American Ideals Lose Out in Ugly Immigration Bill

by Joel McNally

White mobs don't need to resort to rocks and bottles any more. Their elected representatives, dressed up in three-piece suits, are doing the racist dirty work using polite language in the hallowed halls of Congress and the Legislature.

When up to 30,000 Latinos and other supporters of civil rights for immigrants stretched for a mile marching across the 6th Street viaduct into downtown Milwaukee last week, it was a powerful symbol.

The 6th Street viaduct was recently rebuilt in a sweeping modernistic design, but it may as well have been the old 16th Street bridge that Father James Groppi and black and white civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s used to march across going the other way.

The bridge had been prettied up with a futuristic motif, but the purpose of the march was to fight the latest forms of the same old, ugly racism.

In the late '60s, Father Groppi led large groups of African-Americans across the 16th Street bridge to the all-white south side, where they were greeted with rocks, bottles and racial epithets.

Last week, a large group of Latinos marched across the 6th Street viaduct from the no-longer-all-white south side into a city where mobs no longer gather in the streets to openly express ugly, racist feelings.

White mobs don't need to resort to rocks and bottles any more. Their elected representatives, dressed up in three-piece suits, are doing the racist dirty work using polite language in the hallowed halls of Congress and the Legislature.

Milwaukee area Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner has been the driving force behind the harshest anti-immigration legislation in American history. The bill Sensenbrenner pushed through the House of Representatives would build a 700-mile fence along the border between the United States and Mexico.

Remember when we used to condemn Communists for building a wall between East and West Berlin to keep people in? Now we are doing the same thing to try to keep people of color out.
The fence is just a 700-mile-long physical representation of the intense hatred toward Mexican immigrants seething through the bill.

The legislation also would make illegal immigration to this country a felony instead of a civil violation. That would overwhelm our courts and prisons with more than 11 million illegal immigrants already estimated to be living in this country.

Even more disturbing is a provision of the bill that would make it a crime to provide any assistance to an illegal immigrant.
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