Fear
by digby
The immigration atrocity in Arizona reminded me of that NRA “graphic novel” (pdf) that came out a couple of years ago. Click on the image to read :
Yes, it’s all about crime. Or jobs. Or public services. It has nothing to do with race or ethnicity:
Today, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Arizona Department of Education “recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English”:
State education officials say the move is intended to ensure that students with limited English have teachers who speak the language flawlessly. But some school principals and administrators say the department is imposing arbitrary fluency standards that could undermine students by thinning the ranks of experienced educators. […] “This is just one more indication of the incredible anti-immigrant sentiment in the state,” said Bruce Merrill, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who conducts public-opinion research.
But many schools in the state still have a significant number of teachers who are native Spanish speakers. At one school, state auditors complained that teachers pronounced “words such as violet as ‘biolet,’ think as ‘tink’ and swallow the ending sounds of words, as they sometimes do in Spanish.” The principal at that school acknowledged that teachers “should speak grammatically correct English” but said they shouldn’t be punished for having an accent.
And the Arizona legislature passed a bill yesterday outlawing ethnic studies programs.
The frenzy is accelerating and it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. This kind of nativism is part and parcel of right wing populism and when there’s economic strain it rises to the surface. I think it’s actually a testament to progress that it took this long.
But it’s very much complicated by the fact that there are so many Americans of Hispanic descent who know very well what’s going on. And they can vote.
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