Nativism, racism, conservatism

Every so often I like getting a reminder, in writing, of why I detest conservatives:

At their core, their rhetoric of ownership and self-reliance is a thin veneer over an oozing core of ugly racism.

My systematic searches of the web often lead me to places that I don't want to go. This morning, I sleepily stumbled onto to a right-wing op/ed site called "The Conservative Voice."

The column in question promulgated the thesis that teachers who want their money back from Schwarzenegger should join up with the vigilante Minutemen, a group that hopes to stem the tide of dirty brown people coming to California to prop up our economy.

The article falls into one typical logical fallacy that is so common that it makes me yawn, and which I've deconstructed before: There are X illegals in the state; caseload burdens on social service providers result in $Y in material outlay...the implication being that if we allow belt-buckled weekend warriors and shiny-pated National Alliance goons to patrol our borders, we'll save $(X*Y).

Of course, even if social service outlays grew linearly with the caseload, this would only work if you get rid of the undocumented immigrants who are already here...not that I believe the National Alliance types would have any problem storming through the barrio and checking the papers (or the RealID) of anyone whose back looked a little too moist to their squinty little eyes.

(To this author's credit, he does acknowledge — at the end of the article, after trotting out all the numbers — that patrolling the border wouldn't accomplish any savings at all: "...simply securing and controlling the border would at least slow the increase in education costs resulting from illegal immigration." But even that's a misrepresentation: It would only achieve that if it were highly effective and the savings in future outlay (i.e., expenses for immigrants who actually got caught and turned back) were not outweighed by the cost of the patrolling itself. And judging from the past success of federal border patrol programs on a dollar-per-immigrant basis, I don't think that's likely.)

But among the numbers was an unspoken kernel of nativist racism, and I wanted to point it out and share it with you:

Whereas the Urban Institute study estimated that 1.5 million illegal immigrants lived in California in 1993, current estimates of the illegal immigrant population in the state range from 2.4 to 3 million. It is estimated that there are presently approximately one million illegal immigrant children or American-born children of illegal immigrant parents in California’s public schools.

Hear that? It's not just undocumented children who are the problem. It's the American-born children of undocumented parents. No attempt to distinguish between the two categories as we rack up our precious numbers and get to the magic of one million.

Another word for American-born children of undocumented parents, of course, is American citizens. Who apparently aren't equal to the children of other parents, to this particular conservative.

I think if you listen to the pro-Minutemen arguments in the weeks and months to come, you'll see that this seed of racism lies dormant in almost every discussion. The conservatives single out a certain class of Americans — legal citizens in every sense of every law — and lump them together with a group of non-citizens, simply because of who their parents are, and use them to pad their figures.

Not that the figures ultimately matter anyway, though, right?

Because once a wetback always a wetback.

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Nativism, racism, conservatism

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