After Republicans failed with their anti-migrant rhetoric in Virginia, the powers that be have begun to sing a different tune. Duke at Migra Matters was the first to pick up on how the tone has changed. This is a Washington Post article before the results were in:
Candidates for the Virginia General Assembly
entered the final sprint yesterday toward a hard-fought election
Tuesday in which two major forces are likely to determine which party
controls the Senate: the resurgence of Democrats in vote-rich Northern Virginia, and the Republican advantage in the emotional debate over illegal immigration…
Republicans have benefited in recent weeks from the growing intensity
in the immigration debate. They have promised to block illegal
immigrants from obtaining more public services and to do more to start
deportation proceedings against them, particularly those who have
committed crimes.
– Amy Gardner and Bill Turque
This is a Washington Post article after the results were in:
Voters across Virginia chose candidates in state and local elections
yesterday not out of anger over illegal immigration but based on party
affiliation, a preference for moderation and strong views on such key
issues as residential growth and traffic congestion.
With a few notable exceptions, the trend benefited Democrats and not
those who campaigned the loudest for tough sanctions against illegal
immigrants.
– Amy Gardner
The National Immigration Forum has a strong message for pollsters in their latest press release, and it looks like they might finally be listening:
As the saying goes, the only polls that matter are on Election
Day. Forgive us. We are biting our tongue. We want to scream “We
told you so!!!” But we are above that. We will refrain from such
childish triumphalism and seek to educate.
– National Immigration Forum
The most significant and marked shift, though, comes from the establishment democrat blogs. On Daily Kos Markos Moulitsas Zuniga broke years of silence on the immigration issue, and all of the other major blogs seem to have lined up right behind him. In quick succession Kos put up two pro-migrant posts. In “Demonizing Immigration Doesn’t Work” he states:
Demonizing New Englanders, gays, blacks, and women — and losing
their long-term support — isn’t enough for those guys. The GOP is
about to shoot themselves in the foot with the Latino community (and
other immigrant groups) in the long term for a strategy that doesn’t
even work in the short term.
Democrats shouldn’t follow them there. Here’s another issue in which
doing the right thing also happens to be good short- and long-term
politics.
– Kos
The very next day he criticized Rahm Emanuel, an anti-migrant Democrat, in “Is Rahm racist, or merely scared?”, where he states:
Americans don’t want hate-based anti-immigration rhetoric and
action, they want comprehensive immigration reform that secures our
borders and provides a path to citizenship for the millions of
undocumented immigrants in this country.
Yet there’s Rahm, with a big chunk of the Democratic caucus, making common cause with racist Tom Tancredo.
The Latino vote is volatile. It swings. And Democrats can’t afford to lose 10 percent of their margin over stupidity like this.
– Kos
Soon after, Crooks and Liars, Firedoglake, Talkleft, and Open Left, followed suit with their own pro-migrant posts.
If there was any question about Daily Kos’s new pro-migrant stance, our own Duke1676 from Migra Matters, who for years has been putting out pro-migrant posts at Daily Kos, had his agenda for progressive immigration reform rescued and then promoted to the front-page, for hundreds of thousands of readers to see.
This has left all of us in the pro-migrant online community scratching our heads. After years of struggling to get the establishment democrat blogs to speak out on this issue, in a matter of days it seems that it has all changed. We have gone from Matt Stoller at MyDD calling immigration a “pet issue”, to this.
The sudden shift towards the pro-migrant should have come with an explanation. The establishment democrat blogs should have at the very least, acknowledged their years of silence on this issue. It might seem a little petty for me to ask that, and it is bad etiquette to tell any blogger what to write. Still, it is only fair to the millions that have suffered in their silence that I ask for an explanation on behalf of the millions of migrants that will never receive it.
At the same time, for the millions that will continue to suffer, it is only right that I welcome these newcomers to the light of migrant justice, and put aside past differences. In the years of online establishment silence, anti-migrant advocates have developed one of the most sophisticated online machines that the establishment blogosphere has ever known. When the 2008 elections come around we’re going to get hit harder than we could ever expect, and it’s only together and unified that we will be able to keep an anti-migrant politician out of the presidency.
I’m going to return to my bread and butter. The root of the problems associated with migration lie in the lack of opportunity that migrants flee from. While everyone agrees on that point I’m one of the few that can actually analyze and advocate against concrete U.S. foreign policies that are contributing, rather than taking away, from the problems associated with migration.
Welcome to the light my friends, now we can move from tackling the silence to tackling the hate.
I spend a fair bit of time on DKos, and post from time to time (under an older, but related screenname), but I felt like I was reading a Post article, steeped in confusion about them durn internet-blogs. All the tropes were there — out-of-context remarks, throwing around the word establishment to seem important, the idea that progressive blogs take their orders from DailyKos.
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First of all, calling Kos “establishment” is rather off. You don’t have to be establishment to be influential — this is the man who is constantly talking up primary challengers (Donna Edwards, Ciro Rodriguez, Ned Lamont, and Jon Tester to name four). As with myDD, DailyKos does have a wide audience, but it is silly to call him a part of the establishment.
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Secondly, there is the strong implication here that Markos is suddenly pro-immigration — an odd thing to say about an immigrant. No, what happened is that he started posting on the strategic place of a topic once that became clear. He as an individual started talking immigration more lately (something widely noted in the community), and did so saying that it seems spent as a wedge issue.
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If you read these posts closely, he’s discussing how this issue can get Democrats votes. That’s the main topic of discussion on Kos — how to get more votes for Democrats. Well, 2007 (including our dear MA-05) made it pretty clear that this was a Democratic issue.
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Finally, it wasn’t too long ago that immigration was a pet issue. It wasn’t a major voting issue in 2004 and was virtually absent from debate. Until about 3 years ago, it wasn’t important from a strategic point of view. It was a sudden, concerted effort by conservative water carriers made that it blossom within a few short months. The best part of this is seeing all their strategery blowing up in their faces.
…I have no use for Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. He is only interested in electing Democrats, no matter how odious they are. He showed that in 2004, when he supported the anti-gay bigot Stephaniie Herseth. With “friends” like that, who needs enemies?
…a pro-equality Democrat in South Dakota who had a shot in 2004 and I’ll concede your point. Fact is, it was another vote for Majority Leader Reid.
since Herseth was and is in the House.
see Chafee, Lincoln.
You probably mean Susan Collins, who according to one measure I saw, votes more liberal than 55% of the Senate.
…Markos was supporting a homophobe. He, like more than a few Dems in Congress, couldn’t care less about gay people.
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On another note, Herseth was voted into the House. She would not have had an opportunity to fote for Reid.
Kos has been extremely good on gay issues. Witness his recent response to Obama.
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The point really is that a Democratic homophobe in the House is better than a Republican homophobe in the House — even for gay people.
Raj, I try to piece together your politics from your random comments. As far as I can tell, you think both parties are bad and that they’ll stay bad. Good people should learn French, Dutch, German, Swedish, or Norwegian and relocate where civilization still flourishes. Your view of U.S. politics is pessimism itself. By that perspective, inching toward progress just holds out false illusions.
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I am sure I got your politics wrong, but I find it hard to discern what you really advocate and how you imagine it will be achieved.
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Reason is not scheduled to arrive on the wings of angels next month.
I speak fluent French, and I’m wrong a great deal of the time, apparently.
you are speaking canadian french. đŸ™‚
…the French!
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(I still love that random commercial.)
If you, like many Americans, believe the mantra of “we’re number one, and we have nothing to learn from other countries” you are wrong. and I having been trying to tell you that. I have been trying to tell you that about local transportation. I have been trying to tell you that about health care financing. I have been trying to tell you that about renewable energy (eg, photovoltaic panels on rooftops).
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And I have been trying to tell you that about media–newspapers, news magazines, television and radio. Hence my “learn a foreign language” mantra–you don’t have to be in the resident country in order to receive foreign media (we download Der Spiegel’s PDF version weekly), but if you could receive and understand at least one foreign language publication, you might get a more complete perspective about what’s going on in the world.
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But those are things that most Americans do not want to hear. The American cheerleaders yelling “we’re number one” is what they apparently want to hear.
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No country is perfect. But the idea that the US–or any other country–has nothing to learn from the experiences of other countries is nonsense in the extreme. And that is what I have been trying to tell you.
Raj, you’re kidding yourself. Do you seriously think you’re the only bilingual person on this board, because you’re the only one who brags about it constantly and mocks people for not understanding your little inside jokes in German? Sure I could throw in QuĂ©becismes from time to time to show myself how smart I am, but I don’t have that starved an ego. For that matter, the best news service in the world works mainly in English, although they spell words funnily. It’s amusing that you cast yourself as someone single-handedly trying to tell us about health care financing and renewable energy, as if it would never dawn on us that such things exist. Ezra Klein makes a living off of comparative health care, and many of us read his stuff.
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I don’t see a lot of jingoism on this blog, frankly, and I doubt that you do either. “America is perfect” is a rare sentiment on this board, and not altogether common in the progressive community. You’re tilting at windmills that don’t exist around here. First rule of decent writing: know your audience.
…you were not paying attention to the indentation. I was not responding to your comment. I never claimed that I was the only polyglot here. What I claimed is that more than a few Americans are (a) uninterested in knowing what is going on in the world outside of the US, (b) are uninterested in being able to read foreign language publications to find out what others say is going on in the world, and (c) believe that they can learn nothing from experiences in other countries. I had believed that that was clear from my comment.
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BTW, I don’t do French. German, yes, and a little high school Spanish.
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BTW2, recall that I was responding to a single comment that questioned my politics. That was the context of my comment. Context is everything.
Points a, b, and c had nothing to do with my question. Not even a little.
You were summarizing my response to me.
In response to Sabutai, you write
Sabuatai at 8:34 am EST is responding to your response to me at 5:21 am EST. Your use of the past tense indicates that you are summarizing your 5:21 am comment which was a response to me. Thus, I can take the blockquoted material as a summary of your “Yes, you did get my politics wrong”.
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Happily I can read as well as follow indentation. Could you move now from studying the horizontal spacing to reading the text slowly?
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If you don’t wish to discuss whether pessimism is your end position, that’s fine, but it would be clearer if you did it without the odd indirections to indentation.
KBusch @ Tue Nov 13, 2007 at 16:19:14 PM CST
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make explicit reference to comments to which I am responding. As here. Indentation be damned.
Sometimes I think you read too rapidly.
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Where you got the idea that I don’t think one can learn from other countries — or even that that was the point of my comment — I have no idea.
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I’m saying this. For the U.S., you never propose anything practical.
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Why?
I’m saying this. For the U.S., you never propose anything practical.
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I had thought that by suggesting how people in other countries have solved similar problems, people in the US might figure out how to solve their similar problems. Apparently, they do not want to solve them.
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Why?
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Because, apparently, Americans don’t want to solve their problems. Apparently, they don’t even want to recognize that they even have problems.
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I do believe that I have proposed suggestions regarding health care financing and transportation. Inferentially, of course. But nobody in the Boston area is interested. Media (TV, radio, newspapers, news magazines), the same. Food supply the same. Renewable energy the same.
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It strikes me as a bit presumptuous of you to suggest that I have never proposed anything practical, when that’s all that I’ve been doing, but you and others of your ilk want to ignore the suggestions?
I mean that you just float above political practicality. I think I hit the nail on the head then when I said your politics are the politics of pessimism. What else to conclude from the following?
That’s a very dire assessment. That’s why I think that you take emigration as the answer. I suspect you believe that Europeans, by contrast, recognize their problems and wish to solve them.
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What do you think Americans who recognize problems and wish to solve them should do? I mean politically and in the current two party system before the Rajocrats win a majority.
What do you think Americans who recognize problems and wish to solve them should do?
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…barring a crisis, I doubt very seriously that the American government will do anything to solve them. Germany’s social security system (health and old age pensions) came as a result of Otto von Bismarck’s (!) wish to stem the rising tide of the Social Democrats in the last half of the 19th century.
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That didn’t translate into much in the US until the Great Depression gave rise to old age pensions (“social security”). And health care insurance in the US, which prior to the 1930s was handled in some small measure by communal organizations contracting with providers (which the AMA opposed), was eventually subplanted by corporate systems during WWII to get around wage-and-price controls. The corporate systems are now falling apart–witness the GM agreement with the Auto Workers union a couple of weeks ago.
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Where is it going to go? I don’t have the slightest idea. What I do suspect, though is that the Rube Goldberg construct of health care financing and old age pensions in the US is going to fall in on itself.
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As to the “who recognize problems” part, you aren’t going to get anywhere unless and until you get other people to recognize that there are problems. That’s where the “crisis” comes in. Maybe with the UAW settlement with GM other people will sit up and listen, but I doubt it. I have mentioned here about Munich’s wonderful public transportation system, but I haven’t given any historical context. Munich began building its public transportation system in 1965–20 years after the end of WWII–after it had been awarded the 1972 Olympic games. A crisis? Most assuredly–without the system, they couldn’t have gotten the visitors from the city center to the Olympic site. The irony is that they did not then even have a world-class airport, and they did not have one until 1996.
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What is the lesson I draw from this? Maybe we in the US need someone with the foresight of Bismarck.
What do you think Americans who recognize problems and wish to solve them should do?
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We should await the coming of Otto von Bismarck.
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Well, I suppose that’s not completely pessimistic and I stand corrected.
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I think.
This sounds like a very Kossian establishment argument. If you read the National Immigration Forum press release above you’ll find that it made sense to take on this issue back in 2006 when it was clear that nativism didn’t get Republicans elected.
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To say immigration was a pet issue after millions of people marched on the streets, when I started blogging, completely neglects the reality of people power. And yes, Markos might be an immigrant, but that never stopped them from taking on some of the most vicious anti-migrant hate from taking hold of their site.
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In Kos’s silence one of the most sophisticated Web 2.0 machines has been created. Post almost anywhere and your bound to get hammered with the same anti-migrant talking points.
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You’ll find that you’re arguments also neglect a lot of the POC blogs. So many of these non-racial (read white) blogs marginalize and neglect to give credit for the organizing POC blogs do.
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The scariest thing about Daily Kos is the army of people Kos has created to defend him. Like I said, I’m happy he’s in the pro-migrant camp, now, so I won’t go any further. But I think you’re arguments above are quite frankly baloney.
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And you might know Kos, but you don’t know immigration blogging like I do, and I stand by everything I said above. I resent that WaPo comparison.
The Republicans have pushed this issue up into national prominence. Had they not done so, it would have continued to get a low amount of attention.
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Why don’t you instead find it encouraging that, when migrants are attacked more systematically, the bigger sites in Left Blogosphere join in the defense?
That it took years and the most recent totalitarian tactics against migrants for people to take notice?
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In the absence of the left blogosphere taking this up, anti-migrant advocates have developed one of the most sophisticated web 2.0 machines ever.
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Try posting anywhere on the internet and your bound to get hammered with the same anti-migrant talking points over and over.
If Republicans hadn’t pushed this into national prominence, migrants would be a lot better off than they are today. Right now millions are living in fear in the U.S. like never before.