December 27, 2007 9:57 AM
The nationally respected Southern Poverty Law Center says that hate crimes against Latinos have increased a whopping 35% in just the three years from 2003 to 2006, the last year for which FBI stats are available. The Center's report confirms what most immigrant community groups are seeing on the ground: It has become increasingly acceptable to use violence against immigrants.
According to the report:
There's no doubt that the tone of the raging national debate over immigration is growing uglier by the day. Once limited to hard-core white supremacists and a handful of border-state extremists, vicious public denunciations of undocumented brown-skinned immigrants are increasingly common among supposedly mainstream anti-immigration activists, radio hosts and politicians. While their dehumanizing rhetoric typically stops short of openly sanctioning bloodshed, much of it implicitly encourages or even endorses violence by characterizing immigrants from Mexico and Central America as "invaders," "criminal aliens" and "cockroaches."
When big budget politicians, and commentators on programs bankrolled by Fox and Disney used the testosterone charged rhetoric of "invasion" and "reconquest" to describe folks coming here to pick your apples and mow your lawn, is it any wonder that knuckleheaded "patriots" try to become heroes by taking a baseball bat to the Spanish-speaking Osamas?
Lest you ascribe these attacks to regions remote from where this blog is written, one of the epicenters for this nativist-on-Latino violence is Suffolk County. When politicians make political hay by demonizing an ethnic group, they place that group in danger of ostracism and violence.
Is it really surprising that hate crimes against Latinos have increased so dramatically? Racism, influenced by the public discourse, claims that all Latinos are undocumented and "illegal," that criminals deserve to be punished, and that punishment in the form of violence is acceptable.
By Charlene January 2, 2008 01:35 PM