Is the Anti-Immigration Movement Really a New Racist Movement?? Looks like a Resounding "YES"

This incident says it all: A Minuteman on the front lines of the anti-immigration movement, a republican phenom, saying "Fuck You, Brown Boy!"...

As Kyle de Beausset said in his report on the crowd outside where Obama was giving a speech in San Diego at the annual National Council of La Raza (NCLR) conference where the incident took place (from one of the San Diego Minutemen, an anti-immigration group),

Just as I was about to turn away from filming a man holding a sign of a boy urinating on the phrase "La Raza", I heard him begin to chant, "Fuck You Brown Boy. Fuck You Brown Boy. Fuck You Brown Boy." The San Diego Minuteman supporter was walking up a ramp to the convention center and was speaking to another full-grown man that looked to be of latino descent to me.

They were supposedly "protesting" La Raza's "racism" using racist epithets...!?!

Some will see the above incident as the fault of a fringe lunatic, who supports a fringe organization, but as anyone who blogs about migration can attest, hateful rhetoric like this has poisoned almost every online forum that takes up the subject. Any newspaper article that dares even suggest that unauthorized migrants are human quickly fills up with hate like this in the comment section. Even the mainstream progressive blogosphere is filled with hate like this. Look no further than Alternet's special immigration section for evidence of that.

This hate is degrading the U.S.'s democracy, and preventing the U.S. from arriving at a meaningful solution to the issues associated with migration. I live and breathe the U.S. migration debate. And even for someone like myself, who is very familiar with the U.S.'s history oppression, I find myself living in disbelief over the suffering of that millions of authorized and unauthorized migrants have to live through every day in the United States.

And as we all know from even W.'s attempt at Immigration reform, the racism and fear provides a lot of right-wing steam attacking this amorphous non-WASP "threat" that is undermining their livelihood and that of Lou Dobbs, who has solved all the economic problems facing the nation with the simple, symbolic concept of building a huge, impenetrable Wall against the Other.

Problems begin when that very wall and all it symbolizes undermines what America has always symbolized: democracy, freedom, and compassion. So much for those dreams - hate is much more compelling for an apparently vocal, mostly Republican, "interest group".