The "city on the hill"? Look what's climbing up one side of the hill.
It's okay to let those people in if they are exploitable economically. If they're going to embarrass us? Hell, no. Don't tell us about what we did in Central America. Don't spoil our self image. Don't yammer at us about brown and white equality.
The photo above is from the New Yorker. So is this:
Last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics pointed out that non-native-born workers—a category that includes those who are undocumented—are 16.3 per cent of the population. They have a labor-force-participation rate of 66.7 per cent—four points higher than that of the native-born population—and are disproportionately represented in the service sector. In the mid-nineteen-thirties, groups like the N.A.A.C.P. and the National Urban League fought against the sexual and economic exploitation of black women domestic workers. We’re far enough beyond that history for films like “The Help” and “The Butler” to be billed as uplifting narratives about a cartoonish past. Look beyond the borderland limbo, and the unsettling question becomes whether we’ve vanquished the antiquated contempt that made a civil-rights movement necessary or simply given it a new form. We scarcely notice the extent to which women working in domestic service—nannies, housekeepers, health-care aides—encounter problems much like those that confronted black American women in the Jim Crow era.
It’s easy to overlook the extent to which the civil-rights struggle was connected to economic questions that remain achingly familiar. Black exclusion from the burgeoning labor movement effectively created a separate, lower wage scale for black workers, who commonly were denied legal rights to challenge those differences. The 1963 March on Washington is now understood as a massive demonstration in support of the Civil Rights Act, but A. Philip Randolph—a labor leader and its chief architect—initially conceived of it as a gathering to protest economic exploitation. Later discussions with Martin Luther King, Jr., led them to collaborate on an event for civil and economic rights; it became the “March for Jobs and Justice.” The wage gap between blacks and whites persists, though now it exists in tandem with the gap between citizen and non-citizen labor.
There are also stark divergences in the dilemmas of immigrants and African-Americans. The point of recalling the civil-rights movement, though, is not to confirm the triumph of the American moral conscience. It’s to understand what happens to people whose labor is compensated under the table, to whom the legal system offers scant protection, and who exist along the social margins. ...JelaniCobb,NewYorker
Cobb goes on to add some perspective to our view of the tea party: "Until the recent dethroning of Eric Cantor, it was possible to understand the Tea Party as fundamentally driven by economic conservatism; it’s now apparent that it is, in large measure, an outlet for nativist anxieties."
