Researcher Speaks on Hate Group Activity

Mark Potok, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project and editor of the organization’s Intelligence Report magazine, spoke yesterday at a conference on “Michigan Response to Hate: Building United Communities” in Lansing, Michigan organized by the Michigan Alliance Against Hate Crimes and the Michigan Department of Civil Rights.  Potok, among other things, discussed the growth of the anti-immigrant movement and the increase in hate crimes after September 11:

“Potok explained that there has been a rise in “race-based” hate groups particularly in the post-9/11 climate. These groups have been motivated by fears about the United States no longer being a majority white nation, although it has been 9/11 and immigration that have been the driving factors accounting for growth in the movement. Racist groups have been able to take advantage of a general climate of anti-immigrant and xenophobic sentiment to develop a movement centered on immigration. Potok asserted that this movement is “pretty well thriving” and has grown dramatically in the past five years.

Potok explained that the Southern Poverty Law Center first noticed this phenomenon in 1998. That year there was an anti-immigration rally held in Alabama that featured the burning of a Mexican flag. The rally was put on by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a group that positions itself as a “mainstream” entity despite its historic relationship with the racist movement. At that rally–which numbered only fifteen people–Potok explained that there was an unrobed member of the Ku Klux Klan as well as a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens.”

For a fuller discussion of the presentation, click here.   For a report on one of the new anti-immigrant groups, the San Diego Minutemen, click here.

KJ