A Divider, Not A Uniter

For five years Dr. Carl Mumpower has been an effective member of Asheville City Council.

He has staked out strongly conservative positions as a vehement opponent of drug abuse and a champion of downtown quality-of-life issues. We commend him for his support for the Ducker Road Community Involvement Council and such city improvements as new bus stop shelters.

While most downtown proponents consider the heart of Asheville a thriving, vibrant city center that is far safer than most medium-sized or larger cities, some area residents do not. Some perceive threats from various sources encroaching on their security and way of life, and they support and appreciate Mumpower’s determination to remove what they perceive as “dangerous elements” ranging from drug users and dealers to muggers to panhandlers.



Most
recently, Mumpower and a group of like-minded conservatives have
highlighted illegal immigrants as the subject of their concern and
attacks. By establishing the so-called “Action Club” and placing
anti-Mexican signs on billboards, Buncombe County Republican party
leaders have apparently adopted the national party’s policies of
stealth and divisiveness.


The group’s
billboards, which read “Had enough?” feature a photo taken at a
California high school of a US flag hung upside down beneath a Mexican
flag. The billboards are clearly designed to engender anger among
voters and fear among Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal.
Pretending that the childish behavior of a few high school students
reflects the beliefs of the vast majority of immigrants and liberals,
the club defends its use of the image by asserting that it “captures
the contempt that illegal aliens have for the country they are
invading.”


The group’s
website is www.theactionclub.com, and in its FAQ the organization
claims to be “an independent, informal group of local citizens,
including Democrats and Unafiliated.”


Fine print at
the bottom of every page, however, identifies the group as “The
Republican Action Club.” Every candidate endorsed by the club, whether
for national, state, or local office, is a Republican. A search
indicates that the URL “www.republicanactionclub.com” is not in use;
the only imaginable reason for omitting “Republican” from the web site
name is the party’s well-known practice of stealth as a means to
disguise partisan activities.


The club
believes “that America is a sovereign nation and has a right and an
obligation to secure its borders against invasion.” We’ve yet to meet
any citizen who disagrees with that noble sentiment. And while briefly
pandering to fears of terrorism – its use of the words “invading” and
“invasion” are enough to show that – for the most part the club does
not pretend to be concerned for national security, as many vigilante
groups do. Instead it builds primarily on fear of job loss,
lawlessness, and overburdening of a failing health care system.
“Illegal immigration threatens our sovereignty and circumvents and
creates disrespect for our law. It strains our education, social,
criminal justice and health care systems, perpetuates a criminal
underclass that preys on American citizens, and burdens the taxpayer
with footing the bill.”


The message is
also designed to frighten immigrants themselves. “We expect that these
lawbreakers will fear the attention they are getting from the public
and from law enforcement. We think they should. The possibility of
apprehension and deportation should be real and ever-present for those
who break our laws by their very presence in our country. Illegal
aliens should be faced with the option of voluntarily returning to
their country of origin or being apprehended and deported
involuntarily. If illegal aliens want to reduce their fears and become
real Americans, they can turn themselves in. . . .”


Links to other
web sites are indicative of the club’s positions. Www.GrassFire.org has
mounted billboards in Chicago titled “Stop the Invasion” and lists
among its top ten petitions Support the President, Save Marriage, Stand
for the Unborn, Support the 10 Commandments, and other “action alerts”
pushed by the leadership in Congress. Www.FreedomWorks.org, run by
former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, proclaims devotion to “lower
taxes, less government, more freedom” and promotes a laundry list of
Republican legislative goals including the flat tax, elimination of
inheritance taxes, school choice, tort reform, and privatization of
Social Security.


So let us
dismiss out of hand The Action Club’s claims of nonpartisanship and
address, first the economic arguments made on the web site.


Legal and
illegal immigrants help power our economy. Recent news stories have
portrayed growers in western and southeastern states worried about
fruit and vegetables rotting on the ground for lack of pickers – scared
away by immigrant crackdowns.Visit any Buncombe County construction
site, any Henderson County apple farm at harvest time, any area hotel,
and you will find Hispanic immigrants building houses, picking apples,
and cleaning rooms. Many are legal, some are not. In a region built on
tourism and supported by the unending influx of wealthy retirees
looking for McMansions in paradise, the disappearance of legal and
illegal immigrants would bring some of our most important economic
engines to a halt.


Furthermore,
every worker’s paycheck includes deductions for Social Security and
Medicare, but only a tiny minority of illegal immmigrants will ever
collect benefits from those programs. They pay in, but they don’t draw
out. According to most economic estimates, the value of their
contributions is in line with the occasional benefits they receive from
health care providers.


We must also
address Mumpower’s role in choosing this issue for the club’s public
debut and paying part of the cost of renting the billboards. We cannot
discern the truth of his motivation – it may well reflect honest
personal conviction. But as a psychologist by trade, he must surely
know what the likely reaction of the public will be to his actions. He
writes careful rebuttals to every challenge; one would have to be
willfully blind to believe that he doesn’t, with equal care, consider
in advance what those reactions will be.


So it’s
impossible to reach any other conclusion than that his decisions were
carefully thought out, and that his deliberate intent in supporting the
Action Club was, and is, to engender anger, fear, and resentment among
his followers and against the most powerless group of people in our
community.

That conclusion
is strengthened by his subsequent proposal to empower and instruct the
Asheville Police Department to partner with the Immigration and
Naturalization Service in helping deport illegal immigrants. He
introduced his motion with the full knowledge that no other Council
member would second it. Again, whatever his motivation, there is no
question that, knowing the outcome in advance, he moved forward not
with blinders on, but with the deliberate intent to engender anger,
fear, and resentment.


Mumpower’s
positions are shameful; his actions are the deliberate work of a
divider, not a uniter. There are many issues that our community can and
should address in a positive way; by working together in all our
diversity we can accomplish great things.


Leaders, whether
in elective office or private life, must have the entire community’s
best interest at heart and, more importantly, the will to change things
for the better. As a member of City Council, Mumpower should retire his
shameful motives and work towards constructive solutions to real
problems. We can only hope that he can find a way to change. In the
words of longtime community leader Minnie Jones, who has spent four
decades making life better for the disempowered, “The change has to
come from the heart.”