AJC’s editorial board member Mike King on the ADL attacks in today’s Atlanta Journal Constitution

The ADL and D.A. King. I’ve been on the receiving end of verbal and e-mail blasts from anti-illegal immigration activist D.A. King going back to my days as public editor of the newspaper. When I joined the editorial board and took up the immigration issue, he became an even more frequent correspondent, vigorously disagreeing with much of what we wrote. We often joke about how the two of us (we aren’t related) can look at the same set of facts and draw totally opposite conclusions.

In recent years, he’s put himself front and center whenever the topic comes up at a public forum. He writes letters to the editor, he authors an occasional column in the Marietta Daily Journal and he’s a frequent contributor to anti-illegal immigration Web sites.

Last week, a report by the Anti-Defamation League said King and his Dustin Inman Society, a small anti-illegal immigration group he organized, “borrow from the playbook of hate groups to demonize Hispanics.” The ADL’s Southeast Regional Director Bill Nigut told the Marietta paper that King uses “hate-filled speech to characterize undocumented workers as a threat to the safety and well-being of American citizens.” The ADL’s national director, Abraham Foxman, said of King and other anti-immigration groups: “The Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis were not the only ones who saw an opportunity to sow the seeds of racism as a means to derail immigration reform.”

I share the ADL’s concerns about how the debate over immigration reform can degenerate into ugly racial stereotyping and cultural insensitivity. I’ve seen it happen on both sides of the issue.

Nigut calls the people in question “undocumented workers.” D.A. King calls them “illegal aliens.” I’ve used both terms and been criticized by one side for being demeaning to hard-working immigrants and by the other for lying about their legal status. When words take on such inflated importance, it obscures areas of agreement and ruins the chance to achieve consensus.

Still, I think the ADL’s branding of King as a racist is over the top. I’ve been around commentators, politicians and leaders of well-funded interest groups (unlike King’s shoestring-activist Inman Society) who are much quicker to play to racial prejudices on this issue. Lou Dobbs at CNN stirs up more prejudice in his nightly bombast about the threat of illegal immigration than D.A. King could ever imagine.

He and his group don’t strike me as a threat.

( Note from D.A. – I emailed Mike King asking ” a threat to what”?…he replied ” to the public order. to the First Amendment. ” From here, it looks like the ADL and Bill Nigut represent the threat)

Find this article at:
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/king/stories/2007/10/31/mkinged_1101.html