[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]
Recent polls are showing that
Arizona's police-state immigration law is broadly popular with the public -- and boy, are they all over THAT story at Fox News.
Here are the ugly results:
The Pew Poll, conducted in early May, shows that more
than 60 percent of Americans support the Arizona law's separate
provisions, which give police increased authority to question and detain
people they suspect of being in the country illegally.
... Pew Research Center President Andrew Kohut said he was surprised by how popular the elements of the law are.
"What's going on here is while the public has had moderate views on
dealing with the immigration problem, like support for a path to
citizenship, they've long thought that more has to be done to protect to
borders and to get better enforcement," Kohut said.
Kohut said he was particularly surprised about the level of support
among Democrats. Fifty percent of Democrats said they support the law
provision allowing police to question anyone they think may be in the
country illegally.
... A similar poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal and NBC tells
a similar story: 64 percent of American adults support the Arizona law.
Bill O'Reilly, upon seeing these results, naturally brought on Karl
Rove to chortle about how these polls bode ill for President Obama and
Democrats. And no doubt these polls are a heads-up to Democrats that
they need to aggressively take control of the message, instead of
letting Fox talkers and nativists define the terms of the debate.
Of course, if Rove devises the talking point, you can count on Fox's "news" shows to begin repeating them
ad infinitum. Which, of course, is exactly what happened the next morning, especially on Megyn Kelly's
America Live
program. Kelly ran several segments on the poll numbers, including a
"fair and balanced" debate with radio host Mark Levine and the utterly
incoherent Mike Gallagher:
I'm always amused by right-wingers like Gallagher -- guys who make a
fetish out of the Constitution, regularly claiming that President Obama
is somehow violating it and instituting a "police state" -- who seem
utterly unconcerned when their side tramples all over the Constitution,
and Levine clearly explains why the law is unconstitutional.
Levine also says something well worth repeating:
Kelly: Mark, why would the president get involved in
this? You've got -- you know, you've already got legal challenges that
will be mounted by many other groups -- why would the Department of
Justice, according to our attorney general, Eric Holder as of May 9, be
considering challenging this law on their own when you've got these kind
of approval ratings of the law on a nationwide basis?
Levine: It's a fair point, Megyn. Anyone can challenge the law, it's clearly unconstitutional -- it violates Article I, Section 8
-- and you're right that anyone can challenge it. I think the
president, though is making clear that anytime you have a majority
attack the rights of minority, that's something where you want the
Justice Department involved.
I'll give you a great example: Jim Crow laws in Alabama and
Mississippi were vastly supported by the great majority of people in the
1960s. That didn't make them right. Anytime you have a
majority infringing on the rights of a minority, then that's usually
when the Justice Department does need to stand up.
And Levine also points out one of the really disturbing aspects of the poll:
Levine: Hold on, Mike -- 71 percent said -- this is the most interesting poll -- 71 percent of Americans think that legal Latino citizens will be harassed by police. 71 percent! So you have 71 percent of Americans thinking that Latinos, legals, will be harassed, and they still support the measure! [Note: Kelly shortly points out that the actual figure is 66 percent.]
Of course, at this point Gallagher becomes simply incoherent, and
meanders off into claiming that the recent defeat of an incumbent
Democrat in West Virginia was related to the Arizona immigration bill.
Eh?
Well, it's true that laws like the one in Arizona that purport to deal with a "real problem" -- that is,
drug-related crime -- by taking away the rights of a despised minority have in fact always been popular.
Levine is right that Jim Crow laws enjoyed broad popular support for
many years. I can think of an even more vivid example of a broadly
popular measure to strip minority Americans of their civil rights:
Those who've read my book
Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community
are aware that not only was the evacuation and incarceration of 120,000
Japanese Americans -- including some 70,000 American citizens -- during
World War II an extremely popular measure, it was in fact avidly
demanded by a near-hysterical public, particularly along the Pacific
Coast, after Pearl Harbor.
From
Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians:
From March 28 to April 7, as the program evolved from
voluntary to mandatory evacuation, the Office of Facts and Figures in
the Office for Emergency Management polled public opinion about aliens
in the population. Germans were considered the most dangerous alien
group in the United States by 46 percent of those interviewed; the
Japanese, by 35 percent. There was virtual consensus that the government had done the right thing in moving Japanese aliens away from the coast;
59 percent of the interviewees also favored moving American citizens of
Japanese ancestry. The answers reflected clear educational and
geographic differences. Relatively uneducated respondents were more
likely to consider the Japanese the most dangerous alien group, and they
were also disposed to advocate harsher treatment of the Japanese who
were moved away from the coast. The east considered the Germans most
dangerous, the west the Japanese. People in the south, in particular,
were prone to treat Japanese harshly. The Pacific Coast public led all
other regions in believing the evacuees should be paid less than
prevailing wages.
I'll have to go do some archival hunting for the actual numbers, but
I've seen Gallup polls from the period that showed in excess of 90
percent public support for the evacuation policy. Historian Roger
Daniels, one of the foremost experts on the internment episode,
conjectures that evacuation, far from being ignored by apathetic
citizens as some have suggested, was actually one of the most popular
acts of the war.
I did find this in Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis'
The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation of the Japanese Americans During World War II, discussing the sentiments of the American public about what to do with the internees after the war was over:
A Gallup poll conducted at the turn of the year, 1942-43, reported that while there was almost unanimous approval of the evacuation and detention of the Japanese minority,
53 percent of those polled would allow citizens to return to their
homes. Of this figure 29 percent would include both citizens and aliens,
and an almost equal number would oppose return of either group. A poll
conducted by the Los Angeles Times at the end of 1943, on the other
hand, revealed 9,855 readers would exclude American Japanese from the
Coast as against 999 opposing exclusion.
This reflects a little-reported aspect of the internment episode, which I in fact described in some detail in
Strawberry Days
-- namely, the campaign by white xenophobes to keep Japanese American
citizens from being allowed to return to their former homes after the
war was over:
And the lessons of history apply deeply here, because the fate of
this campaign is highly instructive in the current environment. Here's
an excerpt from Chapter 6 of
Strawberry Days:
The new Japanese Exclusion League was organized that
spring with help from Miller Freeman and others. The core ideology seems
to have been built off the bones of Freeman’s old Anti-Japanese League,
which had gradually ceased activity after the passage of the Asian
Exclusion Act in 1924. Freeman was a financial supporter of the new
entity, but most of its leadership represented fresh blood in the
anti-Asian movement, men named Dale Bergh, C.G. Schneider, Ralph Hannan,
and Arthur J. Ritchie. And their June 1945 newsletter, dubbed the Japanese Exclusion League Journal,
made their agenda quite explicit, describing the JEL as “an
organization dedicated to legally, peaceably and permanently ridding
this Coast and, ultimately, this country of the Japs.”
The newsletter was chock-full of various attacks on the Japanese. A
Bainbridge Island resident named Lambert Schuyler attacked Japanese
strawberry farmers:
“The beating that the Japs gave Bainbridge acres amounts to assault and battery,” Schuyler told the Journal.
“The fact is that the Japs made their fortunes here by mining the
soil—leased soil. Take a good look at our so-called berry fields today.
Most of them will not even grow good weeds. At best they will produce
very inferior berries. And it will cost plenty to restore them to any
kind of farming. The reason: chemical fertilizers and no crop rotation. .
. .
“Don’t believe it, either, when someone tells you that the Jap has
brought wealth to our community. Actually, they mined this region. They
made money, but they lived in filth and poverty. They did their spending
in Jap stores, put their savings into Jap hotels and grocery stores in
Seattle, sent the balance to Japan to help build battleships. They
didn’t build us up. They tore us down. We want no more of them. . . .
“We can raise better strawberries ourselves than the Japs can. With
the help of machinery and crop rotation we can produce them just as
cheaply, too. Here is opportunity for some of our farm boys, returned
from the wars. In strawberries we have natural advantages of soil,
climate and market.
“Keep the Japs away and the white farmers will make money in berries
just as they did before the Japs came in and drove them out of
business.”
A Journal editorial titled “A Program That All Can Back!” outlined the League’s political agenda:
Almost daily letters come into the headquarters of the
Japanese Exclusion League from persons who are anti-Jap but who confess
their inability to go along with the League’s program because “it sets a
precedent that will undermine the fundamentals of the Constitution and
imperil other minority programs.”
Let’s re-inspect the program and see:
Item 1. Induce the government to keep all Japs out of the Western
Defense Command until the war is over. That’s just good sense, with a
war on. If only one among them was a saboteur, the exclusion of all, to
prevent his dirty work, would be justified. And we heard a man, close to
the military intelligence service, say in a public speech that six
known Japanese spies were now operating in Seattle alone.
Item 2. Deport all alien Japs and all disloyal Japs. Who will argue that this is either un-American or unnecessary?
Item 3. Stimulate interest in a national post-war election (so the
soldiers can participate) to amend the Federal Constitution and provide
that, after a certain date, NO MORE descendants of persons not eligible
for citizenship may automatically become citizens merely because their
alien mothers were here when they were born.
Japanese now constitute only one-tenth of 1 per cent of our
population. No great danger there. The peril lies in permitting
fast-breeding races that are not assimilable to go unchecked, and to
make American citizens of them as fast as they are spawned. Give them a
few years and they will make good of their boast of dominating America.
And they’ll do it without firing a shot. They will VOTE OUR COUNTRY AWAY
FROM US.
If that kind of law is un-American, we set a bad precedent many years
ago. We had such a law once. And we kicked it out the window.
This position was explored in greater depth in a pamphlet that Lambert Schuyler published independently: The Japs Must Not Come Back! Schuyler’s core arguments were not very distinguishable from those offered twenty years before by the exclusionists:
As a nation we stand prejudiced against orientals. This
is something which our bleeding-heart idealists have overlooked. They
claim our basic laws, the principles upon which America rests, are
unanimously in favor of regarding all men as equals. The fact remains,
however, that according to our statute books all men are created equal
except those with yellow skins. Any race, color or creed, say our laws,
may become naturalized citizens of our country except the Japanese,
Chinese and Hindu. These are judged unfit for assimilation in our
society.
Mind you, we on the Pacific Coast are glad of it. What irks us is the
loop-hole in our Constitution through which orientals may purchase the
farm next door to us and defy us to kick them out. The loop-hole is
this—all babies are created equal providing they are born in the United
States. The Japs, Chinese and Hindus are no exception to this rule.
Oriental babies born here are automatically American citizens. . . .
Obviously this is a contradiction of principle which cannot be justified
within the bounds of either religious or political idealism.
For Schuyler, in keeping with the anti-Japanese tradition, the tenets
of white supremacism and pseudoscientific racial eugenics were
paramount:
The dividing lines between the races are necessary to prevent mixed breeding. The white race does want to survive!
There is no dodging it. This is a white man’s country. The white man
runs it. And he is not going to let his own rules of behavior drive him
from his own soil. So, as long as we remain a people of spirit we will
refuse to sanction the mixing of colored blood with ours.
Japanese in America will never be the social equals of the whites for
the simple reason that they are not assimilable. Germans? Italians?
Jews? Yes. We can assimilate any of the whites. But the colored races
are different. We reserve the right to reject from our midst those who
are not patently assimilable.
His final solution: designate a passel of Pacific islands permanent
territories of the United States, and then remove all persons of
Japanese descent to this new permanent homeland. Of course, no one of
Japanese blood would be permitted to become a permanent resident of the
mainland afterward.
---
As is often the case with well-laid plans, the Bellevue “mass
meeting” of Monday, April 2 [1945] didn’t quite run according to script.
Much to the dismay of the Japanese Exclusion League, some people
actually showed up to voice their opposition.
As expected, the Overlake Elementary community hall was filled to
overflowing with about 500 people. The parade of speakers began with
assurances—soon shattered—that the organizers supported the principles
of free speech. Crandell launched into his expected diatribe against the
evacuees, concluding that “the one and only way to solve the Japanese
question is to exclude them forever from all American territory!”
League executive A.E. McCroskey of Seattle added that the entire
nation “is fully aware of the danger of giving American citizenship to
those who have proved unworthy of it time and again.” He then went on to
make a pitch for league memberships, asking for a show of hands from
all “who favor exclusion of all American-born Japanese from this
country,” and about 400 hands went up. Ritchie, who had previously tried
to make a quick buck by selling busts of FDR by a “famous Northwest
sculptor,” held up for the audience door prizes he promised to give
away: busts, created by the same artist, of “America’s No.1 Jap
hater”—and as he peeled away the tissue, the image of Gen. Douglas
MacArthur was revealed.
However, there also were about 100 people in the crowd who apparently
weren’t ready to sign up at all. Some of them began questioning the
league’s positions, and two women began heckling the speakers. In
response, McCroskey decided free speech wasn’t such a good thing after
all and threatened to oust their antagonists, telling them to “hire your
own hall to heckle in . . . and if there are any more outbreaks you
will be ejected.”
The outburst apparently put a damper on the evening, because at the
end of the night, only 200 or so of those who had raised their hands
stayed to put up their $10 for a Japanese Exclusion League membership.
A similar fate befell the would-be organizer of an anti-Japanese
effort in Seattle announced the same day as the Bellevue gathering.
Lloyd Young, who ran a glass shop in South Seattle, announced he was
going to cobble together a local chapter of the Remember Pearl Harbor
League, though his dues would only cost $5. But that mattered little to
the 150 or so University of Washington students who showed up at his
meeting that Thursday to distribute pamphlets and ask questions making
clear their opposition to his plans. The opposition far outnumbered the
would-be league members. The students refrained from heckling the
speakers, but spontaneous laughter erupted at times—as when a speaker
declared that white pioneers had “taken this country away from the
Indians and now the Japs are trying to take it away from us.” The
would-be organizers were taken aback by the opposition and said little
afterward. No record exists of any further activity by the league in
Seattle.
The interest appears to have waned almost as quickly in Bellevue,
despite the reported sponsorship of the first meeting by “business men
and women.” In the edition of the Bellevue American following the
meeting, no account of the gathering itself appears, except for a
discussion of it in a front-page editorial by editor A.J. Whitney.
Whitney backed away from his earlier pro-exclusion tone, though his
inclinations against the Japanese were still evident—reflective,
perhaps, of his long association with Miller Freeman, who actually
purchased a minority interest in the paper a few years later. He
bemoaned, for instance, the fact that there was little anyone could do
to stop Japanese citizens from returning to their own land. “We were
unable to discover anything that could be done about relocation—except
protest,” his editorial in the April 5 edition observed. “But, even a
protest is effective, and we believe that it is honest and fair to
notify in advance those Japanese who are planning to relocate here that
many people here do not want them to return now.”
Whitney was also aggravated by the fact that the internment camps had
been closed before the end of the war in the Pacific, and seemed
inclined to the Japanese Exclusion League’s suggestion of a national
plebiscite: “We are of the opinion that the War Relocation Authority . .
. made a terrible mistake in trying to force the relocation of the
Japanese on the Pacific Coast during the war. Instead, we believe the
Japanese should have been encouraged to stay where they were until peace
is established, and the nation can attack this grave problem in a
rational manner.”
He did, however, suggest that a proposal to pass a constitutional
amendment to exclude all Japanese from the country “presents many
difficulties.” And he noted that he “holds no brief for the Japanese
Exclusion League,” adding: “We do not guarantee the men who are
organizing the league. We cannot tell you how the money [collected for
memberships] will be spent.”
---
Within a week, a counter-meeting had been organized. Whitney was in
full retreat. A headline in the lead positions of the April 12 American
announced yet another “Town Meeting,” this one to be held in the
Bellevue School Auditorium on April 19. The meeting, the story declared,
“indicates that East Siders believe in fair play and want to know all
the facts on the problem of American citizens of Japanese descent.”
The story listed organizers from each Eastside community. All were
important civic, business, and church leaders, and all wanted the other
side of the debate heard. The Bellevue contingent included Charles
Bovee, whose wife had been the kind overseer of Mitsi Shiraishi’s dog
(and who also had sparked the Japanese “panic” two years before).
Again, several hundred attended. Support for their Japanese
neighbors’ rights was voiced. “I’m not for or against any group,” said
speaker John Fournier, publisher of the weekly newspaper in Kent. “But
as a newspaper publisher and King County businessman, I am deeply
concerned to see that the Constitution is upheld and the rights of
citizens respected.” Other speakers questioned the motives of the
exclusionists. Some observed that many of the anti-Japanese backers were
businessmen who stood to gain by having the Japanese lands remain
vacant.
The tide changed quickly in Bellevue as the town’s deeper nature
manifested itself. Among longtime Bellevue residents, Miller Freeman
was—discreetly—viewed as an overbearing self-promoter and a rich man
with little in common with the average rural Bellevue resident.
Moreover, many of the former neighbors of the Japanese, who had lived
among them and attended school with them, were repulsed by the jingoism
they were witnessing. They knew better.
“There were people around here that were madder than all get-out
about the Japanese,” recalled Robert Hennig. “I didn’t particularly feel
that way. I was mad at what happened at Pearl Harbor, but as far as the
Japanese that lived here, it wasn’t their fault.
“I know one guy, lived over here on 24th, and he says, ‘Well, if a Jap ever came to my house, I’d shoot him right off the bat.’
“And I said, ‘What the hell for? . . . You ever realize that there’s a
bunch of them over there in Europe, 442nd, the most highly decorated
bunch in the Army? . . . They’re fighting for us.’
“Well, he—he was a knothead anyway.”
Of course, Hennig had a cautious perspective on the entire internment
episode, considering his own German ancestry: “I always had to laugh
about it, because—I said, they shipped all the Japanese out of here,
Japanese descendants—they’d never been near the country of Japan—and
here I am a hundred percent German descent and they didn’t even look at
us.”
Bellevue at the time was largely populated with working-class people
like Hennig, and his attitude about their Japanese neighbors was
relatively common, though often unspoken. As the weeks went by, that
view prevailed. The Japanese Exclusion League dropped entirely out of
sight; there was no evidence that it organized any further meetings or
published any more newsletters. And the American, as expected, never was
able to report how the membership money had been spent.
The experience in Bellevue, in fact, was largely replicated along the
Pacific Coast: Attempts to prevent the return of the Japanese occurred
in every community in which they had been present, and in every one of
them, the campaign was largely a failure, inspiring counter-campaigns to
welcome back their former neighbors.
What we saw in this episode is that it's very easy for the public,
angry and eager for some kind of action to resolve an urgent fear, to
embrace some kind,
any kind of action, even if it takes away
the rights of someone other than themselves. And with a certain segment
of the population, there is real relish in taking those rights away.
But much of the population goes along with these kinds of solutions
often thoughtlessly, and then when confronted with the very human
realities and consequences of them, realizes its mistake, changes
course, and then works to repair the damage.
That certainly is the course of the American experience when it took
away the basic civil rights of all its citizens of Japanese descent: We
wound up paying huge amounts of money to the victims in the end, and the
long-held public view is that the internment was a horrendous mistake
of catastrophic proportions, one of the true black blots on the nation's
history of protecting civil liberties.
Of course, at the time, it was extremely popular. Most great mistakes are.
I suspect, in the long run, we will see the same thing happen with
Americans and the Arizona immigration law. Once they see that, put into
action, the laws really will create a nightmarish police state for
anyone of Latino descent or with an immigrant background, their basic
decency will rise to the fore, the tide of popular opinion will shift,
and we will again wind up having to work to repair the mistake.
In the meantime, it will be the duty of Americans of good conscience
to wait for the tide to change -- and to work for it. Because doing the
right thing is not very often the popular thing.