Gabler: Immigration Reform 'Beating Up on Aliens, Getting Whites for 2006 Election'

April 1st, 2006 8:12 PM

Do you support rigorous measures to strengthen border security and tighten immigration controls? If so, you're probably a 'nativist' - read racist - or a rube, or very possibly both.

Don't believe me? Just ask Neal Gabler. Here's what he had to say on this evening's Fox News Watch:

"The conservative nativists, and maybe that's a redundancy, thought they had a winner here. What a great issue they have," he said sarcastically. "You can beat up on aliens and get all of those white folks for the 2006 election."

Conservative columnist Jim Pinkerton weighed in with two points of note:

"Bloggers like Mickey Kaus and Michelle Malkin have made the point that the MSM, especially the LA Times, hid the most inflammatory element of those pictures from their readers and viewers by not showing the profusion of Mexican flags and highlighting the relatively few American flags."

"The polls show 60, 70, 80% of the country supports the [rigorous] House approach. The elites are one way on this issue, the masses are another way. The media can't deal with that because the media are siding with the elites."

Let's summarize: in Gabler's mind, there's apparently no national security justification for reducing the annual flow across our porous borders of hundreds of thousands of unidentified people. No, it's just about nativism, which rhymes with racism. And if you fall for the Immigration Fear Factor, you're nothing but a gullible white rube, being led to the 2006 polls by those cynical conservative pols.