Believing in strong border controls doesn't walk or quack like a racist. The analogy would be more along the lines "if it has feathers, it must be a duck", sure ducks have feathers, but so do most other birds, sure people who are racist against Mexicans or generally against Hispanics/Latinos want to greatly decrease illegal immigration, but so do a lot of non-racists.
racism
One entry found for racism.
Main Entry: rac·ism
Pronunciation: 'rA-"si-z&m also -"shi-
Function: noun
1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination
webster.com
The majority of the people wanting strong border controls don't believe that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities, and many of them are for strong border controls for reasons other than discriminating by race. The reasons vary from overload emergency rooms near the border, to a stronger than usual support of enforcing laws, to a feeling that if we have much stronger border controls we can reduce drug traffic and/or the threat of terrorism, to the desire to keep the population of the US from rising, to belief that illegal immigrants cause wages for low skilled jobs to go down, to any number of other reasons. And then of course there are people who just don't like Mexicans. I never claimed that none of the supporters of very strong border controls are racist, its likely many are, but to paint all of them as racist is inaccurate and inappropriate.
Note that even if some of the reasons for the desire for strong border controls are faulty, that doesn't make them racist motivations. For example if strong border controls don't significantly help in the fight against drug trafficking or terrorism, that wouldn't mean that the motivation was a racist one, so arguments about these motivations being weak or incorrect are mostly irrelevant. |
