English: March for America brings 200,000 people to Washington, DC, to call for comprehensive immigration reform. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By George Zornick

If there’s one media failing in the immigration debate, it is that many mainstream reporters hedge around the fact that at least some conservative opposition to the bill is based in cultural and even racial animus towards Hispanics.

It’s not the only reason people oppose immigration reform. There are many good reasons, and many bad reasons that have nothing to do with race. But a non-trivial portion of conservative opposition reform is couched in those terms, particularly among the activist crowd organizing against the bill.

It’s ugly, but it happens to be true. One could forgive mainstream reporters for largely dancing around this fact—if these activists didn’t regularly plan large rallies in the shadow of the Capitol building, and then say a bunch of plainly racist and nativist things into a microphone.

Such was the case Monday, where several hundred people gathered in Upper Senate Park to denounce immigration reform as a job-killer. As ThinkProgress noted, a white nationalist named John Tanton organized the rally; he is famous for works such as “The Case for Passive Case Eugenics” and saying that black Americans are a “retrograde species of humanity.”

Read More Ugly Opposition to Immigration Reform Comes Back to Capitol Hill | The Nation.