Arturo Sandoval PicIt’s funny how every time Americans find themselves in a big mess of their own making, they go looking for someone else to blame.

No exception to the rule is the current madness passing as debate on health care reform.

Anti-immigrant activists are using the health care reform debate to attack undocumented immigrants as a major reason not to extend health coverage to all Americans.

At a recent town hall on health care attended by President Obama in New Hampshire, a man standing outside the meeting hall with a megaphone in his hand yelled: “We don’t need illegals. Send ‘em all back. Send ‘em back with a bullet in the head the second time.”

The facts don’t support this xenophobic response. An in-depth study by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the uninsured showed that:

– Although legal and undocumented non-citizens accounted for 22 percent of the nonelderly uninsured in 2006, US citizens still made up the bulk of the uninsured (78%). Further, the majority (76%-80%) of the growth in the number of uninsured from 2000 to 2006 occurred among US citizens, not legal and undocumented non-citizens.

– Federal law already prohibits undocumented immigrants and recent legal immigrants from receiving Medicaid and SCHIP coverage.

– Non-citizens receive significantly less health care than citizens.

– Non-citizens are significantly less likely to use the emergency room than citizens.

So Mexicans and Latinos or anyone else living in the United States as an undocumented resident isn’t the reason our health care system sucks. Nor are any of the proposed health care reforms designed to let undocumented residents into the system.

So what gives here?

Health care reform is just the latest issue used by American racists and xenophobes to whip up anti-Mexican bias. There is a long historical pattern to this racist sickness that infects American society and that has been specifically directed at Mexicans and Latinos.

The first significant waves of Mexican workers coming into the United States began in the early 20th Century, following the curtailment of Japanese immigration in 1907 and the consequent drying up of cheap Asian labor. The country needed cheap Mexican labor to permit Americans to fight overseas in World War I. Immediately after the war, a strong nativist climate led to restrictive quotas on immigration from Europe and to the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol, aimed at cutting back the flow of Mexicans.

But the nation’s economic demand for unskilled migrant workers continued throughout the 1920s, encouraging Mexicans to cross the border for work. The Great Depression brought a temporary halt to the flow of Mexican labor. During the early 1930s, Mexican workers — including thousands of legal residents — were rounded up and deported en masse by federal authorities in cooperation with state and local officials.

Mexicans then as now, became convenient scapegoats for widespread joblessness and budget shortages. Mexicans were accused in the 1930s of paradoxically, both taking away jobs and living off public welfare.

World War II caused the United States to again seek large numbers of unskilled Mexican labor for the war economy, and the Bracero Program was created to permit Mexicans to work legally in the country. This continued until just after the Korean War, when public opinion again turned nativist. In 1954, “Operation Wetback” was launched and the program apprehended more than one million undocumented Mexican workers for deportation.

The fact is the U.S. economy has historically pulled undocumented Mexican workers into the country. It is the “pull” of the economy, not the “push” of the Mexican economy, that has created the so-called “undocumented worker” problem we face today.

Yet, like the man with the megaphone in New Hampshire, we are always willing to demonize Mexicans and blame them for any and all of our societal ills, especially if it means we don’t have to look in the mirror to see the real cause of our anguish and malaise.

I ask you: If the 12 million undocumented people living in the United States were Canadians, would there be any public outcry? Would anyone grab a megaphone and blame them for the messes we create? Would anyone be calling for a bullet to their heads?

I don’t think so.