Jackson Free Press

The Southern Poverty Law Center is warning that the vitrolic anti-immigrant debate is, predictably, starting to spill over into violence against Latinos. And as we've seen right here on the JFP site, and in local Democratic campaigns, the ugliness is not just limited to white supremacists and other extremists like the John Birch Society, or even the right wing of the Republican Party. The rhetoric by many so-called "progressives" is mirroring the claims of the extremists:

There's no doubt that the tone of the raging national debate over immigration is growing uglier by the day. Once limited to hard-core white supremacists and a handful of border-state extremists, vicious public denunciations of undocumented brown-skinned immigrants are increasingly common among supposedly mainstream anti-immigration activists, radio hosts and politicians. While their dehumanizing rhetoric typically stops short of openly sanctioning bloodshed, much of it implicitly encourages or even endorses violence by characterizing immigrants from Mexico and Central America as "invaders," "criminal aliens" and "cockroaches."

The results are no less tragic for being predictable: Although hate crime statistics are highly unreliable, numbers that are available strongly suggest a marked upswing in racially motivated violence against all Latinos, regardless of immigration status. According to hate crime statistics published annually by the FBI, anti-Latino hate crimes rose by almost 35% between 2003 and 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available. In California, the state with the largest population of Latinos in the country, anti-Latino hate crimes almost doubled in the same period.

[Read the full piece here.]