Anti-Illegal Immigration Activists & Novellas

This is getting ridiculous, anti-illegal immigration activists are continuing their ‘we hate Mexicans’ campaign to a Denver public library and protesting Spanish-language novellas.

Opponents of illegal immigration rallied outside the Denver Public Library on Monday to demand the resignation of city librarian Rick Ashton, contending he was accommodating illegal immigrants at taxpayer expense.

The protest was in response to copies of a Spanish-language novella with sexually explicit illustrations found on library shelves last week. Library officials are pulling all 6,000 of their novellas to review them, even though the vast majority do not contain sexual or violent illustrations.

The anti-illegal immigration activist concern is not really about Spanish novellas or their raciness, but scapegoating a segment of the population due to their color of their skin. As David Neiwert point out.

It's called scapegoating, and it is the hallmark of American right-wing extremism. The paranoid mindset always insists on a scapegoat: Jews. Blacks. Mexicans. Gays. In the 1920s, it was Catholics. They always insist that someone is conspiring to bring harm to them and to America. They describe them as vermin, and urge their elimination. It is a story that has repeated itself many times.

This is why, when you hear someone talk about organizing a border watch, you can bet that, if you hang around their campfires long enough, you'll start hearing a lot of talk about Latinos. How they're ruining the country. Causing crime. Crowding the hospitals. Pretty soon the usual slurs come out too.

It isn't about whether they're legal or not. It is, in the end, all about the color of their skin.

Indeed.

I am for effective immigration reform, not rhetoric and immigration bashing.