What, Me Racist?

Yesterday, the Sunday Star Tribune had an interesting juxtaposition on its front page, plus a business section front page column added to the mix:

The story at left tells about how seniors and people with disabilities in rural communities and smaller cities are struggling to maintain access to transportation services for medical appointments because of staffing problems (as well as insufficient reimbursements). The older white man pictured in a wheelchair is being helped by a Black man named Chris Isaya. I don't know that Isaya is an immigrant, but I'd be willing to bet money that he is, like many workers in nursing homes and other caring roles. There have also been numerous stories in recent years about the Greater Minnesota downtowns revived by immigrant-owned business — sometimes African or Asian refugee-owned, sometimes Latino-owned.

The column on the right side of the front page is headlined "Refugee backlash emerges in Wis." (gift link). It tells of how people in St. Croix County, Wisconsin, home to the Twin Cities exurb Hudson, just across the border, are riled up about too many dang refugees from Myanmar and two Congolese countries being brought to their almost all-white, population-losing part of America. 

Half of Wisconsin's towns lost population in the 2020 census but the people in St. Croix County want to be stranded in their houses with no one to take care of them in their dotage, I guess. 

But they're not racist or xenophobic, no sir! The story quotes a member of the Republican party telling us so. It's about taxation without representation. Those refugees will be sucking on the teat of all those taxpaying Wisconsins, see? Those people just don't want to work.

The misinformed people who support the Right in its immigrant fear-mongering are backing a Republican bill that would require any local official who "is contacted by a nonprofit or federal agency about proposed placements of refugees" to report it "to every municipality, county and school district within a 100-mile radius." And each one of those entities would have to have a public meeting and hear public comments about the request.

A 100-mile radius would cover half the state of Wisconsin, generally, so that basically precludes any resettlement, which is the intent.

All those non-racists who came out to comment at the St. Croix County hearing were clear about what they thought. "I don't want to live in a third-world hell-hole," said one, according to the Star Tribune. People in the audience clapped. 

Other speakers told the usual lies about failure to screen refugees, refugees' failure to assimilate, why don't "they have to wait in line like I did" to come to the U.S. (there is no line), and that refugees would be a fiscal drain. 

In Minnesota, most of us know — as the headline on the business section column by Evan Ramstad at the right side of my photo above says — migrant influxes benefit us. Documented or undocumented migrants, and also refugees, despite their traumatic reasons. We could make it easier for them than we do, I know, and that would bring the benefits of their presence faster. But there are studies that demonstrate that immigrants of all types bring innovation, new businesses, and economic growth. And also less crime.

But that's not the story of fear and paranoia the Right wants to tell.

Gillian Branstetter's recent post, which linked the Right's joined obsession with divorce, fascism, and transgender children, had a quote that is relevant to this topic, and made me think of my own sister who could be the most empathetic person for anyone she knew but was poisonously anti-immigrant:

Particularly in the U.S. (with its near-zero social safety net), mothers are trapped in a permanent state of precarity and judgment that incentivizes paranoia and distrust of all forces outside the home—be it “gender ideology” and vaccines or, for white mothers, racist fears of migrants and urban crime.

They're sad people, cutting themselves off so they can suck on their Fox News anti-pacifier. I hope there's a fight for the soul of Western Wisconsin, from Eau Claire to River Falls to Hudson. That's one place close enough to campaign.