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So Who Were Those Interesting Commenters Yesterday?

Posted December 3, 2009 by Patrick Young, Esq.

Anyone who visited this site yesterday had to be struck by the number and tone of the comments on an article I wrote about a panel presentation on immigration reform at Columbia University Tuesday night. You may rightly have wondered if Long Island Wins has a huge following among people bitterly antagonistic towards immigrants who, after months of lurking unnoticed at the margins, suddenly felt called upon to unleash their venom.
Nope.
The web site of Glenn Spencer’s anti-immigrant American Patrol posted a link to the Long Island Wins blog yesterday and dozens of his supporters transited through. Since Long Island Wins can appropriately be described as viewing immigrants favorably, it was a good opportunity for our readers to see the opinions on the other side, to examine the rationality of their arguments and the depth of their knowledge about the issue.
The title this leading anti-immigrant group gave to its posting on my coverage of the open public forum at Columbia University attended primarily by Ivy league students and faculty was: “Open-borders fanatics meet to plot amnesty scheme”.
An interesting aside:
Whenever I read articles on immigration, I notice, and I’m sure you have as well, that the majority of the comments are from anti-immigrant folks. I’ve always wondered if that meant that there are more people opposed to immigration, or if they are just a lot more vocal. Well, yesterday’s “experiment” gives us a bit of useful data:
While they made up less than a quarter of our visitors yesterday, the American Patrol readers appear to have accounted for 55% of yesterday’s reader comments.
Sign the Immigration Reform petition.

Tags : american patrol, glenn spencer, hate watch

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