Nashville's New Nativism

AlterNet: Nashville's New Nativism: "Phil Valentine gets on Rick Casares's very last nerve. 'I don't like to say this about anybody,' Casares says, 'but he's just a racist.' Casares has been working only six months as outreach coordinator for TIRRC, the statewide immigration-rights group, and he knows he needs to be more politic when talking to reporters. But he feels this in his bones. 'For me, it's personal,' he says. 'My parents were illegal immigrants from Mexico.' His father, among other accomplishments, rose to become mayor pro tem in the predominantly white town of Rosemeade, California. Still, Casares says, it was ugly at times. But the discrimination he saw his parents face 'pales to what immigrants face today in this climate of poisonous rhetoric.'"

(Via AlterNet.)