I’ve had better days in the fight for things in which I believe deeply. Nathan Newman began a chain noting a religious split on the question of immigration. I wrote a bit about this over there. I felt rather lonely–far less persons reflected sympathy for undocumented persons than I do. I took a licking and kept on ticking (I think), but garnered my second (1) and a (2) or two for my efforts. I shall add them to my merit badges.

A significant amount of objection to what I was saying came from people who objected to my attribution of a "large part" of opposition to the New Immigration to Xenophobia. For me, "large part" equates to "significant" not to "most" or "all". Rather than get into a mud slinging match I thought I’d move over to my blog, write a bit, and see what kind of discussion, if any, it evokes.

I thought I’d begin with something in the nature of an annotated bibliography of some web analysis of American Xenophobia. In each case, I’ll provide a link and a little taste of the writing one finds there, beginning with a Non-partisan website which defines the situation, the Migration Information Service. I may occasionally add a thought or two of my own. Or I may wait until I see what kind of comments arise, first.

From the non-partisan Migration Information Service

A New Century: Immigration and the United States

By Staff, updated by Kevin Jernegan

• Immigration, perhaps more than any other social, political, or economic process, has shaped the United States over the past century. As the next decades of the 21st century unfold, the rate of immigrant-driven transformation, which began in earnest in the 1960s, will continue to accelerate. Never before has the Statue of Liberty, long the symbol of America's rich immigrant heritage, lifted her torch over so many foreign-born individuals and families.
• In short, America's profound demographic and cultural transformation continues — and the policies that govern who can enter the US, and how, will affect every aspect of American life in the new century. Just how to minimize the challenges confronting this "nation of immigrants" while maximizing the attendant opportunities will continue to animate the US immigration policy discourse in the years to come

Also from the M.I.S.,

Mexican Immigration to the United States: The Latest Estimates

By Jeffrey Passel

• Mexican immigrants account for about one-fifth of the legal immigrants living in the United States. This large percentage is actually a legacy of the legalization programs of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), under which about two million formerly undocumented Mexicans acquired legal status. In terms of the annual inflow of legal immigrants, about one in seven are Mexican. This share is substantially larger than the legal flow from any other country.
• Mexico is also the single largest source of undocumented immigrants. There were an estimated 9.3 million undocumented immigrants in the United States as of March 2002. Note that this estimate encompasses those included in the March 2002 CPS plus an allowance for those missed. Of these, about 5.3 million or 57 percent were from Mexico. The rest of Latin America (mainly Central America) accounts for another two million or just under 25 percent. Asia at about 0.9 million represents 10 percent. Europe and Canada together account for about five percent, as do Africa and the rest of the world (see Figure 1).

Next, a sampling of opinion on what might be called the left. I’m feeling quite at home with what I found there, by and large.

By JOHN CHUCKMAN

• But in America, the broadcast of a Spanish version of The Star Spangled Banner has aroused a somewhat different response. Charles Key, great great grandson of Francis Scott, offered the immortal words, "I think it's despicable thing that someone is going into our society from another country and changing our national anthem."
• "This is evoking spirited revulsion on the part of fair-minded Americans," offered John Teeley, representative of one of innumerable private propaganda mills in Washington commonly dignified as think-tanks. Mr. Teeley continued, "You are talking about something sacred and iconic in the American culture. Just as we wouldn't expect people to change the colors of the national flag, we wouldn't expect people to fundamentally change the anthem and rewrite it in a foreign language."

From The Library Journal

A successful first conference of librarians of color builds solidarity

By Rebecca Miller & Aída Bardales -- Library Journal, 11/15/2006

• That sentiment was echoed in programs like "After 9/11: Latino and Asian Immigrants & the Public Library." California State University–Long Beach’s Susan Luévano said current anti-immigrant attitudes "demand librarians take an active part in defending [immigrants’] use of the public library." Luévano pointed to efforts, since reversed, at Gwinnett County Public Library, GA, to halt purchase of Spanish materials, calling it a "new...anti-immigrant tactic." "Libraries are being put on the defensive, having to justify the collections we worked so hard to put together over many years," she said. The new "American xenophobia," she argued, targets legal immigrants as well.

From Salon

American goodwill, in shackles: How Bush hardliners and even mainstream pundits have hogtied one of our greatest potential strengths in the war on terrorism.

By P.W. Singer

• But there is a critical aspect of this debate that no current presidential contender has faced. While leaders like Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ and even Nixon saw that we would never defeat the Soviet bloc in the Cold War battle of ideologies until we openly wrestled our deep problems with racism and civil rights at home, no candidate yet has wrestled with that period's 21st-century parallel. Just as it was hard to win hearts and minds in the Cold War battlegrounds of Africa and Asia as long as Jim Crow stood strong, it'll be impossible to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world as long as a vapid prejudice against Islam continues to grow in our political discourse and on our airwaves.
• The deep and rapid deterioration of America's standing in the world is one of the greatest challenges the United States now faces. It took us most of the 20th century to build up a global reputation that melded both power and popularity, and yet we are squandering it away in the first years of the 21st century. The erosion of American credibility and standing in the world is not just some lost popularity contest. It alienates our allies and reinforces the recruiting efforts of our foes, and denies American ideas and policies a fair shake.

From Ed Strong, "The Best That’s Left" (which, MHO, should be better known)

Racist America Wages War on the 'Wetbacks'

• As anyone who’s watched CNN’s Lou Dobbs can attest, vicious hysteria regarding undocumented foreign workers is being generated especially by Republicans who recognize the key role that scapegoats can play in consolidating their own, reactionary rule.
• In fact, with fascistic attitudes emanating from the White House, progressives should appreciate that "aliens" could be the divide-and-conquer contrivance that so dupes the masses that unequivocal authoritarianism might actually be realized here.
• If working people of all races unite -- without obfuscating qualifiers pertaining to documentation -- we’ll acquire the collective power to prevent anyone’s exploitation. Including our own.

From Boston Review

Their Liberties, Our Security,

By David Cole

• In short, when we balance liberty and security, we should do so in ways that respect the equal dignity and basic human rights of all persons and not succumb to the temptation of purchasing security at the expense of noncitizens’ basic rights. The true test of justice in a democratic society is not how it treats those with a political voice, but how it treats those who have no voice in the democratic process.

Also from the Boston Review

A Legacy of Xenophobia

by Bonnie Honig

• When foreigners are celebrated in American political culture, it is because "they" make "us" better. For example, foreigners are said to bring family values to a culture that cannot sustain them due to New-World mobilities, sexualities, materialisms, and freedoms. The true entrepreneurial spirit, central to American capitalism, is more often identified with America’s newest comers than with its native-born. And communitarians see immigrant communities as one of the few sites of mutuality and care left in a liberal polity driven by individualism and self-interest. Again and again foreigners are represented symbolically as much-needed agents of national renewal. In the 1990s, many multiculturalists lobbied in favor of immigrants by deploying these xenophilic arguments.
• Unfortunately, such arguments carry within them the seeds of American xenophobia. Positioned as the saviors of the nation, foreigners slide all too easily into becoming its scapegoats. Their "family values," celebrated by some, look to others like patriarchal infringements of cherished American freedoms.1 From the perspective of the native poor, iconic hard-working immigrants, celebrated for their perseverance, put working class Americans out of jobs. Liberals see immigrant communities as ethnic enclaves that retard the development of American individualism. And so on and so on.

From the Houston, TX, Catholic Worker

The Truth about Immigrants: Xenophobia existed in Early America

By Brian Frazelle

• Hostility towards the Germans had been around since they began to immigrate en masse in the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin, in his 1751 pamphlet Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, wrote
• "Why should the Palatine Boors [Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Languages or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion."

From The Atlantic Free Press: Hard Truths for Hard Times

Xenophobia and the Hatred that goes with it.

By Frank Pitz

• White America is culturally predisposed toward xenophobia and hatred. Taking our early history of burning "witches," slavery and of course, genocide against Natives. These injustices were socially and intellectually acceptable. Things didn’t get much better through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries either. Many immigrants were driven by shame and did not hold on to their cultural traditions, because of fear many among them changed their names.
• We "interred" the Japanese and some Germans during World War II, the Italians and Eastern Europeans also came in for their share of bias directed against them. Today, the current climate of fear and hatred is directed towards Muslims, Arabs and as well, Latino immigrants. Americans have always viewed foreigners with suspicion, fear and hatred, even when they needed these immigrants they still looked upon them as something less than human, just think of our favored idiom for foreigners: "alien."

These websites all evoked some sympathy for Immigrants, documented or undocumented, and in general condemned the worst excesses of those who see the recent immigration primarily as a threat. The Right, on the other hand, behaves as I’ve come to expect the right to behave, with venom and condescension. How about we start with a comment about the actions of religious organizations, seeing as this is what brought Immigration to Nathan Newman’s attention in the first place.

David Horowitz’ Front Page Magazine brings us this:

Christian Churches Moving Leftward Together

By Mark D. Tooley

• "Christian Churches Together" (CCT) was to have been the new, more spiritually vibrant alterative to the decaying, chronically left-wing National Council of Churches. But instead, as reflected by its new Religious Left leader, CCT will likely become a tool for exporting the NCC’s failed brand of political activism into Catholic and evangelical circles.
• Six years ago, with the National Council of Churches (NCC) then near collapse, CCT was initially conceived as a new coalition for mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, Eastern Orthodox and black church denominations.
• But CCT is already quickly repeating the NCC’s mistake of substituting left-wing politics for faith. Emblematic of its new course is the hiring of a mainline Protestant bureaucrat, Richard Hamm, as its first full-time executive. Having recently quit after ten years as president of the Christian Church-Disciples of Christ, Hamm will help ensure that CCT becomes little more than a thin echo of the reflexively political NCC.

It seems fair to offer CCT a chance to reply.

From CCT

Statement on Poverty

• Four Objectives
  CCT will promote its commitment to overcoming domestic poverty by inviting all Christians and all people, especially our leaders in public life, to embrace and implement the following objectives:
• to strengthen families and communities; because they are essential bulwarks against poverty;
• to reduce child poverty; we seek to cut child poverty by 50 percent in the next ten years;
• to make work work; by combating racism and guaranteeing that full time work offers a realistic escape from poverty and access to good health care;
• to strengthen the educational system in our country with particular attention to the public schools; because access to quality education offers perhaps the best way out of poverty.

Meanwhile, back at the Right Wrong

From Faultline U.S.A.

• In the past, the left has been fairly successful in creating an atmosphere of political correctness where only the left and their far left Marxist brethren are free to promulgate their filthy race-baiting tactics with impunity. It is in the interest of the left to stoke the fires of racial and cultural warfare in a thinly veiled attempt to win future votes by playing into the fears of the very people they hope to keep marginalized. It’s a 20th century fascist trick that has outlived its usefulness. . . . 
• Now Xenophilia or Xenophily is the opposite of Xenophobia. A Xenophiliac or Xenophily is someone who has an inordinate attraction to strangers and people of other lands usually to the detriment of their own welfare. The word is derived from the word Philoxenia. Philoxenia is a compound made up of two Greek words: philos, means "love" or "attraction" and xenos, means "stranger" or "foreigner."
• According to wikopedia.com, there’s a sexual as well as a UFO connotation to the word Xenophily. I leave it to your imagination to play with this word and its implications the next time some loony leftist "loose-bolt" tries to label you a Xenophobe!

From Human Events

It’s not Xenophobia, it’s Xenonausia

By Mac Johnson

• The emotion surrounding the ports [of Dubai] deal, and illegal immigration, and outsourcing, and homeland security and a dozen other aspects of breakneck international economic integration is no longer simply a quiet misgiving. It is rapidly being formed into a single coherent message from average citizens to those in power—both on the right and on the left- that see it as their job to make sure the "inevitable" rise of a single world economic entity actually happens. People are saying, "Stop!
• They’re saying "OK, we’ve tried it your way and it never seems to end. No amount of globalization, tolerance, equalization, outsourcing, internationalism, interventionism, human smuggling, and security risk is ever enough. There is always a push for more—even before the last round has proven itself wise or foolish. Treaty piles upon treaty, migration upon migration, integration upon integration. Now people want a break and a reassessment. They’re not sure they are against it all. They’re just no longer sure they’re still for it.
• It is not Xenophobia. It is Xenonausea. People are sick of having the whole world shoved down their throats at once and being told it tastes like ice cream. They are sick of every street corner and parking lot being filled with criminal aliens waiting to work off the books and outside the laws that are applied so enthusiastically to actual Americans. They are sick of pressing "1" for English. They are sick of being at war with foreign terrorists and simultaneously being economically and demographically bound more tightly to the nations producing these terrorists. They are sick of being told that the world is global or flat or smaller or at their doorstep or all coming for dinner on Tuesday.
  

So I guess I can say at least I’m in better company being pro immigration than I would being anti-immigration.

I came home at the end of the day to find out that The Supreme Court leap-frogged us back more than a century with today’s split decision on the issue of using race as a factor in school assignment. Brown v. Board of education is, in essence overturned a scant 53 years after its decision. The basic premise of Brown isn’t denied: separate remains inherently unequal: there’s just nothing we can do about it. I’m sure there will be some pious but ultimately hypocritical hand-wringing on the right wing side of the spectrum. Come 2008 we’ll need to make sure that a President is elected who will honor Justice John Marshall Harlan and Justice Earl Warren by appointing Supreme Court Justices to remedy today’s travesty.