New York – Huge street protests made millions of immigrants more visible and powerful last year, but they also seem to have revived a hateful counterforce: white supremacists.
Groups linked to the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads and neo-Nazis grew significantly more active, holding rallies, distributing leaflets and increasing their presence on the Internet – much of it focused on stirring anti-immigrant sentiment, an Anti-Defamation League report says.
“Extremist groups are good at seizing on whatever the hot button is of the day and twisting the message to get new members,” Deborah Lauter, ADL civil rights director, said Monday. “This one seems to be taking hold with more of mainstream America than we’d like to see.”
Klan chapters have been revived and new ones started across the South, historically the heart of the group, and in places such as Michigan, Iowa and New Jersey, says the report, scheduled for official release today.
“The Klan is increasingly cooperating with other extremist groups and neo-Nazi groups,” Lauter said. “That’s a new phenomenon.”
Between 2000 and 2005, hate groups mushroomed 33 percent and Klan chapters by 63 percent, said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes.
Precise figures are difficult to pin down, but Potok’s group counts as many as 150 Klan chapters with up to 8,000 members nationwide. More than 800 hate groups exist around the country, the center’s research shows.
In the late 1990s, membership in such groups was crumbling as they lost leaders and struggled to organize, said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino. Many hit bottom around 2000.
“Whenever you think the Klan is down and out, they find another way to reinvent themselves,” he said of the resurgence.
Historically, the Klan’s focus had been to terrorize African- Americans, but it reached peak membership at more than 4 million in the 1920s by focusing on immigration.
Newcomers from Ireland and Germany were portrayed as Catholic usurpers taking jobs from native-born Americans and undermining the national fabric, Levin said.
Today, many white supremacists blame immigrants, particularly Latinos, for crime, struggling schools or unemployment, for instance.
