constitution to deprive the native-born children of immigrants the right of citizenship.
Americans have always considered themselves special - different from the Germans or the Yugoslavians who have gone to murderous extremes in their treatment of the ``other.'' But today's anti-immigrant hysteria, and our rationalization of it, resembles Germany's behavior during the 1920s.
The Holocaust began with small lies that grew larger. Soon it was difficult to tell truth from fiction. It was easier to blame the Jews for faults in the national character and economy than to admit to them. That is why after World War II so many Germans said they never suspected what was happening in the death camps.
Undoubtedly Pat Buchanan has accelerated our tendency to demonize the ``other.'' His popularity is a symptom of the racism that lurks in the contours of our national history.
Buchanan is like so many Irish-American lads with whom I attended Jesuit prep school. They are short on historical memory of the struggle of their ancestors - either in the old country or here. They are Catholic on the outside, vehemently pro-life, all the while forgetting that their bishops have also labeled immigrant-bashing a sin.
However, Buchanan is less of a problem than the ``good guys'' like President Clinton. In his State of the Union address, Clinton jumped on the scapegoating bandwagon, and made it clear that he would campaign against immigrants.
We should not fool ourselves into believing that the Democratic Party will do something before this madness goes too far. The only way to stop this madness is to stop blaming the alcohol and to start calling it the racism that it is.
Rodolfo F. Acuna is a professor of Chicano studies at California State University, Northridge.
- Knight-Ridder/Tribune
LENGTH: Medium: 83 linesby CNB