"A list of 1,300 Utah residents described as illegal immigrants has sown fear among some Hispanics here, and prompted an investigation into its origins and dissemination."
So begins a story in The New York Times about a Utah group named Concerned Citizens of the United States. The group compiled a list of names of people they suspect of being in the county without papers. Naturally, the list is filled with the names of Latinos.
My question is: Where are the political leaders banding together to condemn this hate mongering?
President Barack Obama is pushing, FINALLY, for immigration reform. He caved into right-wing fear mongers, however, by talking up border safety as if the murders and rapes along the border were committed by people who are here without papers. He needs to educate the Fearful Minority that there's a difference between people without papers and people who are criminals. The federal government is right to go after criminals, the hardcore narco-traffickers, the murderers, the rapists, the abusers.
But to go after people who are working in misery so that their children can have opportunities denied to them as a result of US foreign policy that led to the need to emigrate here in the first place? That is criminal.
And so is allowing a group of neo-fascists gather names in the name of the United States. That's what Joseph McCarthy did in the 1950s, when he saw monstrous communists everywhere. National treasure John F. Kennedy never railed against McCarthy. Their friendship and mutual interest in power came first. By the time McCarthy was done in by his own maddness -- he was censured by his fellow senators eventually and lost power -- many people had lost their jobs and their reputations.
This list on supposed immigrants without papers is echoes those terrifying Red Scare days. But they echo the eight years when George W. Bush was "president," when traditional media outlets failed to hold him accountable for the economic collapse, Katrina, two wars, 911.
The silence on this list from our political leaders is beyond disappointing. It is almost criminal.
