Has the Springfield Republican been radicalized?

You've probably never heard of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican newspaper, but the article "Hispanics get call to political action" from Natalia Munoz seems of interest:

...A far-reaching campaign to stir political action by [Western Mass.] immigrants with and without legal papers was ignited yesterday with a talk by representatives from the Cambridge-based Centro Presente, which works with the Central American community in the state.

"There is an anti-immigrant environment here," said executive director María Elena Letona. "The hypocrisy of this country is that it denies immigrants rights and at the same time exploits their labor in below-minimum wage jobs."

More than a dozen people from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and El Salvador attended the talk, given in Spanish. It also addressed concerns over La migra, as Latinos call the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service...

Thanks for the translation. Perhaps when they start getting bigger crowds you could give us some background information on Centro Presente. From Mark Krikorian's "Strange Bedfellows: Left and right on immigration":

And then there's the National Immigration Forum, the umbrella organization for high-immigration political advocacy, which works closely with sympathetic Republicans. But NIF is not like the conventional lobbying coalitions that exist on numerous issues. It was cofounded by the National Lawyers Guild in the 1980s, back when the Guild was a Soviet front group. The group's first head was Rick Swartz, a leftist attorney who cut his teeth advocating for Haitian illegal aliens and who, during a 1981 Senate hearing, likened the United States to Nazi Germany.

Like many lobbying coalitions, the NIF board includes representatives of Republican stalwarts like the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Restaurant Association, and used to include Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, now head of the Club for Growth. Whatever his libertarian views on immigration, I imagine Steve hightailed it out of there after he realized what he'd gotten into, because the people sitting around the conference table at NIF board meetings include some decidedly unsavory characters. In addition to the usual leftist suspects — the ACLU, the Service Employees Union, Jim Zogby of the Arab American Institute — the NIF board includes the head of the immigration lawyers' association, one Jeanne Butterfield, who used to be executive director of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, identified by the Anti-Defamation League as an alliance between members of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine and the Workers World party (the Trotskyites behind the Iraq War protests). As David Horowitz observed in National Review in 1991, Butterfield's organization was "one of the few groups in the world supporting Saddam's rape of Kuwait." Butterfield was later litigation director for Centro Presente, a Cambridge, Mass., outfit which provided aid to Central American illegals and was headed at the time by Frank Sharry, who is now, not coincidentally, head of NIF.

Also on the NIF board is the head of the L.A. branch of CARECEN, which backed the Communists in El Salvador's civil war and which helped pioneer the "sanctuary" movement to subvert U.S. immigration law. And, like the rest of the high-immigration Left that Chris Cannon has embraced, NIF's biggest funders include the Ford Foundation and George Soros's Open Society Institute...

The Springfield Republican's Executive Editor is Wayne E. Phaneuf. Please send him an email suggesting that his paper lays off the anti-Americanism and provides background information on the groups they discuss: wphaneuf *at* repub.com