There's a new website called wecanstopthehate.org which is trying the old guilt-by-association trick to delegitimize all anti-immigration arguments and arguers—including not just us at VDARE.com, but also including the more circumspect/ wimpier organizations like CIS, FAIR, and NumbersUSA, which may see us as radical.

Wecanstopthehate [WCSTH] identifies a number of mainstream organizations as "Fanatical Factions". It bases this on the reports of the SPLC ("a shakedown scam that preys on the elderly, Holocaust-haunted rich"—Peter Brimelow), which is identified as one of its "allies" on its website. (Other "allies" include the Anti-Defamation League, the Soros-funded Media Matters, and the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund. This makes me think that "Fanatical Factions" would be a better name for them.)

It isn't until you take a close look at WCSTH's "Media Center" page that you realize who's paying for this smear job—The National Council Of La Raza. NCLR President Janet Murguia (email her), who has gone on Lou Dobbs and babbled incoherently about "code words", is trying to suppress debate by associating the language of patriotic immigration reform with antique controversies over Irish immigration, Japanese internment, and civil rights. On the February 4, 2008 show, she said

MURGUIA: Lou, I stand by my record as leading an organization...

DOBBS: You can stand by your record as you want to...

MURGUIA: ... for 40 years as a civil rights advocacy organization, represents 44 million Hispanics in this country. [Note that the NCLR represents both legal and illegal Hispanics.]

DOBBS: You're sitting here, attacking freedom of speech, suggesting that the only one who can oppose you would be [inaudible]...

MURGUIA: We have to draw the line on freedom of speech,  [Emphasis added] when freedom of speech becomes hate speech.

DOBBS: You wouldn't be involved in this debate if it were not...

MURGUIA: Hate speech is not acceptable.

DOBBS: Excuse me. You would not even be involved in this debate on illegal immigration unless the preponderance of those illegal aliens were Hispanic.

And that's the point—the National Council Of La Raza isn't interested in civil rights in principle, or even in open immigration—it's interested in Mexican immigration, the Mexifornication of America.

Of course, it's not really interested in freedom of speech, either. The WCSTH website has a page called "Media Malpractice"  which accuses various patriotic journalists (who are always a little thin on the ground) of wrongdoing in supporting enforcement or reporting immigrant crime. It has a "write to the media" section where people are encouraged to write to the president of CNN to make him stop Lou Dobbs from talking about illegal immigration.

The object of La Raza and its WCSTH project is simple: suppression. La Raza really don't want people like us to get any mainstream media exposure at all. "People like us" doesn't just include me, Peter Brimelow, and Joe Guzzardi— WCSTH is also attacking Dan Stein and Mark Krikorian, who are much nicer than we are (just ask them), not that it does them any good. And Pat Buchanan, who's been a professional journalist since 1961. Perhaps WCSTH thinks he needs to be replaced by a bilingual Hispanic.

What this amounts to is organized stifling of debate. We've been aware of this blacklisting at VDARE.COM for some time. We outed an example in the Brad Krantz case, where a talkshow host who had scheduled Peter Brimelow for an interview cut it short because of a phone call from law professor/ blogger Eric Muller. Now La Raza, with the arrogance that seems to characterize Hispanic activists' attempts to shape policy, is making the tactic public.

The WCSTH website has a page called Code Words in the Debate [PDF] which attempts to enforce style rules in the debate. It claims that the previous episodes of immigration restriction and other Bad Things in American history were caused, not by genuine democratic processes, but by propagandists who "dehumanized" the victims:

"Virtually every large-scale civil rights atrocity in U.S. history was preceded by a widespread campaign vilifying a specific ethnic or religious group."

The examples: Chinese Exclusion, World War II Japanese Internment, and previous mass deportations of illegal aliens in the 1930s, and 1950s. In fact, all of those were responses to real social problems. (If the Japanese weren't an actual threat, something we can only know after the fact, at least there was a real war on.)

Here are some of the words we're not supposed to use (I added the hyperlinks):

• "Describing immigrants as 'third world invaders' who come to America to destroy our heritage, 'colonize' the country and attack our 'way of life.' This charge is used against Hispanics, Asians and other people of color."

WCSTH seems particularly annoyed that illegal immigrants streaming over the southern border should be called "invaders." But guess what? After the first ten or twelve million, it does start to look like an invasion.

• "Using terminology that describes immigrants as part of 'hordes' that 'swarm' over the border. This dehumanizing language has become common.

But the term "hordes" is only used of humans. And there are really large groups of illegals crossing the border. ("Usually, the illegals start to trickle across in small groups of two or three, dodging through the brush of no-man's-land. Occasionally, however, a large group will simply charge isolated officers and overwhelm them. The Border Patrol calls this a 'banzai.'"[Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation, p. 235]

Possibly the Border Patrol officers would say they were being "swarmed" too

• "Portraying immigrants as carriers of diseases like leprosy, tuberculosis, Chagas disease (a potentially fatal parasitic disease), dengue fever, polio, malaria."

Hey, WCSTH is doing our work for us here!—it's mentioned most of the diseases that immigrants do carry, leaving out only AIDs, which comes in more from Africa and Haiti, and thus doesn't concern the NCLR. But really, why are we supposed to keep this a secret?

• "Depicting immigrants as criminals, murderers, rapists, terrorists, and a danger to children and families."

Well, the links above show either (a) if you're Janet Murguia, "See! See! They do depict immigrants like that!" or (b) if you're an ordinary American, "My goodness, immigrants frequently are like that—who knew?" By the way, immigrants are frequently a threat to their own children and families, as well as ours.

• "Propagating conspiracy theories about an alleged secret 'reconquista' plot by Mexican immigrants to create a 'greater Mexico' by seizing seven states in the American Southwest that once belonged to Mexico."

Of course, the thing about reconquista is that it's not a secret conspiracy—it's an open aspiration of many Mexican immigrants and intellectuals. And it's a simple demographic fact—you can not only see it in towns like Maywood and South Gate that have turned into Mexican colonies, but you can see it throughout the history of human migration, most recently in Kosovo, where the borders have changed because the people changed.

WCSTH also has a discussion of "myths and facts". Here are the "myths":

• Myth #1: Enforcement-only policies are a practical solution to undocumented immigration
• Myth #2: Immigrant workers suppress the wages of American workers.
• Myth #3: The nation spends billions of dollars on welfare for undocumented immigrants
• Myth #4: Undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens.
• Myth #5: Immigrants don’t “assimilate” into U.S. society

Looking at the "myths," I can only conclude that La Raza and WCSTH are deceiving themselves or trying to deceive us—their myths are facts, and their facts are myths.

1. Enforcement is practical—La Raza just doesn't want it to work.
2. Immigrant workers do suppress wages—George Borjas has proved this, but La Raza prefers a study by Giovanni Peri, who is just wrong.
3. The US does spend billions on welfare for illegals—La Raza claims that they're not eligible to receive welfare, ignoring their US-born children ("anchor babies" to use a La Raza-disapproved term) who are.
4. Illegals do commit a lot of crime—their crime rate is lower than that of that of black Americans, but higher than that of white Americans. Relatively low incarceration rates for first-generation Mexican immigrants, which may simply represent not getting caught, don't continue into the second generation, where crime and gang membership goes way up.
5. And finally, of course immigrants aren't assimilating—unlike previous generations of exiles, most of today's immigrants have a perfectly good country of their own, to which they can return on a regular basis. In the case of Mexican immigrants, that country is so close, you can get there by wading.

After the Obama speech on race, the New York Times interviewed various people asking for their reaction. One of them was La Raza's Murguia, who made this amazing statement:

"But Ms. Murguia said she hoped that Mr. Obama's speech would help 'create a safe space to talk about this, where people aren't threatened or pigeonholed' and 'can talk more openly and honestly about the tensions, both overt and as an undercurrent, that exist around race and racial politics.'" [The Race Issue: Groups Respond to Obama's Call for National Discussion About Race, By Larry Rohter And Michael Luo, New York Times, March 20, 2008]

What I'd like to know is:

can we at VDARE.com have a "safe space" in which to discuss these things with being censored by La Raza and its friends?

How about Lou Dobbs? Can Murguia allow him a safe space to talk about the tensions that exist around the "race and racial politics " of immigration?

How about people like math teacher Walter Kehowski of Arizona, who found himself persecuted by the EEOC and the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund after emailing some of our columns, (including one of mine) to his colleagues? Can he have a "safe space?"

And, if La Raza doesn't mind, could this safe space for discussion be America?