From NPR:
Geraldo Rivera, whose never been afraid to voice a controversial opinion, believes that “The hostility by some anti-immigrant activists against Hispanics is no different from that directed against earlier generations of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants.”
“It’s a hysterical whipping up of a mob frenzy on an issue that should be recognized that it is part of a process that makes this country unique,” Rivera (who has a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish mother) tells Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition. “And by exacerbating the differentness of the newcomers, what they do is a gross disservice.”
“Many of the most fervent anti-immigrant activists are themselves the children or grandchildren of immigrants,” he says. “The style changes, the accents change, the geographical antecedents change, but it’s the same. You can track headline for headline the response to the Irish wave of immigration in the mid-19th century to the reaction of the Minutemen and similar radical anti-immigration groups today.”
And he has little time for the argument that some people make about border security being the reason reason behind their opposition to immigration.
“Are you really concerned about ‘border security,’ or are you concerned about the changing demographic face of the United States? [For] example, if it is terrorism that you are concerned about and you want this fence built between the United States and Mexico, why don’t you want the same fence built between the United States and Canada? Why isn’t there this clamor … ?
“It’s not [fear of] crime, it’s not terror, it is demographics that is the true fear. If we wanted secure borders, what about the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts?”
