Ethnic cleansing in the American heartland

From TomPaine.com:


Ethnic cleansing in the American heartland
Submitted by Rick Perlstein on July 17, 2007 - 10:00pm.

Historian Jean Pfaelzer, author of Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans
writes about an America that does not look like America: the eighty towns (so far) that have passed versions of the "Illegal Immigration Relief Act" criminalizing the rental of property to undocumented immigrants. Thus have wide swathes of Middle America willingly turned themselves into municipal police states. In her book, Pfaelzer writes about entire towns cleaned of their Chinese populations by gun-toting vigilantes. That was the 19th century. They do it more bureaucratically now:

In Hazelton, PA, landlords face arrest or fines of $250 per day. In Riverside NJ the fines grow to $1,000 per day. In Cherokee, GA, even after an eviction, landlords must prove that their former tenants have left the county before they can again collect rents....

As civil rights groups try to enjoin the codes, others spring up. Only the federal government can deport people, but small towns can drive them out of town....

Hazleton’s mayor told Sixty Minutes about a 70% rise in violent crime since Latinos came to town in 2001 (the correct number is 20 of 8,500 crimes). Farmers Branch, Texas said that the code would prevent terrorist attacks by purging its Latinos. One third of towns that passed the code are in unemployed areas of Pennsylvania--railroad towns that once sold anthracite coal, steel tubes, and carpets. Now they export Latinos....

The mayor wants Hazleton to remain 94.7% white. Last week in front of a burning cross the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, recently defunct, announced to ABC Evening News that since they began assaulting, torching, and “bleaching” Latinos, membership has risen 40%.

“Pack your bags…It’s over, go home” shouted local Minutemen after Escondido’s city council voted 3-2 for the Hazleton code. With nearly half the town born outside the US, anyone who looked or sounded “foreign” stood to be evicted. In Altoona, which is 99.9 % white, a city councilman declared “We just want to stay ahead of the curve.”...

http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/ethnic_cleansing_american_heartland?tx=3

:eyes:

We've lost our damned minds.

:cry:

Many towns in the midwest, used to have "Sundown" laws, which in effect, Blacks were banned from these towns at night.