HispanicVista Columnists

By Suzanne Manneh
New America Media,
Jan 01, 2008

Immigrant rights activists are attempting to change the face of the immigration debate in the blogosphere – in spite of a fierce anti-immigration online presence, activists said on Access Washington, a New America Media-sponsored conference call with ethnic media.

Liza Sabater, established blogger of Culture Kitchen and the Daily Gotham, asserts that immigrant rights activists throughout the United States are utilizing the Internet to expand their pro-immigrant discourse and network.

“There is a huge, vast number of pro-immigration bloggers, the bulk of them ethnic bloggers, writing from that experience,” Sabater explains.

Even those who don’t consider themselves political are writing about immigration issues, she says, because they impact their everyday life. “These include so-called mommy bloggers, daddy bloggers, education bloggers, even entertainment and gossip bloggers,” she says.

Kimchi Mammas, for example, a Korean “mommy” blog site, frequently holds discussions that “amplify the pro-immigration movement online,” Sabater explains.

Marian Douglas, an African-American blogger, is one of many who use online social networks, such as Facebook, to mobilize pro-immigration activism.

Latino pro-immigrant writers like Alisa Valdes have tried to “detach themselves from the idea that immigration means Latino, because it really doesn’t.”

“It is a much larger discussion,” says Sabater, who attributes this conflation to anti-immigration groups who, she says, “want to sell the immigration movement as an invasion of ‘these dirty, stinky Latinos coming into the United States.’” One of the most prominent of these organizations is the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which was recently classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“FAIR has been the leader in raising anti-immigrant law at the local and state level,” says Henry Fernandez, senior fellow with the Center for American Progress. “While much of the nation’s concern has been on illegal immigration, FAIR simply uses this issue to open the door to tell its hateful stories that all immigration, whether legal or illegal, is bad for America.”

Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the SPLC describes FAIR as “an organization with a long history of bigotry, one-sided reporting, and of connections to white supremacy groups.” He says several staff and board members of FAIR are affiliated with white supremacist groups, such as VDARE and Council for Conservative Citizens.

FAIR has also “shamelessly accepted, year after year, a total of $1.2 million dollars from the racist organization the Pioneer Fund,” says Potok, who adds that FAIR promotes “racist conspiracy theories, such as the reconquista, meaning that Mexico is involved in a secret plot in conjunction with American born Latinos to recapture the southwestern United States.”

“This is a pure fantasy in the paranoid minds of FAIR and its friends,” he asserts.

Anti-immigration groups, meanwhile, have cultivated their own minority bloggers to voice their messages, in what Sabater calls the “browning of the face of anti-immigration.” These include Asian bloggers like Michelle Malkin and numerous African-American bloggers.

Yet some of the organizations set up by FAIR – such as Choose Black America – have no members, adds Fernandez; they simply serve as fronts for the organization, and have African-American spokespeople in “an organized effort to have people of color speaking on this issue.”

An abundance of pro-immigration voices from the Asian, African-American, Middle Eastern, and Native American communities is now gaining visibility nationally, in addition to the pro-immigration voices from Latino communities.

This is becoming increasingly present in the blogosphere, says Devin Burghart, director of the Center for New Community, based in Chicago. “At the same time that we’ve witnessed a marked rise in the number of state and local anti-immigrant organizations—in fact over the last two years it’s been more than a 600 percent increase—we’ve also been overwhelmed by the response of people of good will around the country who care about American values and the threat that new nativist groups, like FAIR, pose to those core American values.”

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=d03ea9c48943960997bc96c4244852c9