This morning, National Public Radio reported on how hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, are “finding new energy and members through the issue of immigration.” And, as Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center explained, it’s a two-way street between hate groups and the anti-immigration movement:
[Potok has] tracked a 40 percent rise in number of hate groups since 2000. At the same time, there’s been an explosion in anti-illegal immigration groups: Potok says some 250 created in just the past two years. Now, he sees a type of cross-fertilization.
“This kind of really vile propaganda begins in hate groups, it makes its way out into the larger anti-immigration movement, and before you know it you wind up seeing it on places like on CNN television shows, news programs.”
One example came last May, when CNN’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” reported that Vicente Fox was making an “Aztlan tour” of southwestern states, suggesting that the Mexican president was part of a conspiracy to make those states part of Mexico. CNN’s source for their fictional map of “Aztlan”? The Council of Conservative Citizens, which Potok describes as “a right-wing white supremacist group which says, among other things, that blacks are a ‘retrograde species of humanity.’” PFAW captured the video:
The head of CCC, which wants an end to “non-European” immigration, told NPR that the “heart and soul” of the immigration debate is, “Do we want to keep America as it is, more or less, or do we want it to be changed into a third-world country?” NPR reported that CCC “saw a spike in interest after the mass immigrant marches a year ago.”
