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Unscholarly minutemen spread a new chill in town

by Chon noriega

For those of us who study minority issues, today’s intellectual climate is — as it has always been — contentious. But it’s becoming chilly in new and frightening ways.

Within an hour of releasing a policy brief on noncitizens and voting in California, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) received a deluge of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls. Most expressed unbridled hatred and disgust for the report, its author and our center, vowing to fight our alleged campaign “to turn the United States into Mexico.”

The December 2003 report was by Joaquin Avila, an expert on minority voting rights and one of the winners of the prestigious MacArthur Fellows Program “genius” grants. Avila drew upon recent census data pointing to the growing number of California cities that have large noncitizen adult populations. Noting that prospects for political integration in the state are limited, he recommended further debate and research on noncitizen participation in local government. That included neighborhood councils, but also voting for local officials, which already occurs in Chicago, New York City and Maryland.

While some of those who protested were open to reasoned debate, most contented themselves with comments like, “Mexicans need to learn birth control.” Perhaps more troubling, everyone (including the news media) conflated noncitizens with “illegals,” thereby ignoring the status of legal residents. In the process, they quickly slid into the erroneous assumption that only U.S. citizens are entitled to civic participation or protection before the law.

“Illegals have no rights,” declared one protestor. “No one is entitled to anything,” cried another, adding: “Read the Constitution.” Clearly, in taking away the rights of others, some protesters even seemed to be willing to give up their own constitutional rights, evidently proposing that we do unto ourselves as we want done unto others!

The chill taking place on campus stems from a flawed presumption: Some people have rights, including freedom of expression; others do not. One of the consequences of this turn is that the university is seen as the advocate, if not the author, of the research its faculty members produce, rather than as a site for presenting, examining and challenging ideas. CNN’s host Lou Dobbs exemplified that attitude when he referred to our report and asked incredulously: “And it has the imprimatur of UCLA, one of the nation’s most respected universities, calling for voting rights for illegal aliens?”

Of course, protests against immigrant and minority rights are nothing new. Several colleagues have spoken to me matter-of-factly about the filing-cabinet drawers where they keep angry letters they have received over the decades. Former CSRC Director David Hayes-Bautista still receives hate mail for a study noting that more than half of all births in California are now to Latinos, as if he were personally responsible!

What’s new about the latest critics is that they’re more emboldened and represent an organized sector of the electorate that enjoys significant access to the mass media. If their misguided efforts succeed, our society will fly backward into the future, like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history. And the past will seem like “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”

Noriega is director of the Chicano Studies Research Center.