White mobs don't need to resort to rocks and bottles any more. Their elected representatives, dressed up in three-piece suits, are doing the racist dirty work using polite language in the hallowed halls of Congress and the Legislature.

When up to 30,000 Latinos and other supporters of civil rights for immigrants stretched for a mile marching across the 6th Street viaduct into downtown Milwaukee last week, it was a powerful symbol.

The 6th Street viaduct was recently rebuilt in a sweeping modernistic design, but it may as well have been the old 16th Street bridge that Father James Groppi and black and white civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s used to march across going the other way.

The bridge had been prettied up with a futuristic motif, but the purpose of the march was to fight the latest forms of the same old, ugly racism.

In the late '60s, Father Groppi led large groups of African-Americans across the 16th Street bridge to the all-white south side, where they were greeted with rocks, bottles and racial epithets.

Last week, a large group of Latinos marched across the 6th Street viaduct from the no-longer-all-white south side into a city where mobs no longer gather in the streets to openly express ugly, racist feelings.

White mobs don't need to resort to rocks and bottles any more. Their elected representatives, dressed up in three-piece suits, are doing the racist dirty work using polite language in the hallowed halls of Congress and the Legislature.

Milwaukee area Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner has been the driving force behind the harshest anti-immigration legislation in American history. The bill Sensenbrenner pushed through the House of Representatives would build a 700-mile fence along the border between the United States and Mexico.

Remember when we used to condemn Communists for building a wall between East and West Berlin to keep people in? Now we are doing the same thing to try to keep people of color out.

The fence is just a 700-mile-long physical representation of the intense hatred toward Mexican immigrants seething through the bill.

The legislation also would make illegal immigration to this country a felony instead of a civil violation. That would overwhelm our courts and prisons with more than 11 million illegal immigrants already estimated to be living in this country.

Even more disturbing is a provision of the bill that would make it a crime to provide any assistance to an illegal immigrant.

We're not talking about the unscrupulous "coyotes" who take money from immigrants with promises of helping them to cross the border before leaving penniless families to die in the desert. No, the kind of assistance Sensenbrenner's bill would outlaw is the kind routinely provided by churches, social workers, teachers and any other decent, caring people in this country who are moved to help the desperately poor.

Following Sensenbrenner's example, Wisconsin Republicans have introduced state legislation that would deny public medical care and public defenders in court to illegal immigrants and even deny school lunches to their children.

At some point, blind hatred of other races can be hazardous to the health of all of us. Sure, denying public health services to illegal immigrants could reduce their numbers through die-off. But what if they have contagious diseases? Do we really want to risk catching something ourselves just to thin out their ranks?

The U.S. Senate began taking up anti-immigrant legislation this week. Oddly enough, one of the voices calling for more tolerance toward illegal immigrants was that of President George W. Bush. Of course, George Bush calling for racial tolerance is a lot like George Bush talking about progress in Iraq. The words George Bush reads off the papers in front of him never have much real meaning.

Bush and his Republican Party have never been shy about openly demonstrating their solidarity with white racists by opposing affirmative action and any other effort to reduce racial inequality in America. Bush is now reaping what his party has sown. Because of Republican opposition, Bush has watered down a proposal he once claimed to believe in to give illegal immigrants in this country a chance to earn their citizenship by working and paying taxes.

The latest version of Bush's proposal is a joke that's not very funny. After working for six years as a "guest worker," an illegal immigrant "earns" deportation back to his native country.

The proposal is dead in the water anyway like everything else from the prematurely lame duck president. As bad as Bush's bill is now, it's not bad enough for the Sensenbrenner Republicans.

The fact that Latinos continue to risk everything to come into this country illegally in the face of our open hatred says something positive about the promise that our country still holds for poor people around the world.

But if we really do start withholding school lunches from children based on their racial or national backgrounds, all of us will have lost America.

Joel McNally of Milwaukee writes a weekly column for The Capital Times. E-mail: jmcnally@wi.rr.com

© 2006 The Capitol Times

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