Earlier this month, President Obama and a bipartisan group of members of Congress did the right thing by granting Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Haitian immigrants already in the United States. Granting TPS was a welcome and timely move that reinforced American values at a time of great international turmoil.
It was a move that we, and many other organizations, applauded with the advertisement above, which appeared in Roll Call last Thursday, January 21st.
Since then, as Andrea Nill at the Wonk Room points out, anti-immigration policy organizations and anti-immigration legislators began spouting nonsense like, "Haiti’s So Screwed Up Because It Wasn’t Colonized Long Enough" and "Undocumented Haitians Should Be Deported, Haiti In ‘Great Need Of Relief Workers" immediately following the tragedy. Blogger Duke at The Sanctuary quotes the anti-immigration "think tank" director, Mark Krikorian, in "Krikorian: Problem with Haiti- slavery ended too soon."
A recent article in the Washington Post by Amy Goldstein and Peter Whoriskeyon on whether the US should let more Haitians immigrate in the wake of the disaster was greeted with comments like:
]If you are not familiar with these people, I suggest you go to South Florida and see what they’ve done for the neighborhood. Ask the locals what they think of Haitian immigrants. And the crime and third-world ways they’ve brought with them. Then, write to your Congressional representatives and tell them you don’t want any more Haitian immigration. And that the illegals already here should be sent back as soon as feasible. After two-hundred years of self-rule look at what they’ve achieved. No, we don’t want any more immigration from there.
The few positive comments on the article included:
The cries that "oh, these people are not as good as we are and will only bring disease and bad culture and most likely the end of America as we know it" was the same argument used in past centuries against desperate immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe by those who'd gotten here first and who fancied themselves of a superior culture and better stock. The irony is that many of those screaming now about diseases and bad things the Haitians could bring, might have heard the same said about their ancestors way back then, when they were trying just as desperately to get into America.
The article's comment pages, literally hundreds of comments long, came out mostly against the idea of Haitian immigration, and were peppered with tell-tale talking points from the online anti-immigrant networks, which have stepped up their immigrant blame game in the wake of the tragedy.
In fact, many of the anti-immigration organizations in the John Tanton network have members whose sole job is to whip up xenophobic sentiment online. This overabundance of negative, often-racist rhetoric is nothing new, and it should surprise no online publication or blog that's been covering the topic of immigration for very long. According to the Chicago Tribune:
..."I've got 80-year-olds that are...Internet fighter pilots," said William Gheen, president of the North Carolina-based Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee, a conservative group whose Web campaign helped derail Immigration reform legislation in Congress last year by prompting thousands of faxes, e-mails and phone calls to legislators.
Some of them, when they first came on, were scared to death to even interact in this media," Gheen said. "But I've watched them grow. Necessity is the mother of invention, and we're inventing tactics as we go."...
Fortunately, most Americans firmly reject William Gheen's deport-them-all agenda, whether for practical, economic, or humanitarian reasons.
Recent polling shows that the majority of Americans want to see a pragmatic, common-sense solution that fixes our immigration crisis: comprehensive immigration reform. In fact, a series of polls conducted in November 2008, May 2009, and December 2009 show that the American people want Congress to tackle the issue, and are strongly in favor of a comprehensive proposal that puts undocumented immigrants on a path to citizenship if they register, pay taxes, and meet other criteria. In other words, most Americans support a bipartisan solution that's in line with our nation's values.
Cross-Posted at America's Voice.