Anti-immigration: it’s the prejudice, stupid
April 26, 2012 8 Comments
So, with the Supreme Court hearing a case on Arizona’s immigration law, it was a good opportunity for the Post to put on display the hate and ignorance that drives those people anti-immigration enough to protest on the Court steps:
Supporters of Arizona’s law made it clear that they didn’t simply oppose illegal immigration — they feared it. “We have a home in Florida, and the illegals stay in our back yard,” explained Kay Rivoli, one of the country musicians on stage. “They leave little knife blades, Guatemalan money, sleeping bags and syringes — they stay in the bushes.”
The activists supporting the Arizona law emphasized that illegal immigration was a gateway to a host of unspeakable crimes and moral degeneration: “Take a look at the rape trees in the Arizona desert. When women come, they’re told to bring plenty of condoms, because ‘you’ll be raped,’ and the trees are covered with women’s underwear and condoms,” decried JoAnn Abbott, a tea party activist from northern Virginia, referring to confirmed reports of migrant women’s rape by border “coyotes,”as the human traffickers are known. By contrast, after Virginia’s Prince William County cracked down on immigration, “the crackhouses in my neighborhood were all gone, and the people who smash glass in the storefronts are all gone,” Abbott claimed.
In the event you think that these are just the protesting whackos or that these comments are cherry-picked to make anti-immigration types look bad– sorry. The best social science on the matter makes it quite clear that much anti-immigration sentiment is rooted in prejudice, plain and simple. Here’s the quote on the matter I like to read my students:
Most restrictionists are desperate to avoid the appearance that they have been inspired by Archie Bunker, preferring to cast their arguments in economic and sometimes environmental terms. Unfortunately for these well-intentioned conservatives, the case for limiting immigration is more difficult to air with credibility precisely because a considerable share of the restrictionist sentiment is motivated simply by prejudice. [emphasis mine]
And lest you write this off as the untrustworthy rantings of a librul academic, I can attest that at least one of the authors of this research does not fall into that category. So, I’m sure you anti-immigration reader out there are motivated entirely by principles and no prejudice, it’s just all the other anti-immigration types who are prejudiced.
About Steve Greene
I accidentally hit the like button. Believe me I don’t like your post. Every time a lib disagrees with a conservative viewpoint you have to dismiss us as racists, homophobes or some other low life.
The illegal aliens are bankrupting our hospitals because if you present yourself to an emergency room you are required to be seen. They are also bankrupting our school system because they pay no property tax which supports the local school system just as a couple of examples. It is also not fair to the legal people who come to this country legally.
Let’s accept some of your premises here (i.e., take it as granted that immigration is increasing, which in he past several years it has actually decreased). You say: “They are also bankrupting our school system because they pay no property tax which supports the local school system just as a couple of examples”. They do not pay any property taxes directly, true, but if they rent (which they do) then the property taxes paid by their landlord gets passed on to them, if they have a competent landlord. They pay sales taxes, probably larger as a proportion of their income than most, as they are more likely to be low or moderate income. Gas taxes? Check. Alcohol and tobacco taxes? Check. They only seem to be missing out on payroll and income taxes; many illegal immigrants actually do pay into social security and do not receive benefits, and income taxes make up a smaller share of state and local taxes and they do of Federal income taxes. So to say that immigrants are merely taking public goods without contributing is not true. Are they contributing as much as a full-fledged citizen? Probably not, but it’s not nothing. Why should we have to pay to deport them when we can just make them citizens and have them contribute what they should be? I don’t get it.
Also, Steve is not making a normative point about opposition or support of immigration, nor is he saying that everyone who opposes immigration is xenophobic or that one is necessarily xenophobic if they oppose immigration, but rather that prejudice makes one considerably more likely to be anti-immigration, and provides empirical evidence for that claim. If that makes you uncomfortable, persuade some anti-immigration or anti-gay marriage folks who ARE prejudiced that they ought not fear this or that minority but base their opposition on principle. It’s that simple.
Yeah, what David said. Thank you sir.
So, if a racist supports a policy, is the policy automatically racist? And by extension is anyone else who supoprts the law also racist? Who is the final arbitor in judging whether one’s motives are pure? Can we make all laws optional, contingent on the law being supported only by honest citizens with pure and culturally approved motives?
Please quit interchanging immigrant and illegal immigrant. The Arizona law is about Illegal immigration and nothing else!
Illegal aliens do not pay their share of property taxes as the majority of them ; at least where I live, cram 15 to 20 people in a house.
What makes an illegal alien better than others from different countries waiting to come here leagally? Why do they get special treatment?
I’m tired of people excusing law breaking and crying fowl when caught doing it.
My correct statement was actually “The people who smash glass beer bottles in the playgrounds for the kids to get cut on are gone”.
From a local news article- “Following a crackdown on illegal immigration, officials in Prince William County in northern Virginia are reporting their numbers reveal a significant decrease in violent crimes committed.
The violent crime rate in Prince William County plummeted 22 percent in 2008, according to new reports.”
This was the first year the anti-illegal alien laws were actually enforced.
As to my being against immigrants? How…silly of you to make such an uninformed assumption. An immigrant is a person who enters a country through legal means with the intention of following that countries laws, learning that countries language and assimilating into that country’s social fabric. My doctor comes from India, and I thank God that he did and that I found him- the man is a brilliant diagnostician. He also waited his turn to become a citizen. My mothers boyfriend Jose from Argentina proudly became a citizen 3 years ago at the age of 73 after legally entering this country and waiting his turn. All of us in the family are crazy about him.
What is an alien? As a noun the definition is “An unnaturalized foreign resident of a country.” As an adjective “Owing political allegiance to another country or government; foreign” They are not people who come here intending to follow our laws- if they did they wouldn’t start by breaking them at the beginning. I assume you know what “illegal” means.
I am for legal immigration. I am against illegal aliens, drug trafficking and the forced sexual slavery of women and girls. Got it?
Y’all can object all you want, complain, make distinctions, but that doesn’t change the fact that the evidence is clear that a lot (never said all) of anti-immigration sentiment is motivated by prejudice. That’s social science, like it or not. As to anything about the actual policy, I don’t think I said a thing about it. My issue is very much summed up by the quote I shared– it’s hard for me to support a policy when I know a lot of the political impetus behind it is based on prejudice– regardless of the actual nature of the policy.
I guess I ought to look at the research you’ve cited. But statistically meaningful results aren’t necesarily the final word on the phenomena. Sometimes social scientists don’t ask questions to which they don’t want to know the answers. I don’t recall seeing journal articles trying to explain blacks’ opposition to school busing while academics were falling all over themselves trying to explain the racist underpinning of whites’ opposition. Yet I believe something like 30-40% of black Rs in the NES data opposed busing (it has been years since I checked the data, so I might be wrong). Presumably their opposition was grounded in something other than antipathy toward blacks. And if so, one would think these same reasons could apply to some of the white Rs’ opposition. So, I would not be surprised if similar flaws exist today.