Mexican Terrorists

I’m hearing Rep. John Culberson (R-Nutcase) on MSNBC saying that we know that terrorists are coming over the Mexican border, hiding among friendly illegal immigrants, and that we should trust American volunteers (with no history of mental illness — which leaves out his constituents) to patrol the border. Just the other day I heard Governor Bill Richardson on Fox going on and on about how illegal immigrants are mutilating animals but we should beef up the border patrol to deal with it.

This kind of talk, in my experience, always means that the economy is in deep shit. I don’t care what the numbers say and I don’t care how happy everyone is supposed to be in this wonderful growing economy — it obviously sucks. Illegal immigrant bashing never happens when the party’s in full swing.

I can see that we are going to spend a lot of time on this convenient scapegoating the next few years and judging from Richardson’s approach, the populist Democratic position is going to be that we need to bash Mexicans with professional border patrol agents as opposed to picking them off with vigilante posses. I guess we are taking the kinder gentler approach?

Economic populism does have an unfortunate history of teaming up with nativism and it looks like the Republicans and the Democrats are going to be racing to see who can get there first. Business always willingly puts up with a short term phony interruption in their cheap labor supply in order to feed the rubes, so no worries of a GOP crack-up on this one. The bigger question is whether the hispanic population is going to put up with the inevitable race baiting that underlies these periodic bash-fests. Whoever threads that needle the best is probably going to be the winner in the western swing states.

One problem with getting older is that you begin to see these pernicious patterns play out repeatedly within your own lifetime and it is profoundly depressing.

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