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NARR
Every month, more than 800,000 people tune into Lou Dobbs on CNN and view a steady stream of reports against illegal immigration. In this piece called Broken Borders, reporter Casey Wians claims immigrants are flooding the prison system.
ACT WIANS
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One reason California's prisons hold more than twice the number of inmates they were designed to hold—they're overloaded with illegal aliens. In 98, the state's prison system held 5500 illegal aliens.
NARR
In fact, a recent study found immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated in California's prisons than U.S.-born men.
Stories like this regularly air on Lou Dobbs and other cable and radio shows and were hotly contested earlier this year in the Republican primary.
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center:
ACT POTOK1
TIME :20
When Lou Dobbs says on CNN that one third of American prison cells are filled with criminal illegal aliens, that certain people out there as they watch this false propaganda, the reaction is one of rage—those people are coming to destroy my society, my culture, my people.
NARR
In a new report, the law center alleges there is a link between the anti-immigrant rhetoric and an increase in violence against Latinos.
ACT POTOK2
TIME :10
Some small percentage of people actually act on this. They actually go out and club people over the head with baseball hats.
NARR
This is born out by FBI statistics. The FBI reported hate crimes against Latinos increased 35 percent, from 426 incidents in 2003 to 576 in 2006.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform, a leading anti-illegal immigration group, disputes this conclusion.
FAIR's press secretary Bob Dane:
DANE ACT1
TIME :08
If you're going to create a cause and effect, which the SPLC, is trying to do with these invidious tactics, they need to get their facts straight.
NARR
FAIR says hate crimes against Latinos were actually higher in 1995, if the population of Hispanics is considered.
In fact, FBI statistics show that the level of hate crimes against Hispanics in the 1990s is similar to the level in recent years, about an average of 500 incidents a year. The crimes dropped significantly in 2002 and 2003. Then, as the Southern Poverty Law Center alleges, anti-Latino crimes have climbed steadily, almost returning to previous levels.
From Arizona to Yonkers, Latinos have been gunned down, beaten, sodomized and taunted by skinheads and nativists. The list of anti-Latino crime includes two incidents from New Jersey and five from Suffolk County.
Potok says violence against Hispanics is largely committed by people who think they are attacking immigrants.
POTOK
TIME :21
One example is a neo-Nazi skinhead who kidnaps a Latino teenager a couple of years ago on Long Island, confines him to this kind of clubhouse, covered with Nazi literature, Nazi posters on the walls and so on and chases the young man around the room with a running chainsaw and screams this is how you run for the border.
NARR
In that case, the teenager was charged with reckless endangerment and menacing.
In another instance, in 2005 in Patchogue, Long Island, a 61-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant was pushing a shopping cart, looking for cans when three white men asked him for his green card. Then they started beating him and broke his eye socket.
Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer says the findings in the law center's report don't ring true in his district.
ACT DORMER
TIME :12
We don't have the hate groups out here. What we have every now and again is a wannabe. We have an isolated incident where some person takes action on their own.
NARR
The center documented a proliferation of hate groups across the country.
The number jumped from 602 groups in 2000 to 888 last year. That's a 48 percent increase. Most of new hate groups have sprung up along the border, areas at the center of the immigration debate.
This is Laura Isensee, Columbia Radio News.