The Soft Bigotry of Just Not Caring

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer went on Univision’s “Al Punto” show over the weekend and denied that she’s a bigot, explaining that some of her best friends are Hispanic:

Not only am I concerned, it’s really disappointing to me. I’ve lived in the southwest my whole life. I’ve got many friends, of many cultures and certainly a great deal of them are Hispanics, and I love them from the bottom of my heart. I love everybody Jorge, from the bottom of my heart.

You can watch the interview for yourself here, but it’s in Spanish. My colleague Andrea Nill reports that Brewer defended her claim that undocumented migrants are mostly selling drugs:

When Ramos challenged Brewer on her statements that most undocumented immigrants are drug mules, Brewer defended her remarks. “Well, if you know; if you are coming across with the drug cartels, and you’re hauling drugs, then you are,” said Brewer. “We can’t assimilate it,” Brewer told Ramos in reference to the number of undocumented immigrants coming to the U.S. “Those people that are coming across are now under the control of the drug cartels,” she affirmed.

Accusations of bigotry are very politically hot and in this context probably best avoided. For my part, I’ll say that I have not achieved the ideal of universal love for all humankind. But when thinking about public policy issues, I do try to take the idea that everyone counts seriously. And one of the things that’s wrong with most anti-immigrant politics is precisely that it fails to do this. Brewer strenuously denies that her program of stepped-up legal harassment and deportation of people who’ve moved to Arizona to do work in exchange for money is motivated by bigotry, but one can’t seriously deny that it’s motivated by a lack of consideration for the interests of the people involved.

Now of course nobody’s crazy enough in this day and age to say “in my opinion, the interests of people born in Mexico don’t count.” Certainly it’s a straightforward consequence of Christian ethics that the interests of people born in Mexico count a great deal.

So instead of saying that they don’t count, we get an effort—likely driven by sincere cognitive dissonance—to define Mexicans as outside the community of people about whom we ought to have concern. One way to do that would be through dehumanizing racism. A different, more respectable approach, is to associate Mexican migrants with criminality, suggesting that they themselves have defined themselves outside the sphere of the community. Hence this loopy and implausible drug mule talking point. Obviously there in fact are people crossing the border for the purpose of smuggling illegal goods into the United States. But if you’re truly concerned about halting that traffic, the best thing to do would be to create a legal and convenient channel for would-be migrant laborers to come to this country. Then enforcement resources could be focused on drug smugglers, who would also be easier to identify without the cover of people crossing the border to work.