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Winter 2004

The War Against Immigrants

DifferenTakes Series
26 ~ Winter 2004
[PDF Version]
By Eunice Hyunhye Cho

Only minutes after planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a wave of hate violence swept the country, with immigrants the main victims of “retaliation.” Since the first moments after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, immigrant and refugee communities have become the frontline victims of a new war.

Eunice Hyunhye Cho is a Program Associate at the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, where she coordinates the BRIDGE Project, a popular education project focusing on race, immigration, globalization, and more. She is on the steering committee of the Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment, and also works with the Korea Solidarity Committee (San Francisco.)

References

  1. John Ashcroft, “Attorney General Prepared Remarks on the National Security Entry–Exit Registration System, ” June 6, 2002. Department of Justice transcript.
  2. Somini Sengupta and Christopher Drew, “A Nation Challenged: The Immigration Agency, ” New York Times, November 12, 2001. For more detailed documentation of Post–September 11 detention, see Human Rights Watch, Presumption of Guilt: Human Rights Abuses of PostSeptember 11 Detainees, August 2002.
  3. Thomas Farragher and Kevin Cullen, “Plan to Question 5, 000 Raises Issue of Racial Profiling, ” Boston Globe, November 11, 2001.
  4. Hugh Son, “Pakistanis Fear INS:Registration Rule Called a Catch–22, ” New York Daily News, February 7, 2003.
  5. Michael Tackett, “Airport Net Caught Small Fry: Washington–Area Sweep Yielded No Terror–Related Charges, ” Chicago Tribune, October 6, 2002; Sarah Tippit, “INS Detains 69 Foreigners in Super Bowl Sweep,” Reuters, January 25, 2003; National Immigration Law Center, SSA “No Match Letters Packet,” March 2002; and Fred Tsao, Losing Ground: The Loss of Freedom, Equality, and Opportunity for America’s Immigrants Since September 11, ICIRR, September 2002.
  6. Colleen Rowley, “Rowley Letter to FBI Director, February 26, 2003, ” Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 6, 2003.
  7. Dan Kesselbrenner and Sandy Lin, “An Immigrant’s Worst Nightmare: Facing the U.S.Legal System,” From the Borderline to the Colorline: A Report on Anti–Immigrant Racism in the U.S., National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, 2001.
  8. United to Secure America, “Questions and Answers Regarding Ads Sponsored by United to Secure America, ” January 15, 2002.
  9. Southern Poverty Law Center, “The Puppeteer:The Organized AntiImmigration Movement, Increasingly in Bed With Racist Hate Groups, is Dominated By One Man,” Intelligence Report, Summer 2002.
  10. Ibid.; Political Research Associates, Defending Immigrant Rights, February, 2002.
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Conserving Racism: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad

DifferenTakes Series
27 ~ Winter 2004
[PDF Version]
By Betsy Hartmann

The greening of hate – blaming environmental degradation on poor populations of color – is once again on the rise, both in the U.S. and overseas. In the U.S., its illogic runs like this: immigrants are the main cause of overpopulation, and overpopulation in turn causes urban sprawl, the destruction of wilderness, pollution, and so forth. Internationally, it draws on narratives that blame expanding populations of peasants and herders for encroaching on pristine nature.

Betsy Hartmann is the director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College and a member of the steering committee of the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment. She is the author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs and a novel about the Far Right, The Truth about Fire.

References

  1. See China Brotsky, “A Defeat for the Greening of Hate,” Political Environments, No. 6, Fall 1998.
  2. “The Puppeteer,” Intelligence Report, no. 106, Summer 2002, 44-51.
  3. Letter to Larry Fahn, President of the Sierra Club, from Mark Potok, October 21, 2003.
  4. On resistance from presidents, see http:// www.groundswellsierra.org, and for progressive response, contact sierrans4rights@comcast.net.
  5. Aziz Choudry,“Tarzan, Indiana Jones and Conservation International’s Global Greenwash Machine,” Znet, October 16, 2003, http://www.zmag.org.
  6. Roderick P. Neumann, “Disciplining Peasants in Tanzania: From State Violence to Self-Surveillance in Wildlife Conservation,” in N.L. Peluso and M.Watts, Violent Environments,Cornell University Press, 2001, 305-327; and Lee Alexander Risby et al, “Environmental Narratives in Protected Park Planning: The Case of Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda,” Policy Matters (IUCN), No. 10, August 2002, 40-49.
  7. Dudley Althaus,“The Fated Forest,” Houston Chronicle, http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/special/01/forest/index.html.
  8. See Matthew MacLean,“Mexico’s Government Wants to Relocate Illegal Squatters, but Some Threaten Violence,” Christian Science Monitor, July 16, 2003.
  9. For example, see Denise Caudhill, “Exploring Capacity for Integration: University of Michigan Population-Environment Fellows Program’s Impact Assessment Project, “ in Environmental Change and Security Project Report. No. 6, 2000, 66-76.
  10. Richard E. Bilsborrow,“Migration, Population Change and the Rural Environment,” in Environmental Change and Security Project Report, No. 8, 69-94.
  11. See Elizabeth Hartmann, Strategic Scarcity: The Origins and Impact of Environmental Conflict Ideas, PhD Thesis, Development Studies, London School of Economics, 2003. Goodman quote from Department of Defense, DoD Commander’s Guide to Biodiversity, n.d.
  12. http://www.susps.org
  13. William Cronon,“The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground, New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.
  14. Betsy Hartmann,“Degradation Narratives: Over-Simplifying the Link Between Population, Poverty and the Environment,” IHDP Update, Newsletter of the International Human Dimensions Program on Global Environmental Change, No. 4, 2002, 6-8.
  15. Andrew Ross,“The Lonely Hour of Scarcity,” Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, 7 (3:3 - 26), 1996.
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