Keeping America Empty

How one small-town conservationist launched today's anti-immigration movement

By Christopher Hayes

At the northern tip of Michigan's lower peninsula lies the quaint town of Petoskey, population 6,080. In late March, a thick white shelf of ice still covers Lake Michigan, and a few miles north, over the Mackinac Bridge, the Upper Peninsula appears as a grey tangle [RETURN TO ARTICLE]

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     Page 1 of 1 pages

    Get Real!

    United States Posted by whattheheck on Apr 25, 2006 at 7:42 AM

    Christopher Hayes

    United States Posted by whattheheck on Apr 25, 2006 at 10:24 AM

    Several sites show links between Tanton and his partners to white supremacists.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has a number of articles on John Tanton.  www.splcenter.org

    “In These Times” has moved from a left stand on issues to a right wing white supremacist stand.

    United States Posted by november on Apr 25, 2006 at 12:10 PM

    Lou Dobbs is a tool.  After all, he graduated from Harvard, with a degree in economics, no less, which proves the point.  What can you say about a guy who cites a study on immigration from the National Academy of Sciences to conclude that even though immigrant labor contributes ten billion dollars to the American economy, the costs of immigrant labor debit the economy by ten to twenty billion dollars, when in fact the study explicitly concludes that immigrant labor contributes ten billion dollars in net benefits to the economy.  Or when he states that one third of the American prison population are “illegal aliens” when in fact the accurate citation is that one third of the prison population are not citizens of the US.

    I don’t mean to imply that my absence of regard for Dobbs’ inability to produce a fair and balanced summary of the facts is an endorsement of Thomas “Flathead” Friedman, whose misrepresentations of the truth are equal to those of Dobbs.

    It’s hilarious to read to the racist rants of people whose great-great-grandparents emigrated from the eastern colonies to extirpate the natives in the western “territories”,  whose great-great-grandchildren presumably invade and occupy the cultural terrain of our patriotic homeland.

    United States Posted by Major Major on Apr 25, 2006 at 3:47 PM

    november -

    United States Posted by wolf on Apr 26, 2006 at 8:27 AM

    wolf:
    —————————————————————————————————————————————————-
    november - “In These Times” has moved from a left stand on issues to a right wing white supremacist stand.

    Can one be against illegal immigration without being a “white supremacist”? In fact, is there any connection between the two?

    Why did you make the assertion above?
    —————————————————————————————————————————————————-

    Gee wolf, could it have been because of the sentence that was written BEFORE the one you quote? Let’s find out.

    “Several sites show links between Tanton and his partners to white supremacists.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has a number of articles on John Tanton.  www.splcenter.org”

    Yes, it sure looks like it is in that sentence.  I guess I _did_ include that for a good reason dontchaknow.

    Your strawman is the usual nonsense.  No where do I say being against illegal immigration means one is a white supremacist.  However, this is the second article in ‘In These Times’ in as many months that uses people linked to white supremacist organizations in the USA to knock illegal immigration.

    Having a conversation about illegal immigration is a-ok by me.  To invite white supremacists and neo-nazis and people that have been shown to associate with them to the head of the table for such a conversation is not valid. 

    For you to pretend it is out-of-bounds for me to point out the table for a conversation about illegal immigration in ‘In These Times’ is being packed with questionable sources is absurd.

    P.S.  Go to GOOGLE & enter
          “john tanton” site:splcenter.org
          & press Google Search and see for yourself.

    United States Posted by november on Apr 26, 2006 at 9:14 AM

    november - sorry you got so confused. I set up no strawman, simply asked you - politely - why you made an assertion. What a waste of my - and apparently your - time.

    United States Posted by wolf on Apr 26, 2006 at 10:39 AM

    wolf-  Sorry you don’t understand plain english.  perhaps a nice language class would help.  After that a quick followup with logic.  Your ‘loaded question’ was indeed a ‘strawman’.  Feel free to google both terms.

    United States Posted by november on Apr 26, 2006 at 10:46 AM

    For the folks who haven’t looked up John Tanton on technorati.com:

    I found a very thorough disection of John Tanton at www.politicalcortex.com. I’ve included a tinyurl link just in case, since the comments tend to break long urls.

    tinyurl link http://tinyurl.com/mjh9p

    original url link http://www.politicalcortex.com/print/2006/4/8/21947/90571

    United States Posted by november on Apr 26, 2006 at 1:39 PM

    Mr. tanton is a true conservative, which ironically these days is a true progressive.  Illegal immigration not only artificially raises US population and damages the environment, but allows employers to ignore existing black and white workers, particularly young people who lack experience in jobs.  The No Child Left Behind Act will result in millions of high school dropouts.  Testing will discourage young people who are not “college” bound or proficient readers.  Talented young people who could find lucrative blue collar careers are underpriced by illegal immigrants.  Unions are undermined by the illegals as well.

    America, like Mexico and every other nation, has the right and duty to its citizens to define citizenship and control its borders and work rules.  So-called free trade, pushed thru mostly by Bill and Hilary Clinton, has devastated the working class of the USA.  We need to send businessmen who hire illegals(meatpacking, Walmart) to tough prisons, cut off education and medicaid funds to illegals.

    United States Posted by knocko on Apr 26, 2006 at 4:28 PM

    Knocko,

    Right on. I might add the doubling of visas for high tech and other white collar jobs have made it questionable whether the cost of college is worth while.

    Mr. Tanton is, in my view, just another diversion from the real immigration issues.  Race is not the problem.  Mexicans are not the problem.  This is a Washington D.C. created mess. Now we are supposed to expect them to clean it up?  Give me a break.  Send them back on vacation where they can do no more damage.

    Maybe it

    United States Posted by whattheheck on Apr 27, 2006 at 12:03 PM

    An article that whitewashs (no pun intended) the history of John Tantons strong ties to white supremacists gets accolades from folks who then recommend lynchings.

    What a suprise. Not.

    United States Posted by november on Apr 27, 2006 at 12:17 PM

    Yikes!

    When people like knocko and whatthehell appear to join the ranks of the liberals and the progressives, you know it’s time to head for the hills and barricade the village gates.

    Lynch an employer?  Now there’s a novel (presumptive) solution, one worthy of anyone seeking to ingratiate himself with the people he ordinarilly dislikes.

    But, seriously, folks.  Even fascists are people, even though they themselves would prefer to regard themselves as white people.  The State of Michigan, home to a wide variety of fascist organizations, has a long and (dis)honorable history of fascist infatuation.  Henry Ford himself was a fascist, when it was fashionable to be fascist.  Faced with a growing labor crisis (sharing profits with the people who made them possible is always considered a crisis by the folks who supervise the labor of the people who do the work), the auto industry decided to import Southern black labor to compete with Northern white unionized labor, a typically fascist tactic, and thereby initiated a half-century of racist retribution.

    You gotta love these guys.  They sure know how to run a railroad.

    United States Posted by Major Major on Apr 27, 2006 at 5:36 PM

    OK…

    The tar and feather/lynching was a bit of hyperbole, but they need to get the message that hiring illegals will not be tolerated. As for whitewashing the Tanton story, my point is quite simple

    United States Posted by whattheheck on Apr 28, 2006 at 5:32 AM

    By the way, whattheheck.  I already said discussions of illegal immigration WITHOUT the white supremacists is fine.  So you’ve gone from hyperbole to beating a dead horse. 

    To do a whitewash article on someone with ties to white supremacists ON the subject of illegal immigration WITHOUT pointing out their ties to white supremacists is a horrendous breach of journalistic ethics.  And that has been my point all along.

    United States Posted by november on Apr 28, 2006 at 6:05 AM

    I find that Dr Tanton’s walk across the cultural divide is very interesting, if for no more than it’s rarity. The right wing is full of confused and frightened white guys, so caught up in their racism and bigotry, that they can’t see how they are “pissing in their own soup”.

      In a similar way many on the left are against the racism on simple moral grounds, if not that they themselves are at the pointy end of that racism, but cannot get a handle on the devastation a bottomless labor force has on everybodies quality of life (except those who hire that pool and their quality of life is due to their exploitation of that bottomless labor force, and even they are forced to do so because they compete with others who do).

    As Dr. Dean has pointed out, those guys should be natural Democrats, and he has taken steps to reach out to them, though in ways less exploitative than Dr Tanton.

    Fixing immigration through walls won’t work, any more than walls will keep out drugs, and they can’t even keep the drugs out of prisons. You have to fix the underlying problem.

    If the Immigrant benefited from outing his exploiter, and the exploiter had something to fear, illegal immigration would dry up in short order.

    As it is, many of the jobs are migrating to China where people are working for wages Mexicans could not afford to take. And that is another greater problem.

    United States Posted by FreeDem on Apr 28, 2006 at 5:40 PM

    Having stolen the land from the original inhabitants, the thieves were compelled to import slaves to work it, because the indigenous inhabitants could not be compelled to submit to slavery, whereas the people seized from another continent had no other choice.  Now their descendants complain about the evils of illegal immigration, as if the emigration of their own antecedants was a virtuous event.

    Hilarity doesn’t even begin to describe the convoluted logic employed to justify the moral rectitude of those who profit from the benefits of conquest.

    United States Posted by Major Major on Apr 29, 2006 at 9:17 AM

    According to Leonard Zeskind, “The New Nativism” in The American Prospect 11.10.05 at
    http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10485

    ****
    It was Tanton who founded the anti-immigration movement

    United States Posted by JonathanNil on Apr 30, 2006 at 5:43 PM

    JonathanNil

    That quote comes from a memo written by John Tanton in 1986 to the attendees of a White Supremacist conference called WITAN IV.  WITAN was/is a White Supremacist group founded by Tanton, which is how he got the attendee list.

    You can read the memo here: http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?sid=125

    United States Posted by november on May 1, 2006 at 6:12 AM

    Major Major, you are my hero and the only one speaking with truthfulness and courage. Every time a subject arises, all I find is people who write to tangle things up, show their literacy and do the work the old sophists did in Old Greece but they are never prepared to get to the root of the problem or its causes and rather waste precious space calling each other names or refering to who said what which really doesn’t matter.
    If your promoted NAFTA had been fair to other countries you wouldn’t have so many desperate people risking their lives to enter your “paradise”. Don’t fool yourselves, many of us in the American continent (yes, we are Americans too) have your game perfectly identified and are doing our best to act accordingly.

    Costa Rica Posted by Maria on May 3, 2006 at 9:19 PM

    RE: the title “Keeping America Empty,” the USA is far from empty.

    This October the US population will hit 300 million, projected by the Census Bureau to reach 420 million by just 2050.  Do the arithmetic.  That’s 120 million more people in just 44 years!  Try this test: ask a fairly well educated person what the US population is and they will probably underestimate by 20-30 million.

    That’s more than a doubling of the population in my short lifetime.  And you can see the consequences everywhere, in our inability to maintain infrastructure, from roads to levees to schools.  And there is the pressure on all natural resources, from wild lands to rivers to fisheries.  Water is going to be one of the most limiting resources, particularly in the far west and the high plains, likely made worse by climatic shifts due to global warming.

    Whatever one’s take on additional immigration and growth may be, it is ought to recognize this fact that we are already bulging with people.

    United States Posted by questionauthority on May 4, 2006 at 8:03 PM

    Who do you think is maintaining the infrastructure in this country?  In a post-industrial economy where industry migrates to foreign shores in search of zero (or negative) tax rates, cheap labor and the virtual absence of environmental restrictions, the people who once were employed by local industry, both foreign and domestic, are inclined to migrate elsewhere to obtain employment.  Many of them end up here, employed by governments which are compelled by the erosion of their tax base to privatize the services they once performed themselves.  In other words, they subcontract those services to companies who hire the immigrants, at slaveshop rates, to perform them.

    Welcome to the wonderful world of a globalized, free market economy where, apparenly, it’s still possible to blame the immigrants for the erosion of our infrastructure and simultaneously employ them to repair it.

    United States Posted by Major Major on May 6, 2006 at 8:06 AM
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