community-based, non-corporate, participatory media
“The First Nazi City in America”
by Juan Santos
Tuesday, Jul. 18, 2006 at 7:04 PM
Juan_Santos@Mexica.net
This isn’t South Africa under Apartheid; it’s not the Deep South under Jim Crow. It’s not Nazi Germany, or 1984 . It’s Hazleton Pennsylvania, USA- population 31,000. The year is 2006 in the Common Era: 514 years since the white invasion of the Americas.
Everyone will have to register their nationality with the government. No one will be exempt. People of certain nationalities will be targeted for removal. Those who look like they might be from those nations will be marked as suspects, constantly subject to harassment, official and unofficial.
Certain people, based on their nationality, will not be allowed to work. They will not be allowed to live in this place. They will be denied access to hospitals, to doctors. They will not be allowed to purchase medicine or food. Their children will be driven from the schools.
Every store clerk will become a race cop, compelled by law to check the papers of every customer they find “suspect.” Everyone who isn’t white will be challenged at the point of sale for any commodity they might need or want. The official language will be English: only. Those who try to shelter, clothe, feed, or give gainful employment or medical assistance to the targeted population will be punished.
According to the LA Times, when the law passed, white citizens burst into applause. The Times reported the reaction of one white woman to the news: "The only ones who are against it are the Hispanics," she said, "and that's because it's against them."
This isn’t South Africa under Apartheid; it’s not the Deep South under Jim Crow. It’s not Nazi Germany, or 1984 . It’s Hazleton Pennsylvania, USA- population 31,000. The year is 2006 in the Common Era: 514 years since the white invasion of the Americas.
Let’s make one thing clear; none of this is about “illegal immigration.” It’s not even about immigration.
Before it passed, Anna Arias spoke at the Hazelton council meeting against the ordinance, warning that its approval would make Hazleton "the first Nazi city in the country." When she asked the crowd if they would deport the children of undocumented workers – utterly “legal” US citizens - the crowd shouted “Yes!”
There’s only one thing the “immigration debate” is about: It’s about white nationalism.
The law recently passed by the Hazelton City Council in a 4-1 vote wasn’t the brain child of anyone in Hazleton. It’s a copycat measure based on a design by a xenophobe from San Bernardino, California by the name of Joe Turner.
Turner, age 27, is an angry young white man with a sneering manner who heads up a group of Minutemen-style thugs called Save Our State (SOS.) He was the author of the original Hazleton-style measure, one that recently failed to get on the ballot in his home town.
Turner’s group has appeared publicly with members of the neo-Nazi organization Stormfront in tow; he says California is being turned into a “Third World Cesspool” by migrants, that Mexican culture is “inferior” to white European culture and that being a white nationalist “doesn’t make you a racist.”
“Americans,” Turner says, “are tired of watching their great American culture disappear, only to watch it be replaced by other cultures that are inferior and contradictory to everything this country was built upon.”
Turner says, “Gone are the days when we allowed our opponents to define the terminology of the debate.” In an SOS email thread entitled “Racism Redefined,” SOS members show what he means:
One writes: “I say: "Racist and proud of it" when they hurl their slime at me.”
Everyone who hates migrants and wants them gone or under lockdown denies their feelings in the matter have anything to do with race – even Turner, when he’s pressed.
That goes for Hazleton mayor Louis Barletta as well; having copied the persecutorial legislation advanced by Turner, he denies being "racist, intolerant and unfair," claiming that "illegal is illegal" and that the Hazleton ordinance doesn’t "target any particular race."
But demographic trends show that the nation as a whole will be half peoples of color by 2050, a fact that causes no small unease among white cultural conservatives across the country, especially in the “Red States” which are largely white, and whose populations have recently shifted in both culture and color.
Barletta is no exception. The very presence of non-white people disturbs him.
"There's no place for me to hide in a small city," he said, according to the Times. "I get it in the grocery store, I get it at the lunch counter, when I get my morning coffee, when I'm pumping gas.
"People are begging me, because we are losing the one asset that this city has to offer — our quality of life."
That’s the same complaint Joe Turner and overt white nationalist groups raise when they say US cities are turning into “Third World Cesspools.”
"It's about time," said Francis X. Tucci, a white business owner and lifelong resident of Hazleton. "We were a nice community," she added. Now the “nice” community is 30% Brown. One anti-migrant commentator wrote that the new law would frighten migrants. “The only people it will scare Christian,” he wrote, “are those here illegally and they should be scared.”
“The city's population has shot from 5% Hispanic to 30% Hispanic in only 6 years,” he wrote. “While not all are illegal aliens, there is suspicion that a large majority are.”
Hazleton will hunt down its suspects through every “legal” means, using police, health and code officers. “It could be a routine traffic stop or a code violation,” Barletta said. “When we do come across someone here illegally, we will find their place of employment if there is one and where they live. We would be the first city that would be going after businesses where they work and the place where they sleep.”
In a Freudian slip, he added "The illegal citizens, I would recommend they leave."
The Hazleton Illegal Immigration Relief Act forces anyone seeking to rent a dwelling in the city to apply to the city for a residency license and to submit to an investigation of their citizenship status.
Landlords who rent to people without a residency license will be fined $1,000 for each undocumented tenant on their premises and $100 per day the renter remains there without a permit.
Business owners who hire, rent property to, or provide either goods or services to migrants will lose their business permit for five years on a first offense and 10 years on a second, and find themselves ineligible for city contracts.
Barletta sites crime and economic stressors as among the principal reasons for targeting the brown population of the city. But the reality is that migrants have been an immense boon to the Hazleton economy, creating 60 new businesses and markedly boosting the value of real estate. Only a year ago Barletta was bragging that the economy was going through an unprecedented boom, due to migration. Today he says, "Illegal aliens are a drain on our resources, and they are not welcome here.”
In the meantime total arrests are down and violent crimes of all descriptions are down since the influx of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans began, while, predictably in any community of color, drug related arrests are up.
Barletta says "we are arresting illegal individuals much more often than we ever have." He doesn’t specify if the arrests are proportional to the population growth in the community, whether there is a differential in the rate of arrests for brown and white people, nor what role racial profiling might play in arrest figures.
Barletta admits the figures don’t back him up. But that’s not the point. The point is that the stereotypes about “crime” and “poverty” are so widespread and deeply entrenched that, even when unequivocally contradicted by hard data, they can be used to stir up a fear driven racist backlash against communities of color – and that is just what Barletta has done.
He knows what his white constituents want.
The white people of Hazleton want to be separate, apart: That’s what Apartheid means. It’s Afrikaans for "Separateness.” Under international law, Apartheid is a Crime Against Humanity.
The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines the following acts as criminal:
"Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognised trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association…"
No one in Hazleton will ever be tried – much less convicted – under the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. The US is one of a handful of nations that – through Democrat and Republican administrations alike – has refused to sign the treaty.
Besides, official white Amerika will never admit that the Chican@ and Mexican@ people, for example, are one people: inseparable; they will never admit that to attack one segment of the community is to attack the whole; they will never admit that Chican@s, Mexican@s and Native Americans are a single group of indigenous descent, an ethnic and racial group that is being singled out for attack.
A Hazleton ophthalmologist – a Puerto Rican – said, "We are family. If you insult part of the family, you insult the whole family."
Official Amerika will never admit that the matter of “national origin” and “immigration status” is little more than a thin excuse for ethnic suppression and ethnic cleansing.
A passage from Ellen Barry’s report on Hazleton in the LA Times makes the point:
“White people feel free to speak openly about their annoyance with immigrants, said Jessica Cruz, who waits tables in two local diners.
“Cruz sputtered with anger recalling a recent day when she greeted three friends in Spanish, and a customer looked up from his seat, pointed his finger at her and told her to speak English. Another customer looked into the kitchen and said he couldn't wait until Immigration came to take away the Mexicans.”
Faced with a trio of oppressions – Apartheid style banishment, deportation and racial profiling, brown people are already leaving Hazleton. “They feel like this is racism,” said the publisher of El Mensajero – the community’s newspaper.
They may have no place to go.
What awaits them is a nation poised to give birth to a new Jim Crow, poised at the edge of fascism; a Congress that wants to deport millions and a string of localities poised to make the nation a patchwork of little Nurembergs, like the place where the Nazi laws on citizenship and race were forged in 1935.
It has come this far. The national movement for migrant’s rights must act now and bring all its resources to bear to wipe the Hazleton law clean from the slate.
While there’s still time.
_______
Juan Santos is a writer and editor living in Los Angeles, CA.
Copy of The Ordinance
by Morgan
Monday, Aug. 07, 2006 at 5:07 PM
Here is the text of the Ordinance, right from the city's website:
http://www.hazletoncity.org/2006_10_Illegal_Immigration_Relief_Act_%20NEW.pdf
"514 years since the white invasion of the Americas"
by racist spotter
Thursday, Aug. 10, 2006 at 7:07 PM
You reveal yourself to be a racist up front. Give the *hate Whitey* shit a rest.
not the Mexicans' fault
by pointer
Friday, Aug. 25, 2006 at 6:40 AM
SFimc.org
Black men's problems not Mexicans' fault
By Cynthia Tucker
Originally published August 21, 2006
ATLANTA // In the last year or so, poor and marginalized black men have gained unlikely allies: right-wing zealots taking a hard line against illegal immigration. Those hard-core ideologues have added to their complaints against illegal workers the claim that they are taking jobs from uneducated black men.
At a hearing on illegal immigration held in north Georgia last week, Phil Kent, spokesman for Americans for Immigration Control, complained that undocumented workers are "wage thieves," adding, "They are taking jobs from unemployed Americans - especially low-income whites, blacks and teenagers."
The Minuteman Project, a high-profile group of activists who want to seal the southern border, has gone so far as to recruit a few blacks to their cause. One of those - Ted Hayes, a Los Angeles homeless advocate - has denounced illegal immigration as "the greatest threat to U.S. black citizens since slavery."
Introducing Mr. Hayes as a guest on his show in April, conservative talk-show host Sean Hannity sounded like an unreconstructed 1960s liberal as he described Mr. Hayes' cause:
"I know you speak up for the downtrodden, the poor. ... Isn't the issue ... let's go after the employers? Let's go after them, who are paying subminimum wage to people who are here undocumented and give those jobs to Americans and force the employers to pay what they should pay?"
Let's postpone, for a moment, an analysis of the logic of that argument and just consider how remarkable it is that Mr. Hannity and his ilk would suggest that they care about America's "downtrodden" and a fair wage for them. After all, they are not known for their support of affirmative action, increases in the minimum wage and other programs that might boost the prospects of black men.
Indeed, Mr. Kent, a former newspaperman, was once in a position to be a prominent advocate for just those causes, but he opposed them instead. As longtime editorial page editor of The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, he presided over an opinion page that fought proposed increases in the minimum wage. In 2000, a Chronicle editorial said: "Basically, a boost in minimum wage is a boost in allowance to teens of often affluent parents. It's certainly not going to rescue anyone from poverty as proponents claim."
So Mr. Kent worries about wages for low-income earners?
Of course, it's easy to lampoon the hypocrisy of Mr. Kent and other latecomers to the cause of marginalized Americans, especially uneducated black men. It's also true that employers should not be allowed to get away with exploiting illegal workers with substandard pay.
But the ultraconservatives' analysis is faulty. The most comprehensive studies show that, on balance, illegal immigration may depress wages on the low end of the spectrum a bit, but not much - no more than 50 to 60 cents an hour, according to a recent analysis of the best studies in The New York Times. While illegal immigrants burden the social infrastructure - housing stock, schools and hospitals - in some neighborhoods, they also revitalize many neighborhoods as they open new businesses and buy additional goods and services.
There are still good reasons, of course, to worry about the prospects of less-educated black men, who are increasingly unemployed, imprisoned and marginalized. They continue to be both victims and perpetrators of homicide in disproportionate numbers. In the last decade, they have also fallen victim, increasingly, to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Perhaps nothing has done more harm to uneducated black men over the last decade than the shift toward long prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. By some estimates, one-third of young black men are either in prison, on parole or on probation. Once a black man acquires a prison record, his prospects for legal employment dim drastically - at any wage.
If all 11 million illegal immigrants disappeared tomorrow, that would not change. So let's not kid ourselves by blaming Mexicans.
"www.sfimc.org"
by disclaimer
Monday, Sep. 04, 2006 at 3:23 PM
No one from SF-IMC posted this, nor would we have. It's crap. To blame us for posting it is disinformation. So is hiding our disclaimer.
Why do the editors here have time to hide disclaimers, but do not have time to hide disinformation? It's bad politics and worse journalism.
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