Misguided in the USA, A Country of Immigrants Manipulated by A Minorityof Nativists

Undocumented Child Immigrant Crisis 

Earlier this year during a visit, a relative by marriage insisted on showing my husband and I a youtube video called "Bubble Gum Immigration" produced by NumbersUSA.  I recognized the name Roy Beck immediately from clips I'd seen of Fox News, as a right wing nativist.  The video uses colored gum balls to represent the populations of countries and potential immigrants, in order to promote the cessation of legal immigration as a humanitarian policy.   Mr. Beck makes over estimates, saying a million immigrants become  Americans each year (In 2013 it was 990,553 ,
He goes on to turn to the problem of world poverty, as though immigration in the US is somehow related to this, assuming that world poverty is somehow an aspect of US Immigration policy, and that somehow, legal immigration makes a warrant that promotes or encourages all the poor residents of the world to come to the United States.  In the odd and grasping argument, he frames all potential immigrants as desperately poor, and in all his examples of the very poor [represented by gumballs] (650 million Africans, 0;42, 890 million Indians, 0;52, 480 million Chinese 1;00, and 105 million Latin Americans 1;17) he conjures an ethnic non-white image for his viewers.
I challenged the use of data as not relevant to immigration policy, nor a fair use of statistics and the content as thinly veiled racism.  My host became defensive and wondered aloud what my problem was, since I am not an immigrant and was born in this country.  He further stated, adamantly, that his problem wasn't with those of other races, but with criminals [the crime in question, being in the US "illegally"] and terrorists[ignoring the KKK, a widely known white supremacist domestic terrorist group], welfare cheats [as though Americans don't commit fraud] and people that -  I left the room before I could be subjected to a second more of it.  This man doesn't consider himself a racist.  He considers himself a model American.  He and others like him engage in a rhetoric of denial, using colorblind racism (the kind of racism that will not explicitly use racial terms but instead uses other measures that have direct correlations to race) and skewed arguments to demonize foreign born workers and residents.
This man is white, I am not.  Of the three of my four grandparents who were born in the US, two where the children of immigrants.  My paternal grandfather was born in Mexico and came to California as part of the Bracero program.  The United States needed agricultural workers to feed her population, and he took the opportunity to do so at great personal cost.  He married my grandmother in the 50s and settled here with her.  All of their children were born in the Central Valley.  They, too would be considered "natives".  However,  "Nativism" has specific views, according to our text,  "it's "the presumed superiority of native-born citizens, favoring the allocation of resources to them over immigrants and promoting fear of other cultures (Golash-Boza p 359)." Native though I may be, the history of my family is forefront in my mind when I consider what an immigrant is, who they are and their validity as potential contributing Americans.
As a child I was very aware of being not white.  While I spoke English almost exclusively, and did well in school, my dark skin and Spanish last name stood out at my elementary school. As a six grader, a girl I had known since 3rd grade, previously a friend, told me that she hated "those Wetbacks [refering to the workers on her father's farm] but You're OK."  I don't remember any of the exchange after that.  I consistently heard from other people that I was "the smartest Mexican" they knew - which was insulting on several levels, since I was the top ranked CHILD in my grade or class each year.  Madera County comprises Madera, Chowchilla and several smaller municipalities with a total of 150,865 people as of the 2010 census. The population is 53.7% Hispanic or Latino.  The foreign born population is 32,582, which is about 21.6% of the total population.  Unfortunately, this relatively high percentage of Latinos and immigrants does not indicate a lack of racism,it does however require a fair amount of tolerance and interaction between Hispanics and non hispanics and immigrants and citizens.

While it's true that the majority of Undocumented Immigrants residing in the US are from Mexico (6.8 million persons) that does not mean that the majority of Immigrants from Mexico engage in illegal activities,  The perception of the undocumented as some how "Illegal" persons provides a rhetorical tool for demonization of Hispanics in general, and further perpetuates stereotypes against immigrants and native born Hispanics as people who are likely or potentially criminal.
Racism persists today, in part, because other wise law abiding people are cast as"illegals" while otherwise good people, who want to think well of themselves refuse to acknowledge the roots of their fears or evaluate information critically.  Just because a connection can be made between dark skin and the idea of something scary, does not mean that the lack of proper paper work makes a dark skinned person dangerous, and deserving of exclusion.