I think the scientific literature is consistent in finding that conservatives are less comfortable with nuance than liberals and that they prefer to think in more black and white, right and wrong, terms. So, it’s kind of natural that conservatives would look at the issue of undocumented workers or illegal immigrants and feel that these folks broke the law to enter the country and that the law should simply be enforced. All of these people should be deported because that’s what the law says. Along the same lines of simplistic thinking, there shouldn’t be any reason why our borders couldn’t be made completely impenetrable. If it takes moats filled with alligators or laying down mine fields, then that’s just what it takes.
Liberals, on the other hand, understand that the reason that we have 11 million undocumented workers in this country is because it’s impossible to secure our borders completely at a reasonable cost or without killing people, and that people are coming here because there is a demand for their labor. Furthermore, liberals weigh the human cost of separating families and understand and empathize with the motives of immigrants, who are often fleeing violence in their home countries.
So, part of the distinction between how conservatives and liberals view the immigration dispute is temperamental and related to how the two groups just think differently.
But that’s not the end of it. Ron Fournier is offended that Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama thinks that advocates of immigration reform are waging a war on white people. Fournier thinks it’s ludicrous to level that accusation because lots of white people are advocating immigration reform. Lots of Republicans and right-wing institutions are advocating for immigration reform. Do they all hate white people?
What Fournier doesn’t understand is the second half of the conservative calculation. Yes, they are opposed to amnesty because it rewards law-breaking, and they oppose making exceptions on deportations because the law is the law. But the reason this is a war on white people is that many, if not most, conservative white people want to keep this country white. They oppose immigration reform first and foremost because they don’t want millions of brown people in this country. They want them to leave. Their secondary consideration is political. They don’t want to deal with a larger Latino community casting votes that conflict with their values. And they do not want to change or water down their values in order to be more appealing to Latinos or Asians or blacks or gays or women or anyone else.
Why do you think the Republicans first reaction to the changing demographics of the country isn’t to change their positions but to enact all kinds of voter suppression laws aimed at disproportionately disenfranchising Democratic voters? How much more effective is it to simply deport these would-be voters than to try to keep them from the polls. No, they can’t have a pathway to citizenship. No, they can’t stay.
So, when Reince Priebus comes up with some roadmap to make the party more appealing to Latinos, that’s the problem. They don’t want to have to do that because it conflicts with their principles. The far preferable choice is to attack people’s ability to gain citizenship and vote.
Fournier won’t understand the Republicans’ stance on immigration until he understands that the Conservative Movement doesn’t bend to satisfy the political needs of the Republican Party. They care much less about winning than they do about remaining consistent in their ideology. And part of their ideology is that America is a country for white folks and should be governed according to the preferences of white folks.
It’s the very act of asking them to change that constitutes a war against them, so Fournier is, in fact, waging a war on conservative whites.
You nailed it with number 1.
Not so much with number 2.
You wrote,
But the reason this is a war on white people is that many, if not most, conservative white people want to keep this country white.
They oppose immigration reform first and foremost because they don’t want millions of brown people in this country. They want them to leave.
Their secondary consideration is political.
They don’t want to deal with a larger Latino community casting votes that conflict with their values.
And they do not want to change or water down their values in order to be more appealing to Latinos or Asians or blacks or gays or women or anyone else.
Number 2 is very misleading spin.
They are quite frank about what their 2nd concern is.
They expect the mass of illegals to represent a net gain in Democrat support, assuming they or their progeny get to remain and eventually vote, just as you do.
As to number 1, well, aren’t you hoping this will turn the white majority into a mere white plurality?
Haven’t you made that as plain as can be, as often as can be?
Hence the phrase, “war on whites.”
There was a time when there was a big influx of southern europeans and Irish catholics who flocked into our cities and became cogs in the Democratic Party’s urban political machines. The Republicans didn’t take the attitude that they should remain anti-Irish or anti-Italian for very long. Yes, the party initially had plenty of Know-Nothings in it. But they grew out of that.
I don’t know why you call this misleading spin when what you’re saying isn’t any different from what I’m saying. The Conservative Movement knows that Latinos will vote against them if they don’t change, and they don’t want to change.
The reality is that Obama having conducted over 2 million deportations is not enough for the GOP because their bigotry has defeated their ability to separate the Hispanic vote from Obama and Democratic Party despite the abysmal practices of the administration an its immigration and border agents.
ProTip: Conservatives don’t count ‘sorry, you can’t enter in this fashion, please turn back’ or ‘sorry, you’ve overstayed your visa, gotta leave’ as deportations. Their idea of deportation is something of a cross between the Elián González debacle and an Albigensian Crusade-style ethnic cleansing which involves police officers busting into homes and stuffing people into vans.
A lot of those deportations have involved police officers busting into homes and stuffing people into vans and taking them to mass detention facilities. It’s just been out of sight of all but the Hispanic media. And certainly not on FoxNews.
And local police seem to enjoy the action.
Cops are always conservative.
I think the quiet conservatives who matter, as opposed to the grifters on Fox and the radio, still do love them. One reason for encouraging the noise machine to stop immigration reform is that illegal immigrants are the kind they prefer, because they’re easier to exploit. They know no amount of militarization and posturing is going to stop the flow.
It’s more subtle than that. The historical dynamic of frontier America was Whites ensuring that blacks and Indians never acted in alliance. The Republicans seek that same sort of ability to exploit but are differing about how to achieve it. One side wants to expel immigrants. The other wants to impoverish them as a way of continuing through discrimination to keep blacks “in their place’. The fact that the frontier operated that way from 1540 onward (at least in the East) makes the whole scheme seem traditional and appeals to their sense of conserving a system.
The notion of equal justice under the law is contrary to that frontier system.
interesting to juxtapose the myth and reality – The Searchers as quintessential myth, is fascinating in a car accident kind of way
The one qualification I would make is that the racism is one aspect of a more general xenophobia. That’s easy to see in the case of Latinos, especially, given that many Latinos are themselves white. (The numbers are a little surprising, actually. The most recent census data for California shows 39% non-Latino white, but 73.5% white if you include Latinos.)
So it’s really the tribe of Real Americans against everyone else. And since hostility to everyone else is increasingly the defining feature of Real Americans, it stands to reason that they feel besieged.
Alabama folks like Mo Brooks don’t consider Hispanic-Americans (or for that matter Portugues, Spanish, Italians, and Greeks) as White.
And since hostility to everyone else is increasingly the defining feature of Real Americans,
Increasingly? Only if you mean ‘increasingly less sublimated’. You know, what with the Cold War fuckery, opposition to American Civil Rights, violent homophobia, anti-semitism, anti-Catholicism, Eastern and Southern European immigrant hating, etc. This shit ain’t new, what’s different is that Real America is getting their cultural delusions less babied.
Well then I wonder how the GOP would react if all of the American Indian Nations got together and passed tribal legislation proclaiming that only those with American Indian blood may stay in the USA. All need to go back to their original countries that they came from ASAP.
Would they find enough 100% Native Americans to vote?
And would they then vote to deport themselves back to Siberia?
Among conservatives, I’ve seen plenty of capacity for nuance and shades of grayness. For example, when you bring up the subject of torture or illegal invasions, you can get the whole spectrum of explanation: “Yeah, I’d usually say this was totally wrong, but it was okay in this case because” followed by some bullshit reason of the most self-serving convenience; “No, you’re wrong, your imagined offense was completely legal and acceptable, and we should not only do it again, but do it harder”; and everything in between.
Then comes the standard denunciation of “situational ethics” that “those libruls” are always on about.