By John Leschak

On Friday, Nov. 14, over 600 people held a vigil for Ecuadorian immigrant Marcello Lucero, who was murdered on Saturday, Nov. 8 by seven teenagers in Patchogue. But this was no random act of violence-the group told the Suffolk County police that they had been out “Beaner jumping.”

“Their motivation was to find Latinos and to assault them,” said Suffolk Detective Lt. Jack Fitzpatrick.

This wasn’t the first hate crime committed in Suffolk County, either. Another Ecuadorian immigrant was assaulted in Patchogue in 2005 by a group of white men asking him if he had a green card. Patchogue is only a few minutes away from Farmingville, where residents were harassing immigrant day-laborers and where two day laborers were brutally stabbed and beaten in 2000.

On the white supremacist blog, Stormfront, one writer argued that it was unfair to charge the seven Patchogue teens with hate crimes because “it is we who are charged more severely for fighting back” against “a gang of foreign invaders coming across the border.” However, most immigrants on Long Island are the total opposite of “invaders.”

To the contrary, many are refugees from Central America who were fleeing death squads in their home countries that were trained and supported by the U.S. government.

For instance, Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush supported the military regime of El Salvador, which killed thousands of its own citizens. On Dec. 11, 1981, the Salvadoran Army killed over 700 children, women and elderly people in the El Mazote massacre, one of the worse atrocities in modern Latin American history. Many of the Salvadoran generals who led these massacres were trained in the U.S. at Fort Benning, Ga., also known as the School of the Americas (SOA).

The SOA, dubbed the “School of Assassins,” continues to train the military of repressive South American governments like Colombia. From Feb. 21-22, 2005, eight prominent peace activists were murdered in Uraba, Colombia, and witnesses claim they saw the Colombian army’s 17th and 11th Brigades in the area around the time of the murders. These brigades were trained at the SOA.

This weekend, Nov. 21-23, is the annual vigil to close the SOA. If President-elect Obama is to restore the moral legitimacy of our country, he must close the SOA. But, it will take more than closing the SOA and Guantanamo Bay to accomplish this goal. It will take much more because violence and hate have deep roots in American culture.

Between 1880 and 1930, over 3,200 African-Americans were lynched in the South. With the election of Obama, many Americans thought that our country had overcome its dark history of racism-yet racism remains a serious problem in our country, and its primary expression is not against blacks, but against immigrants.

The racist undertone of anti-immigrant sentiment is apparent in the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which has called for a “moratorium on all other immigration.” According to reports by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, since the 1980s, FAIR received over $1 million from the Pioneer Fund, which supports the study of eugenics (defined as the “hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding”). J. Philippe Rushton, the Fund’s current president, is a racist posing as a scientist. Rushton writes in an article entitled “Is Race a Valid Taxonomic Construct?,” Rushton wrote, “Black underachievement is not simply due to ‘White prejudice.’ It is more deeply rooted. On average, black children are born with smaller brains than white or East Asian children.”

America achieved its reputation as a great republic because of its innovative policies that distinguished it from other nations. Foremost, among these policies was the willingness to welcome the stranger. From the founding of the Republic in 1789 until 1875, America passed no restrictive immigration laws. George Washington expressed this open-door philosophy when he declared to his fellow Americans, “the bosom of America is to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but also the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions.”

If America is to remain the land of the free, we must transform our culture to reject racial hatred and stop seeing immigrants as “the other” or as “foreign invaders.” Pare el odio. Somos una familia.

John Leschak is a second-year law student. You may e-mail him at [email protected].