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.Such migration will likely be one of the Western Hemisphere’s early social consequences of climate change and sea level rise of these orders of magnitude.Issues deriving from inundation of a large amount of our own territory, together with migration toward our borders by millions of our hungry and thirsty southern neighbors, are likely to dominate U.S.security and humanitarian concerns.Globally as well, populations will migrate from increasingly hot and dry climates to more temperate ones.27Adaptation as the armed lifeboat is only possible if Americans think in certain ways, and not in others.This raises the question, How are the media educating adult Americans? It is instructive to survey the messages that spill forth across the nation, for this is the political context in which immigration and climate change are being understood.When immigration reform came up for debate in 2006, much of the American media worked itself into a hate-filled lather.In 2010, immigration again came up, and the controversy erupted anew.Those episodes offer a glimpse of how opinion makers will frame a future immigration crisis.Ideological ParapetsYou can hear the bad future of the armed lifeboat in the words of self-described Northern Californian, environmentalist, and feminist Brenda Walker.A radical Malthusian, Walker is a green racist who was inspired to politics after reading Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb.Speaking on the Peter Boyles Show, a Denver-based talk radio program, Walker said, “If there’s one thing that the Mexicans are good at, it’s establishing smuggling infrastructures.They can get through, you know, obviously, millions of illegal aliens and WMDs as well.”28Or consider the comments of William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration on the same program: “Oh, look, I’ll take it further than that, Peter.Let me say something about these brown Nazis.Get out of my country—now.Take a hint.Vamoose.I don’t got to say, ‘Don’t let the border gate hit you on the backside on the way out.’ And I mean it.I’m very serious about it.Americans are the Jews.”29Here is another canard from radio host Jay Severin (formerly Jay Severino): “So now, in addition to venereal disease and the other leading exports of Mexico—women with mustaches and VD—now we have swine flu.” On another occasion, he put it this way: “When we are the magnet for primitives around the world—and it’s not the primitives’ fault by the way, I’m not blaming them for being primitives—I’m merely observing they’re primitive.It’s millions of leeches from a primitive country come here to leech off you and, with it, they are ruining the schools, the hospitals, and a lot of life in America.”30 Always the position of the nativist is aggrieved, put-upon, outnumbered, abandoned, almost overrun.Increasingly the nativists see themselves as nature’s staunch defender, its last bulwark against the human locusts.Consider the ravings of another nationally syndicated DJ, Michael Alan Weiner, now known by the rather more Teutonic sounding name Mike Savage: “Burn a Mexican flag for America, burn a Mexican flag for those who died that you should have a nationality and a sovereignty, go out in the street and show you’re a man, burn 10 Mexican flags, if I could recommend it.Put one in the window upside down and tell them to go back where they came from!”31 This self-appointed tribune of real Americans traffics under the website tagline “borders, language, culture.” In a different context, that slippery triptych could pass for a postmodern academic subtitle, but here it recalls fin de siècle Anglo-Saxonism in the style of Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race.32 Savage describes himself as “an ardent conservationist” and claims to have 100 million listeners per week.More objective sources, like Talkers magazine, put his audience at 8 million—still very large.What do the xenophobes suggest be done? Here is Neal Boortz, one of the top talk radio hosts in the country: “They are not going to be shipped back.I mean, Royal [his off-air producer], think about it—Mexico doesn’t want ’em back, first of all [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]