http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060828/moser"When I tell you that the area where I grew up now resembles Tijuana more than the US--well, hang on, you're about to see what I mean," says Theresa Harmon. Tennessee's most vociferous anti-immigration organizer has just picked me up, straight from work at a local construction firm, in her red 1986 Mercury Cougar--a "kicker," she calls it fondly, apologizing for the lack of air-conditioning. "Bless your heart--I'm used to the heat," she says, talking her usual mile a minute as she puffs a Misty long and noses into rush-hour traffic, headed for the South Nashville neighborhood where she grew up. "I mean, who would have ever thought Nashville would be an illegal alien magnet?" she says. "Nashville!"
In fact, the country-music capital has rapidly morphed into what one writer dubbed "a new Ellis Island," the unlikely symbol of America's biggest refugee and immigrant resettlement since the Industrial Revolution. For more than a decade now, most immigrants have been bypassing traditional urban destinations in favor of Middle American towns and cities where jobs are abundant and unemployment is scant. Music City has ranked first among US cities since 1990 in immigration growth, and now has the largest community of Kurdish refugees in the United States. Like the rest of Tennessee, Nashville also ranks high as a destination for undocumented Hispanics--and that's the part that rankles Harmon. "The Kurds are the nicest people you'd ever want to meet," she says. "A lot like the Hispanic folk we've had here for a long time."
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Harmon's culture shock was part of what prompted her to co-found Tennesseans for Responsible Immigration Policies (TRIP), now the state's leading anti-immigration group, in 2001. But even if she sometimes sounds like a walking, talking cultural-backlash cliché, she doesn't exactly fit the mold. Harmon, who as a teenager cruised South Nashville with a big gold marijuana-leaf decal on the back of her Camaro ("it matched," she says), has always had a rebellious streak as wide as Tennessee. "Maybe I read too many mysteries as a child," she says. "I have to think out of the box." She fell in love with activism in 1999 when she partnered with the ACLU in a successful challenge to a new uniform policy at two of her children's public schools. "I don't know about you, but I see kids going to school in uniforms, and I'm seeing little Nazis heiling Hitler."
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It's easy to chalk up the nativist frenzy in Tennessee entirely to the usual suspects: gut-level racism, bigotry, ignorance, NIMBYism, right-wing radio hosts. But what's eating Tennesseans, and hundreds of thousands of other Middle American nativists, is also something deeper, subtler--and likely to outlast the current debates over immigration policy. "This is not just about immigrants and immigration," says Devin Burghart. "It's something much greater--the nexus of race, national identity, who we are and who we want to be."
You can hear it in Theresa Harmon's worries about corporate fascism. You can hear it from Tennessee's other leading anti-immigration activist, Donna Locke, whose quality-of-life concerns are larger than NIMBYism. Locke, who says, "I consider myself a liberal," once agitated for "all the usual late '60s and early '70s causes." The issue that stuck with her into adulthood was overpopulation and what it means for the human environment. "I've always felt that America could set an example for the rest of the world by dealing sensibly with population growth," she says. "The more crowded it gets, the cheaper life becomes, and the easier it becomes to exploit people. Individuality dies, and with it dies a lot of what makes us ethical and moral human beings. I think it will be a disaster for the whole world if America loses that. And we are losing it. You can see it happening in Tennessee."
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the article ends with this:
"The only time we will become violent is in self-defense," Carter interjects.
"Yeah, well, they're going to come after me. There's going to be some upset people who are affected by this. My thing is, you make the first move and there's witnesses, and we'll take care of it from there." A five-beat pause. "But let's hope it won't come to that. Calm. Positive attitude. Restraint." Kerr says it like a mantra he's trying to learn--so much so that it makes us all laugh. Until Carter speaks up.
"If it gets too violent, I still got six acres out on Walter Hill," he says, referring to a plot of land he owns in the country. "I'll take my tent out there, take my long guns with me, put up my tent and stay out there."
"If they come to shoot you, they'll have to hit me first."
"Well, if they shoot through you they'll hit me, 'cause I'll be right there with you."
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