2008-11-25T11:21:00.001-08:00

by: José Fusté

I would like to clarify here why on October 16, 100 students protested Jim Gilchrist’s (founder of the Minuteman Project) lecture on campus.

Most readers would agree that universities are not soapboxes for people to freely express their unsubstantiated personal opinions. We don’t just pick random people off the street and bring them here as distinguished lecturers. The university is a forum for persons who seek to grow our collective knowledge in a way that improves society. In my opinion, Gilchrist is far from qualified to speak as a “distinguished lecturer.” Here’s why:

First, he willfully distorts the facts about immigration. In a recent article published in the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Gilchrist blames undocumented immigrants for creating traffic gridlock, hospital bankruptcies, terrorist attacks, and instability in housing costs. He says they deteriorate the quality of education, deplete our natural resources, increase crime including violent offenses and identity fraud, and bring in leprosy. He also holds them responsible for multi-billion annual frauds against U.S. taxpayers, for neighborhood terrorism conducted by fearless street gangs, for importation of lethal drugs, for increases in university tuition costs, and for a reducing the quality of medical care.

In the section of the article where he lays out these wild accusations, he provides only one footnote as a reference: an LA Times article which he claims states how Los Angeles has the lowest literacy rate of any city in the country. Not only is this piece completely outdated (1993) and untrue (the least literate city today is El Paso, TX), the article provides no proof that undocumented immigrants are to blame for illiteracy. As a matter of fact, the article doesn’t say a single word about illiteracy. It is about how two-year schools were charging graduates higher fees (Gilchrist conveniently left out the part of the title that makes the article’s intent explicit).

The fact is that these claims are unsubstantiated. On the issue of the economy, experts consistently point out that immigration (including the undocumented kind) has a substantial positive growth effect on the U.S. economy. In 2006, a group of 500 economists—including five Nobel Laureates—wrote a letter to Pres. Bush reminding him of the benefits of immigration. Here is what the primary author of this letter said on this issue: “Economists disagree about a lot of things but there is a consensus on many of the important issues surrounding immigration...The consensus is that most Americans benefit from immigration and that the negative effects on low-skilled workers are somewhere between an 8% wage reduction to no loss in wages at all.”

The notion that undocumented immigrants are a burden on taxpayers is also a distortion of the truth. They pay the same real estate taxes and the same sales and other consumption taxes that other Americans pay. The majority of state and local costs of schooling and other services are funded by these taxes. Also, the U.S. Social Security Administration has estimated that three quarters of undocumented immigrants pay payroll taxes, and that they contribute $6-7 billion in Social Security funds that they will be unable to claim.

The same goes for the claim that immigrants are causing a leprosy epidemic. It has been discredited by none other than the CDC.

Also, the notion that recent immigrants (mostly Latino) commit more crimes than other Americans is completely misguided. One study in Florida found that the homicide rates were significantly lower for Latinos there than for other groups. Criminologist Andrew Karmen found the same trend in New York City. Robert J. Sampson, chairman of Harvard’s sociology department, reported in 2005 that the rate of violence among Mexican Americans was significantly lower than among non-Latino Americans.

The facts say that overall, undocumented immigrants make this country a better place. That is why immigrants’ rights advocates seek to give these people legal status. The majority of them are productive, law-abiding citizens (except for their undocumented status, which is a misdemeanor offence. So is jaywalking). We owe it to them.

The other reason why we opposed Mr. Gilchrist's presence on campus is because we consider his speech to be hateful and potentially harmful to the millions of Latinos who live in this country. The lies he spreads are like yelling fire in a crowded theater. Like Rep. John Lewis recently said: “George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans.” The Minutemen may not go around assaulting and killing immigrants with their own hands but it is no coincidence that since they—and other similar nativist groups—began their anti-immigrant crusade in recent years, there has been a sharp increase in anti-Latino hate crimes. Recent FBI statistics say they rose 35% between 2003 and 2006. In California, the state with the largest number of Latinos, hate crimes against Latinos have almost doubled. Here are some examples: a) Oct. 16, 2005, Sacramento: Six people are injured by three white men who crash a private party with the intent of “beating up Mexicans,” b) Sept. 17, 2006, Laguna Beach: A truck driven by two men hits two Latino workers at a day labor center, and one of the workers is also assaulted, c) Aug. 8, 2007, Garden Grove, Calif.: Felipe Alvarado, an immigrant working as a janitor at a fast-food restaurant, is taunted with racist threats and then attacked by three men, one of whom is carrying a loaded gun. Also, this year, in the town of Shenandoah, PA, Luis Eduardo Ramírez, a Mexican immigrant, was beat do death by several white teenagers while they racial slurs at him.

No one is suggesting here that Gilchrist or the Minutemen are directly ordering people to commit these misdeeds. However, by stirring the pot with their inflammatory rhetoric and deceptions, they are tacitly encouraging Americans to act violently towards immigrants. In 2007, Gilchrist told a crowd of 400 people that “it’s OK to say ‘rapist,’ ‘robber’ and ‘murder,’ when referring to ‘illegal aliens’.” This is exactly the sort of mental picture of immigrants that leads some to commit shameful and sometimes fatal acts of violence against them.

On October 16, we tried to prevent our respected institution from validating Gilchrist as a legitimate commentator on immigration issues. We sought to stop the university from amplifying his message of hate. One attendee to the lecture told me that she was there to hear Gilchrist's point of view and that we should let him speak. My response to her was this: would the Osher Institute invite a holocaust denier and anti-Semite to speak as a “distinguished lecturer”? If so, would she be inclined to go hear him and thus validate him as a legitimate speaker? I am not accusing Gilchrist of being neither a Holocaust denier nor an anti-Semite. What I do know is that through his distortions and his paranoid, xenophobic, Nativist, anti-immigrant prejudice he has become our [i.e., Latinos’] version of one.

I personally have no problems with inviting to UCSD speakers with contrasting ideas on immigration. However, if we want to uphold our reputation, we should make sure they are truly distinguished lecturers who deal with facts. A university is no pulpit for a self-proclaimed “vigilante” who goes around scaring people into believing that undocumented immigrants are a threat to the “preservation of a long-established American heritage, culture, and language” (an almost direct quote from the above cited journal article by Gilchrist). This is the same type of cultural racism that German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants faced when they arrived here (legally and illegally).

I regret that in the end, UCSD and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute fell into Gilchrist’s trap and we weren’t able to stop them. The next time he speaks at a forum, he will likely qualify his “lecture” by saying that he was once invited to lecture at UCSD as a “distinguished” person. Shame on UCSD for allowing him to do so.

UCSD is No Place for a Minuteman