Who’s the crazy one, Bill O’Reilly or me?

On Nov. 8, I had the distinction of being called “a crazy columnist” and a “nut” on prime-time television by conservative Fox News anchorman Bill O’Reilly for a column I had written about the urgent need for a comprehensive solution to America’s immigration crisis.

I’m not going to disqualify O’Reilly — or the CNN anti-immigration crusader Lou Dobbs — as a Hispanic-phobic hate monger. Rather than trying to smear him, as O’Reilly did to me, I will focus on how deceiving his arguments are. You judge.

First, the facts. In my column (“Migrant underclass might erupt in U.S.,” Vindicator, Nov. 6), I argued that the rapid escalation of the U.S. anti-immigration hysteria is a dangerous trend. It will create an underclass of nearly 13 million people who won’t leave this country, who can’t realistically be deported and who — if deprived of a path to earned legalization — will become increasingly frustrated and angry, I said.

I even used the word “intifada” — granted, I wanted to grab your attention — to describe the worst-case scenario of what could happen if undocumented immigrants are given absolutely no legal path to earned upward mobility. In that context, I cited the examples of the Palestinian youths’ riots in Israel in the 1990s and the 2005 riots by Muslim youths in the suburbs of Paris.

My main point was that the estimated 1.8 million U.S.-raised undocumented youths — who were brought to this country as toddlers, often speak no other language than English and don’t even remember their countries of origin — will soon be thrown into the U.S. labor market with zero chances of getting a legal job.

What is going to happen with these youths? Most are barred from applying for in-state college tuition and will grow up on the streets. Many of them will join the gangs that are already terrorizing many U.S. cities. Undocumented kids, especially the brightest ones, need to be given an opportunity to gain U.S. citizenship, as was contemplated in the Dream Act that was recently defeated in the U.S. Senate.

As soon as my column was published, I was flooded with e-mails from all over the country. By Wednesday, MiamiHerald.com Web site had a whopping 93 pages of comments on the column. Many of them were openly hostile against Hispanic immigrants and claimed — wrongly — that my column was inciting violence.

On Nov. 8, O’Reilly said in an on-air conversation with Fox News analyst Laura Ingraham that “there is a crazy columnist in Miami, Miami Herald, who says that the Hispanics are going to rise up.”

Crazy anarchist nut

Ingraham said I was “intimating something akin, Bill, to a race war. ... It’s insane.” He responded, “He’s a nut. He’s a nut, this guy.” She added that I am part of “a crazy far-left anarchist wing” of the immigration debate.

My opinion: For the record, I never called for violence, nor would I. Suggesting that I was endorsing violence, as was done in the O’Reilly show, is irresponsible journalism.

But even more irresponsible is what O’Reilly and other cable television anti-immigration crusaders are doing every day: inciting Americans to rebel against “illegal immigrants” — most of whom are Hispanic — without offering any realistic solutions to America’s immigration problem.

As long as the income gap between the United States and Latin American continues to be as wide as it is, as long as U.S. employers keep welcoming undocumented immigrants to do low-paid work and as long as U.S. consumers continue to prefer paying less for services performed by undocumented workers, the immigration flow will continue, no matter how many stretches of fence we place along the 2,000-mile border.

If we want to reduce illegal immigration, we will have to allow greater legal immigration and at the same time increase economic ties with Latin America to help our neighbors grow and reduce their people’s pressures to emigrate.

Above all, we need to give the 1.8 million U.S.-raised undocumented children an earned path to legalization. Otherwise, we will be creating an underclass of social pariahs, many of whom will end up joining street gangs.

Are these fears crazy? Am I nuts? You decide.

X Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.