Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [56]
But the new Reconquista movement is much scarier—a nefarious strategy to take back the Southwest by immigration blitzkrieg. The movement appears to have been first discovered in the late 1990s by a white nationalist border vigilante named Glenn Spencer. Spencer revealed an international plot by the Mexican government, the Democratic Party, the liberal press, multinational corporations, organized labor, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Ford Foundation to establish a “fifth column” of Mexican subversives to recolonize the Southwest, which they refer to by its Aztec name, Aztlán.70
Spencer toured the white supremacist lecture circuit for years, but his discovery remained on the fringe until Pat Buchanan publicized it in 2006. Buchanan, being a good Catholic, dropped the church from the conspiracy, but he kept the Ford Foundation, the corporations, and the Mexican government. He even used Spencer’s “fifth column” language, writing:
Regimes like Mexico’s now look on citizens who leave to work or study in the United States as agents of influence, a fifth column inside the belly of the beast . . . Stated bluntly, the Aztlan Strategy entails the end of a sovereign, self-sufficient, independent republic, the passing away of the American nation. They are coming to conquer us.71
Once Buchanan officially approved the Reconquista conspiracy theory, the rest of the right wing quickly jumped on board, and it has become a staple of anti-immigrant persecution politics, promoted by conservative media stars like Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs.
Bill O’Reilly, on the other hand, doesn’t believe that Mexican immigration is a plot to recapture the Southwest. In his opinion, it’s just an “economic scam” by Mexico to export its “poverty and education problem” to the United States .72 That said, he also claimed that the U.S. government permits illegal immigration because politicians are intimidated by minorities who are plotting to destroy “the white power structure” through population growth, explaining:
There’s no reason on earth the federal government doesn’t secure the border. No reason on this earth. But they’re afraid to be demonized as racist because the real racists who want a color-based country attack them vehemently if they put up a wall or put the military on the border.73
See, it’s not the immigration opponents who are racists. According to O’Reilly’s projection of intolerance, the “real racists” are the secret proponents of illegal immigration who want a “color-based country.”
The fearmongering over illegal immigration eventually found its way into state law in 2010 with Arizona SB 1070. The law requires aliens to carry registration documents at all times and empowers police to demand documents from those whom they suspect of being in the country illegally. In the article “Whose Country Is This?” Pat Buchanan argued that Arizona acted because the U.S. government “refuses to enforce America’s immigration laws.”74
A second lesser-known Arizona law that followed on the heels of SB 1070 invoked persecution politics even more explicitly. The law prohibits ethnic studies classes that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people” (i.e., whites), “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group” (i.e., Latinos), or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” With a hat tip to the Reconquista conspiracy, it also prohibits classes that “promote the overthrow of the United States government.”75
“Governor Brewer signed the bill because she believes, and the legislation states, that public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people,” said the governor’s spokesperson—three weeks after the governor gave the police authority to arrest Latinos who don’t carry immigration documents.
Tom Horne, the Republican state superintendent of public instruction who had fought for years to end Tucson’s ethnic studies programs, explained the true rationale