White Might For White Rights
At the beginning of the secession of the slave-owning states over the election of Abraham Lincoln, The Valley Spirit of Franklin County, Virginia published one of the most honest contemporary admissions that the pending internecine strife was in part about race:
“The Democratic Party maintain that our government was formed by white men to be controlled by white men for the prosperity and happiness of their race.”
Just because the South lost the Civil War doesn’t mean that this attitude had changed - not in the slightest. As New Republic assistant editor Clay Risen wrote in the Boston Globe on March 5, 2006:
“For almost 100 years, a coterie of white elites had controlled the South by leveraging racial antagonisms and legal discrimination to ensure white solidarity behind the Democratic Party. Southern historians argue that the initial shift to the right was led by older whites in a backlash against [Lyndon] Johnson’s civil rights efforts. [Johnson] forfeited the region to the Republicans by signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Legend has it that as he put down his pen Johnson told an aide, “We have lost the South for a generation.
“[I]t’s hard to ignore the decades of subtle and not-so-subtle efforts by Republican presidential tickets to court white racism…. According to the conventional wisdom, … white voters were soon gobbled up by Nixon’s racially coded “Southern strategy.”
The modern version of racism doesn’t concern the emancipation of the black race, but the political and economic exploitation of the brown race.
With whites becoming the minority in American cities, and with whites now the minority in 1-in-10 rural counties, the new immigration enforcement plan has to be a calculated strategy to reverse currently declining political fortunes for the contination of Republican Party rule of the United States. The White House is striking back at the lame Democratic Party in retaliation for its inept conduct of governance. It appears that the GOP is abandoning their hoped-for recruitment of Hispanics as party members through “moral issue” appeals in favor of attempting to retain white males - already hard hit by employment dislocation - from being slammed again by the pending collapse of the mortgage industry. Would any unemployed man not become even more angry at losing his home without having a chance to avoid foreclosure through having a steady job? Why not direct that anger at those who “betrayed” the “God’s Own” Radical Religious Party’s “friendly” overtures to join the effort to enrich the Masters’ Race?
So on with the show!
Crying crocodile tears over the failure of the Congress to pass George W. Bush’s immigration “reform” bill, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced plans to step up enforcement of immigration and residency laws, including increasing the number of ICE men on border patrol and higher fines for employers. New rules have been announced, requiring employers to fire workers who cannot provide verifiable documentation proving legal residency.
Chertoff acknowledged in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that employers - particularly those in immigrant-dependent industries like agriculture, hospitality and healthcare - would suffer “painful economic fallout” from the new enforcement rules, but declined to feel any sympathy for those who are the traditional constituency of the Republican Party, saying, “We have been crystal clear about what the consequences would be.”
Needless to say, said constituency is feeling a bit put out by this declaration of war by the White House against everyone involved in low-wage labor. Representatives of both labor and management, interviewed by various news organizations, wonder if this isn’t a pressure tactic aimed specifically at the Congress to be more amenable to Oval Office objective when it returns from a vacation longer than most workers will see this year (like Bush can talk!). remarked: “People will feel it when they go grocery shopping.”
And so they will! Mike Stuart, president of the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association, confided: “I’m very fearful of our ability to grow and harvest at the level we’re doing now.” Any reduction in production of Florida’s oranges will thus make your morning date with Minute Maid a tad more costly.
Vernie Glasson, executive director of the Texas Farm Bureau, reminds us: “Agriculture is labor intensive. When melons or onions need to get harvested, you have to harvest them. Farmers and ranchers out here don’t have a human resources office with someone sitting there in the air conditioning doing paperwork.”
Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business and a board member of Texas Employers for Immigration Reform, pointed out in the Houston Chronicle that the new immigration policy “forces employers to choose between criminal penalties and illegal racial discrimination.”
Not that this argument will resonate with a sociopath who mocked the appeal of a prisoner he was about to allow to be executed. The Bush attitude is reported to be: “They asked for it!”
Hammond also predicted that Texas would lose 300,000 to 400,000 jobs at a time when construction of new homes is being affected by the collapsing housing sector. But political expediency is clearly far more necessary to continued Republican rule than are the small businessmen - like America’s farmers, who hire 1 million farm workers (half of whom are undocumented. “This is not just painful, this is death to the American farmer,” moaned Maureen Torrey, who runs a family dairy and vegetable farm in Elba, N. Y.
Actually, corporatization is more likely to be the death of the family farm, but I digress.
At the other end of the food chain, John Gay of the National Restaurant Association fretted, “We are concerned that the new regulations will result in employers in numerous industries having to let workers go.” Such service industries would include construction, janitorial and landscaping companies, and hotels and restaurants.
Craig J. Regelbrugge of the American Nursery & Landscape Association, in a Google comment posted on the news page covering immigrant worker stories (can’t locate a good link for this), worries: “The rule now being anticipated won’t solve the problem, and will have unintended consequences.” Such consequences might include higher food costs, and more identity theft. He doesn’t mention the fines which would take away capital for other business needs.
Regelbrugge also suggests that some employers will leave the country rather than remain to abide by the new regulations.
At the other end of the political spectrum, California is expected to be hit hard by the new regulations. “DINO Di” Feinstein predicted a “catastrophe” in the state’s $32 billion agriculture industry if estimated 2.5 million illegal immigrants working as farm hands are returned to their place of origin.
Deborah Meyers, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, agrees, and predicted the fallout to be quite visible within six months. “Some employers are going to find themselves having to fire significant portions of their workforces,” she said.
Larry Rohlfes, assistant executive director of the California Landscape Contractors Association, predicted that many of these displaced workers would go underground and become unlicensed contractors. “It’s going to hurt our remaining workers because the underground economy competes with us and because they have much lower costs,” Rohlfes said.
The newspapers across the land are taking up the challenge. The Mercury News said in an editorial that the new rules are the “Wrong way to police immigration“. The New York Times calls it “The Misery Strategy.
Michigan State University’s The State News declares, “If anything, it will only leave many people unemployed and hopeless, while feeding an ever-growing racism against anyone who appears to be Latin American.” The Centre Daily Times of State College, PA reports that “Migrants from Mexico and Central America are finding it harder to get jobs and are living under a dramatically increased sense of siege.” Immigrants are reportedly hoarding funds to pay for a trip back home should things get worse.
Thinks look like they are about to get worse. The “authoritarians” of the Republican Party have long sought to impose natioal identity cards on the American people. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina will introduce legislation to replace the current Social Security card with plastic biometric cards “that can’t be duplicated” as a means of preventing false identities. He should talk this over how well this plan works with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Department of Motor Vehicles.
But let’s say that the Great White Fear of losing dominance comes about. One resident of Oklahoma saw a silver lining when he wrote to the editor of The Oklahoman, “Doe [sic] this mean that if white people become the “monority” then we can get jobs we aren’t qualified for just because we are white and someone needs to meet a quota?”
If “Jeff, Moore” wants to evade non-whites, he might consider moving to Garfield County, Montana, where whites make up 98.9 percent of the population.
Or, perhaps more sympathetic to his Confederate leanings, he might consider attending the GOP District Convention hosted by White County, Georgia.
Just have him stay away from Texas, where The Austin American-Statesman reports Texas as having the most majority-minorities counties in the nation.