“What calls itself the anti-immigrant movement today is really a movement that is fueled by racism and bigotry,” said Eric Ward, national field director for the Building Democracy Initiative, a project of a Chicago-based civil rights group. “What we're saying is that we will no longer be deceived by those who are seeking to divide our communities.”
Ward, 41, is in Helena this weekend for the Progressive Revival, a conference sponsored by the Montana Human Rights Network and more than a dozen other groups advocating for civil rights, labor, the environment, the disabled and the poor.
Ward, who grew up in Los Angeles and has worked in the Pacific Northwest for organizations fighting white-supremacist groups, said people are “waking up” to the fact that the politics of fear and bigotry are obscuring real problems facing the country.
Said Ward: “The real questions are, why are there not enough jobs for everyone who wants to work in this country? Why is it that a CEO of a large corporation is making 10,000 times more than the person working on the factory line?
“Why is it that, in one of the most developed countries in the world, the majority of families declaring bankruptcy (are doing so) because they can't pay their medical bills?”
One of the chief fear-mongers is the immigration-reform movement, he said, which is more interested in stirring up resentment toward immigrants and minorities and dividing people than in solving the problem.
So-called immigration reformers were the force behind the Real ID Act, passed by Congress and requiring all Americans to prove their citizenship before they can get a driver's license or identification card needed to vote, get Social Security, or access other social services, he said. The law takes full effect by 2010.
African-Americans born in the South in the 1950s or earlier may not have the documents needed to obtain an ID card, because often they weren't issued birth certificates, Ward said. The act could end up cutting legitimate citizens from legal benefits and voting, he said.
The 2007 Montana Legislature passed a law saying the state will refuse to implement the Real ID Act.
Ira Mehlman, national media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, disputed Ward's comments Friday, saying immigration reformers are not attacking immigrants.
Mehlman, in a telephone interview from Seattle, said immigration is one of the top issues facing the country and deserves to be debated.
FAIR, one of the most prominent immigration-reform groups, wants to limit the number of immigrants to 300,000 per year and crack down on those entering the country illegally.
“We need policies that make it clear that you don't benefit from coming to this country illegally,” Mehlman said.
Ward said FAIR founder John Tanton has said immigration is “a skirmish in a wider war, and that war is who he considers an American.”
The United States is a nation of immigrants, Ward said, and policies to deny rights to newer immigrants often end up hurting legal citizens, usually minorities.
“It's a debate about who we are as a nation,” he said. “Any time there is a debate on who we are as a nation, we have to speak up.”
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