Here's what Dave Neiwert over at Orcinus has to say about initiatives and legislation ostensibly aimed at controling immigration:

Anti-illegal immigration activists keep insisting that there's nothing the least racist about their efforts to crack down on the problem. It's only illegal immigration they oppose. Really. It has nothing to do with race or ethnicity.

So maybe they can explain why, in Denver, anti-illegal immigration activists have mounted a protest against the city librarian because the library has (gasp!) expanded its collection by adding large numbers of Spanish-language books, including, evidently, some with racy pictures inside.

This elicited the following response from one of the protest organizers:

"You always hear they want to come and work," said Robert Copley of the Colorado Minuteman Project. "Well, they also want to come and kill, and destroy wages, and just demean our quality of life."

It's pretty clear Mr. Copley's concern is not with illegal immigration -- though we're sure he can rhapsodize at length on that subject as well -- as it is with Latino immigration. And it's kind of funny how that theme keeps cropping up a lot.

Again, none of this is surprising. I've argued consistently that people who think the solution is to harass immigrants who come here illegally are, almost without exception, concerned more with the racial (and cultural) aspects of the current immigrant wave than they are about, say, the war on terror (though they sound that theme frequently enough) or the fact that most of these immigrants are here illegally.

Maybe this explains why local activists are so adamant in asserting that their efforts have nothing to do with immigration. From Seattle Weekly:

Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Olympia, has spun off a group called Grassroots Washington that is "in the process of filing an initiative," says Jonathan Bechtle, director of the foundation's voter integrity project. Bechtle says "the focus is not on immigration." Instead, he says, the purpose is "cleaning up" voter registration rolls generally, the necessity of which became apparent during last year's pitched battle over who won the 2004 gubernatorial race.

However, Bechtle acknowledges that the cleanup would be aimed at weeding noncitizens from the rolls, as well as felons, duplicate names, and the deceased. "It's something Arizona just put in place," he says, referring to Proposition 200. "Some of the ideas came from that." He also says some of the initiative's language will be taken from a bill which state Sen. Pam Roach, R-Auburn, introduced during the current session of the Legislature. The bill would require that voter applicants submit proof of citizenship through documents such as a birth certificate or passport, but it has found no traction.