(cross-posted from Orcinus)

Union Station, the big train depot in Los Angeles, is always bustling in the daytime, but this afternoon there was an extra charge of energy as the Dreams Across America tour got underway with a full dose of press fanfare and boisterous support from well-wishers.

There was an air of palpable excitement among the forty or so “Dreamers” -- as the tour has designated the immigrants who are riding the train across the USA to share their stories with other Americans -- and support staff. Taking in the scene, one of them remarked to me: “This is history.”

Via the LA Times:

A strong majority of Americans — including nearly two-thirds of Republicans — favor allowing illegal immigrants to become citizens if they pay fines, learn English and meet other requirements, a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

...

[Continuing my series of interviews with the Nisei children of Japanese immigrants early in the 20th century. Below is my third interview with Tom Takeo Matsuoka, which took place Aug. 31, 2000, a little less than a year before he died at the age of 98. Once again, his daughter, Rae Takekawa, sat in on the interview and assisted.]

DN: How old were you when you went back to Japan?

Tom Matsuoka: Three.

DN: And how old were you when your mother died?

I'm preparing for my upcoming cross-country trip aboard the Dreams Across America "Dreams Train" -- during which I'll be trying to tell the stories of some of the 100 immigrants who are embarking on a whistlestop tour of the country to share those stories. The posts will be carried here, at the Dreams Across America blog, and at Firedoglake. In order to introduce the kinds of issues and stories we'll be talking about, I thought I would run some interviews of immigrants -- or more properly interviews with the children of immigrants -- who tell both their stories and their parents' I conducted in the 1990s: specifically, the raw interviews of Japanese Americans that provided the basis for Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community

.

What follows is a transcript of an interview I conducted in March 1992 with Tom Takeo Matsuoka, who was 89 at the time. Matsuoka was a "kibei" -- American-born (in 1903) and thus a citizen like most Nisei, but one who returned to Japan at an early age and was educated there, then came back to the United States (in 1919) and remained as a citizen. Matsuoka was a community leader in the rural Bellevue farming community near Seattle through the 1920 and '30s. He was arrested the day after Pearl Harbor by the FBI and detained at by the Justice Department for some six months; upon being reunited with his family at the temporary facility at Pinedale, Calif., he worked to get them out on a work-release program and they relocated to Chinook, Montana. After the war the family bought a farm in Chinook and remained there for another 48 years. When I interviewed him, he was living in Ridgefield, Wash., near his daughter, Rae Takekawa, who assisted with the interviews.

[This was one of my earliest interviews with a Nisei immigrant, and it shows: the conversation is unfocused and skips around a great deal, and a number of salient questions went unasked because I had not developed a good ear yet for what the interviewees were telling me. (Some of the notations, incidentally, are taken from my handwritten notes.) I interviewed Matsuoka twice subsequently (I'll be running the latter of these, which has fewer of the flaws of this interview, shortly as well). Matsuoka's story forms the human core of Strawberry Days, which was finally published in 2005.]

[Cross-posted from earlier this week at Orcinus.]

If you want to see how extremist-right talking points work their way into the mainstream of our political discourse and eventually attain "conventional wisdom" status, watch how Lou Dobbs' phony leprosy statistics continue to be repeated and given official media imprimatur.

Last week, on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, host Joe Scarborough had the following exchange with Patrick Buchanan (whose descent into unreprentant extremism has already been remarked):

SCARBOROUGH: Now, Pat, let me stop you right there, and let me ask you this question...

Under the current political climate in America we have not gone far enough in talking with one another as Americans in this battle. Now more than ever, we need a unique and creative approach to speaking to America, not about immigration and immigrants, but about the dreams and values we all share and cherish.

Statement of SEIU Executive Vice President Eliseo Medina on Senate Immigration Vote:

Senate Republicans Failing America on Immigration

Since I'll be tagging along on the Dreams Train from L.A. to D.C. next week as the tour's unofficial blogger, and everyone is going to be hearing from me a lot over the next couple of weeks, I thought I'd take a little time to introduce myself.

My name is David Neiwert, and I run a blog called Orcinus, which is named after the killer whale you'll find at the site as its emblem. Yes, I do sometimes blog about killer whales, though really not all that often; it's more of an outgrowth of my earlier work as an environmental reporter. That, and my earlier work as a cops-and-courts reporter and news editor at papers in Idaho and Montana, also led me into writing about right-wing extremists in the Northwest: neo-Nazis, Freemen, militias, "Patriots." Over the years, and especially at my blog, I've found myself writing about related subjects quite a bit: hate crimes, the creep of far-right politics into the mainstream, and especially immigration.

I've written about the latter especially because immigration has been such a significant recruitment tool for the racist and extremist right over the past twenty years and more. Hatred of nonwhite immigrants is standard fodder for far-right propaganda, and it has been dismaying watching their ideas and agendas -- from claims that Mexicans are engaged in a secret "invasion" of America, or "Reconquista," to accusations that they are bringing waves of fresh disease to our shores, -- be increasingly parroted in the mainstream media as though somehow accurate or truthful.

Check out our MySpace page and help us spread the word! Here's how:

-Click "Add to Friends" in the upper left box under "Contacting Dreams Across America."
-Then, click "CONFIRM."

Share our group with your friends:

-Click "Forward to a Friend" in the upper left box under "Contacting Dreams Across America."
-Fill in your MySpace friend's name.
-Fill in the subject line with examples: "Dreams Across America" or "Help our Cause"
-Add our link, www.myspace.com/dreamsacrossamerica , to the body.
-Click "SEND."

Thanks!