Xenophobia could bring back `closed society’ By JOE ATKINS
OXFORD – Forty-four years ago, Ole Miss history professor James Silver put a tag on Mississippi that stung hard but proved true enough to serve even today as a bitter reminder of the state’s not-so-long-ago dark ages.
Mississippi is “the closed society,” Silver wrote, a society that comes “as near to approximating a police state as anything we have yet seen in America.” He wrote those words in 1964, a time when racist, xenophobic Mississippians would even kill to preserve a “hyper-orthodox social order” that defied “fact, logic, or reason.”
Thankfully, torched black churches and murdered civil rights workers aren’t part of the landscape of today’s Mississippi, but a new xenophobia is rising that threatens once again to lock down the state’s borders and resurrect the “closed society” that once made it the shame of the nation.
Proof positive of that xenophobia is what the state Legislature recently sent Gov. Haley Barbour to sign, a bill sponsored by state Sen. Michael Watson of Pascagoula that called for the imprisonment of undocumented workers for up to five years plus a fine of up to $10,000.
Employers hiring them would lose their business licenses for a year and government contracts for up to three years.
It’s the kind of document that politicians from Mississippi’s dark ages — James Vardaman, Theodore Bilbo, John Rankin, Ross Barnett — would have loved to brandish at their courthouse rallies — a crackdown on dark-skinned people who can’t vote and have no power, the perfect formula for stirring up the masses and making them forget you’re not doing much else for them.
Just like in the old days, the newest crop of rabble-rousing demagogues — Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, state Sen. Watson and their ilk — have their media messenger boys.
In the 1960s, Jackson Daily News editor Jimmy Ward used his column as a bully pulpit for segregation. Bryant and crowd look to radio personalities like J.T. and Dave to inflame listeners about the threat from south of the border.
Watson’s bill “criminalizes work,” said longtime activist and civil rights veteran Rims Barber at a meeting of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA) in Jackson last week. “It makes work a felony. Five years serving time for someone who’s simply trying to earn a buck.”
State Rep. Jim Evans of Jackson had even stronger words about Watson’s bill. “It’s evil,” said Evans, working people’s strongest champion in the Mississippi Legislature. As for the bill’s sponsors and backers, “They’re greedy, they’re hateful, and they’re ignorant.”
Evans and MIRA work tirelessly and successfully each legislative session to kill similar bills.
This one got through, however, due to the powerful backing of pols like Bryant and to grassroots efforts to raise fear and anger against Latino workers even though those workers deserve much of the credit for the rebuilding that has taken place on the Mississippi Gulf Coast since Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.
Immigrant workers — whether from Mexico or India — come here to work. Often recruited by unscrupulous agents, they arrive to find themselves part of a growing army of invisible people who do hazard-ridden jobs under unprotected conditions for employers whose greed overwhelms any sense of common humanity.
They’re preyed upon by state-sanctioned border patrols and every hoodlum who knows they don’t have bank accounts for their paltry earnings.
Then they’re preyed upon by politicians in desperate need of a new issue now that their old rants against homosexuals, abortionists, and big government have grown stale.
Few point to the dismal failures of free trade treaties like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in creating a situation where people are forced to leave their countries to find work to feed their families.
Like anyone, they would prefer home to a hostile place that first exploits and then threatens them.
Latino workers are making Mississippi a richer, better place. Maybe someday in the future, as Othón Pérez’s noted poem about immigrants says, “no one, ever again, has to abandon their land … to go searching for a destiny in other lands … to go into exile and waste away alone.” (Joe Atkins is journalism professor at the University of Mississippi and a member of St. John Parish.)
