A few weeks ago, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer attempted to make his state's roads safer by reducing the number of people without licenses and insurance who travel on them. His plan was to allow undocumented citizens who could pass a rigorous standard of proof in substantiating their identity the chance to earn a driver's license.
Among other things, Gov. Spitzer calculated that as a result of the legislation, roughly $120 million per year born by the cost of uninsured drivers would be saved, the number of hit-and-run accidents would decrease and the state would have at least some data on the estimated one million undocumented people residing there - ultimately making the state more secure.
Of course, like so many other things involving immigration, the fanatics on the right in the supposedly liberal media quickly doused the proposal in nativist gasoline and set it on fire. Indeed, Lou Dobbs could be heard nightly on CNN railing against illegal immigrants, calling Mr. Spitzer a "spoiled, rich kid brat," deriding him as a "genius," and misconstruing his proposed policy as a sanctuary program for terrorists (New York Times, Oct. 22).
Among the other liberal media outlets, MSNBC's Tucker Carlson, CNN Headline News' Glen Beck (who once quipped in 2006 that there are three reasons why an illegal immigrant "comes across the border in the middle of the night: one, they're terrorists; two, they're escaping the law; or three, they're hungry. They can't make a living in their own dirtbag country"), and Fox News (which functions as a de facto apparatchik of the Republican Party), mouthing party sentiments and skewing news reports almost verbatim from the GOP's playbook, were all in full-hate mode seething at the thought that their very own fear-card of national security could be used against them to give brown people a driver's license (Media Matters for America).
Not that racist-fueled, anti-immigrant positions should surprise anyone, especially those citizens of Irish, Italian, Polish or Jewish ancestry cognizant of the Immigration Act of 1924, but today's commentators are careful to conceal their bigoted contempt for immigrants and any possible policies that may aid them by: 1) relentlessly discussing the immigrant's only relevant characteristic, their "illegality;" and 2) constantly associating undocumented immigrants with terrorists or as potential terrorists incognito.
As expected, the first outburst from the lunatic-fringe when Mr. Spitzer announced his plan: "but they could get on a plane!" Never mind the fact that a driver's license is one of the most easily faked documents available to obtain as is, but one of the major points of Mr. Spitzer's plan was to bring people currently unknown to the state into the official record.
In addition, Mr. Spitzer's plan has constantly been attacked as a form of "amnesty" for "illegal" immigrants - with there being special emphasis on the word "illegal." But as editorialist for the "New York Times" Lawrence Downes wrote, "America has a big problem with illegal immigration, but a big part of it stems from the word 'illegal.' It pollutes the debate. It blocks solutions. Used dispassionately and technically, there is nothing wrong with it. Used as an irreducible modifier for a large and largely decent group of people, it is badly damaging. And as a code word for racial and ethnic hatred, it is detestable" (New York Times, Oct. 28). And as a code word for racial and ethnic hatred, this is exactly how the word "illegal" is used and understood by most commentators.
So, what are we left with? It appears a policy that would have made New York's roads safer, saved the state millions of dollars and brought an untold number of the one million undocumented people living there into governmental record has instead been sacrificed to xenophobic, fear-wrought hysteria. In other words, it's been just another day in America.
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