Demonization of Mexican and other Latino immigrants is fueling hate crimes and violence against them

Demonization of Mexican and other Latino immigrants is fueling hate crimes and violence against them, and it's time for America's leaders and media to put a stop to it all. The swine-flu scapegoating of Mexicans over the past two weeks by some radio and television talk show hosts reflects the abandon with which many local officials, anti-immigrant groups and even an unthinking mainstream media create popular resentments, dehumanize immigrants and provide justification for the extremists among us to act violently. There are genuine issues to debate openly about legal and illegal immigration, but that doesn't justify language such as CNN's Lou Dobbs calling the virus the "Mexican flu," radio host Michael Savage saying "illegal aliens are the carriers" or radio host Jay Severin referring to Mexican immigrants as "criminaliens." Dobbs earlier propagated stories about illegal immigrants causing a major outbreak of leprosy that were false but that he never retracted....In the case of the swine flu, an epidemic never materialized, but the damage to Latinos' image remains and comes on top of the ugly anti-immigrant campaigns of recent years, wild exaggerations of immigrant crime and mass roundups of suspected illegal immigrants by local and federal authorities. At a time when the nation is overcoming its black-white divisions and an African American is in the White House, the FBI reports that hate crimes against Latinos grew 40 percent over four years, reaching 830 in 2007, the last year measured. Last year, at least three murders of dark-skinned Latinos were driven by what clearly was anti-immigrant, racial hatred. The House of Representatives last month passed legislation known as the Matthew Shepard Act, which would extend federal hate-crimes law to cover crimes motivated by race, religion or national origin, in addition to sexual orientation or disability. The Senate should pass it now to make a statement against Latino hate crimes.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/10/ED9J17HA7P.DTL