Extract from an interview on the Tavis Smiley Show
On PBS/KQED - 3.13.08
Tavis: With all due respect to Eliot Spitzer, let's now turn our attention and talk about something that really does matter, and that is the issue of immigration and specifically, the Hispanic community. I love, as I said earlier, the title of the book, "His Panic." What is this panic all about where your people are concerned?
Rivera: Well, you have a - I'll tell you, I could really encapsulate the whole theme of the book with one phone call I received from a guy named Sergio in Portland, Oregon last week. He's a guy who was brought here by his family at the age of three; his dad got a green card. Sergio ultimately became a citizen of the United States.
He's living now, as I said, in the Portland area, has two children, both boys, five years old and seven years old. So Sergio called me because the boys went home from school crying that they're being called border-jumpers. They said, "Daddy, what's a border-jumper?"
The problem, Tavis, is yes, we have a problem with illegal immigration, no doubt about it. But when you have programs like Lou Dobbs and some of the others who every night are showing pictures of Mexicans jumping over the wall or wading across the Rio Grande River, it casts a taint over the entire community, citizen and immigrant, legal and illegal, alike.
That story I just related to you is part of a generalized phenomenon now. Groups like the KKK and other hate-mongering groups according to the Southern Poverty Law Center with a report released just this week, these groups have been resurgent. They were almost dead in 2000 and now on the backs of this issue, on the backs of these illegal immigrants, they are resurging, they are - hate crimes against Hispanics are exploding.
You have a very, very stressful situation being created because of the demagogues and the savage right-wing talk radio campaign who are scapegoating mainly Latino immigrants for everything from crime to disease to stealing jobs to bringing terrorism in. Next they're going to blame them for acne and eating our sandwiches.
Tavis: You take this head-on in the book. How would you respond to Lou Dobbs or anyone else on that list that you laid out a moment ago that says that it is illegal, first and foremost it is illegal, and from that point on nothing in your book really matters? Geraldo, it's illegal.
Rivera: Well, I point out - and the second sentence is my forebears were also immigrants and they came here illegally. The fact of the matter is in the 19th century, there were no immigration laws. If you weren't a prostitute or a convict and if you were a White person, you could come into this country. The Chinese were excluded in the 1880s, then we had 50 years of White, European immigration, and then in 1924 the National Origins Act, which dispersed visas to foreigners wanting to come to this country on the basis of race.
Seventy-six percent of the visas went to people from the United Kingdom or Scandinavia, and then the percentage went down as you got closer to the Mediterranean and presumably less White. Italians got 3 percent, Greeks got 1.5 percent of the visas. None for Africa, none for Asia, none for Latin America. So we always had a race-based immigration program, so that belies the whole comment that their forebears came here legally; mine couldn't come here legally.
Well, my dad was Puerto Rican, and that's another story; he's a citizen. But my point is that Latinos really had no avenue other than the temporary guest worker programs, the Bracero programs that developed over the years. Right now, you have in the United States a tremendous explosion of the Latino community. Most of it is because of our families having more babies than other families.
We have a very young population, 25 years old on average as opposed to 40 years old for Anglo Americans. So there's definitely something going on. We were four or five million in 1950, 45 million today, and what I believe - and I base my statements on the emails that I've been receiving - racial, racist, racialist, however you want to couch it, Geraldo, go back from where you came from, you brown turd in the nation's toilet bowl. Take these people back with you.
The tone, Tavis, is - and I've been 40 years in public life and I have never received this kind of vibe before. It's an us against them situation that has been created largely by the demagogues and it's very, very troubling.
Tavis: And yet the flip side of that is, which I'm trying to juxtapose here, that everybody wants to make money off of or take advantage of in one way, exploit in one way or another, the fact that they are here. How do you explain that, that there is this visceral maltreatment of immigrants, and yet there's so many people making money - all kinds of American companies.
Every time you go on a plane these days or anywhere you go you hear an English announcement and you hear a Spanish - we know they're here. We're making money off of them. And yet I'm trying to juxtapose that with the hate that you're talking about.
Rivera: Well, we talked earlier about Spitzer and horny hypocrites. There is rampant hypocrisy in the area of illegal immigration as well. I believe that the people who are flogging this issue on a nightly basis are people who have figured out how to cure their ratings problems on cable news or talk radio. They are doing this because it rates.
And then you have situations like Mitt Romney. You've been at our summer house in Massachusetts. For 25 years, I have a real connection to Massachusetts. I was there when Mitt Romney was governor. The person he became when he decided to run for president is not the Mitt Romney that we knew as people from Massachusetts.
This guy is a person who has been exposed. His own lawn crew in the governor's mansion were illegal immigrants, and yet he was demonizing them in a way - I actually had a conversation if you have a minute I could relate to you with Mitt Romney. I was doing Bill O'Reilly's program, as I do every Friday. I came out in the green room. Governor Romney was there and he's a very charming man in person, he couldn't be nicer.
And I said, "Governor, I'm glad I've run into you because I've got to tell you, the extreme rhetoric in your anti-immigration platform is really distressing a lot of Latinos. We're worried; we're hearing stories now where people with mustaches and brown skin are being carded at traffic stops, cops asking them for proof of their citizenship status. This is very troubling."
And he said, "Oh, no, Geraldo, no, no." He's such a sincere guy. "No, no, I only am interested in illegal immigrants." And I told him, I used the word putrid fog. Your rhetoric and the Minute Men and everything that they're doing is creating a climate that's like a putrid fog that lies over the entire Hispanic community now and Governor, I'm telling you, it's going to cost you in Florida.
And he said, "No, Geraldo, I've got 45 Hispanics on my advisory community in Florida." And I said, "Governor, good luck, it's not going to be enough." So sure enough, he spent a fortune in Florida; he drank café con leche; he said, "Cuba is, Castro no;" he wore the Guayaberra shirt; he did all the formulaic things to get the Cubans on his side and guess what? They voted for John McCain five to one. Because even citizens are extremely concerned by the tone of this debate, and finally, we are going to, I hope, hold these public officials accountable.
Tavis: We're just scratching the surface of a fine new book by veteran journalist Geraldo Rivera. The new book is called "His Panic: Why Americans Fear Hispanics in the U.S." Geraldo, always an honor to have you on the program, take care.
Read an exerpt of his book: click here.