Guest Column
Democrats Cowed by GOP Scare Tactics on Immigrants
- By Juan Gonzalez
- November 15, 2007
- New York Daily News
- Juan Gonzalez is a Daily News columnist.
Adriano Espaillat, the state assemblyman
from Washington Heights, was touring the storm-ravaged Dominican
Republic when he got a telephone call from Gov. Spitzer.
It was late Tuesday and the governor told him that he was
abandoning his plan to issue driver’s licenses to illegal
immigrants in New York State.
After two months of relentless pounding from Senate Republicans
and television pundits like Lou Dobbs, and after a firestorm of
public opposition against his plan, Spitzer was conceding
defeat.
“This is tragic,” Espaillat said yesterday. “The undertone of
bigotry on this issue has prevailed. The Democratic Party in
this state just caved and shifted to the right.”
Espaillat voiced what many Latino leaders now fear: Illegal
immigration is rapidly becoming the boogey man of the upcoming
presidential race.
Republican leaders, fearing a complete rout of their party in
next year’s national election, are determined to ride public
anger over undocumented immigrants in the same way they rode
anger over gay marriage in the 2004 race.
Look at all those illegal Salvadoran gardeners and Mexican bus
boys and Jamaican nannies and Haitian sugar cane cutters - all
those weapons of mass destruction aimed at America.
Terrorists abroad. Alien invasion within. Danger everywhere.
Such is the tone of many of the e-mails and letters I receive
whenever I write about immigration. Others are so filled with
pure venom toward Hispanics they make Dobbs, the Father Coughlin
of our time, sound positively warm and cuddly.
Early this week, U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, the Republican
presidential candidate from Colorado, released a campaign
commercial in Iowa.
It shows a hooded terrorist with a bomb in a shopping mall,
while talking about “20 million aliens who have come here to
take our jobs” and “Islamic terrorists freely roaming on U.S.
soil.”
Like Bush, who falsely linked Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda,
Tancredo and the extreme wing of the anti-immigrant movement are
falsely linking foreign terrorists to immigrants who come here
desperate to find work.
While governors and mayors across America are being forced to
deal with the failure of Congress to approve comprehensive
immigration reform, Tancredo and the haters whip up the worst
fears imaginable.
Tancredo’s presidential campaign may not be getting much
support, but his views on immigration are getting far more
traction.
Last week, House Republicans pushed through a last-minute
provision that forbids the federal Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission from pursuing discrimination cases against companies
that force their workers to speak only English.
When more than 30 centrist Democrats joined with the Republicans
to pass the bill, members of the Hispanic Caucus were furious;
they threatened to withhold their votes on other important bills
in protest.
“We’ve had to fight and argue every day with some of our own
Democrats to stop them from backing anti-immigrant measures,”
said U.S. Rep. Nydia Velazquez, (D-N.Y.).
The solution to the immigration problem is comprehensive reform
from Washington. But with half the Democrats cowed by the
fear-mongering of the extreme right, the most voiceless and
powerless people in America - undocumented workers - are about
to become this year’s Willie Horton.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed by HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com) without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)