" when these people lose family members or see their local communities turning for the worse due to illegal immigration, then hear urban people talk down to them, wondering why they are so intolerant (despite the fact that they themselves are 1,000 miles away, and not experiencing these problems!), it tends to rub them the wrong wayâŠ"
This is probably the view in rural areas, but what this boils down to is people see the ills that have hit rural areas, the declining economics, and more importantly, the surge in drug abuse (opiod addiction, meth), the social dislocation where families come apart and so forth, and they blame illegal immigrants for the problem rather than the real causes IMO. These areas have seen increases in crime, for example, but much of that is fed by drug use that is their own people so to speak, but it is a lot easier to duck that issue and blame it on others.
As far as professors in areas 1000 miles away, that is a load of BS that quite honestly is the old âbubble headed liberal elite in their limosines, what do they know?â. For one thing, it assumes they are looking from an ivory tower, when many of the people writing those things have gone âon the groundâ in rural areas and have seen what is going on. Likewise, arguing they donât see it where they live is idiotic, the places where these guys teach, chicago and NYC, have been seeing immigration, legal and illegal, in numbers for a long time, people from Mexico I believe are now the largest group in NYC, and many of them are illegally here. In the burbs where I live, over the last 15 years or so we have seen large numbers of immigrants, many of them illegal, so we have faced these issues, issues like substandard housing (stacking, either in rooms in old houses or motels), issues of contractors using these guys as day laborers and abusing them, issues like when it is families, facing influxes of kids the schools werenât equippred to handle (non english speaking kids, for example)⊠personally, when I hear âthose ivory tower people donât know what they are talking aboutâ, it often comes down to 'they arenât backing what my own eyes tell me", that often is based on misperceptionsâŠ
And yes, when it comes to things like illegal immigrants, there are real issues, something some wave aside, for example schools already strapped for resources dealing with waves of the kids of immigrants who need special help, issues of poverty, of government services, but a lot of the perceptions I have heard are repeating the claim that for example Mexican immigrants are criminals, rapists, taking âour jobsâ (mexican immigrants are not taking the factory jobs that have been lost, they are taking jobs no one else wants because they pay so poorly). While there is some truth to that claim, in construction cheaply paid day laborers have taken jobs that used to be well paying, as a blanket statement it is myth.
People in rural areas also traditionally have operated under the mythology that they are all rugged individualists, that the government gives them nothing but they give everything to the government, whereas the reality is rural areas often rely more on the federal government then the areas they claim get all the helpâŠand likewise, where rural areas have done well, they often wonât/canât attribute that success which may in large part come from federal actions shrug.
And this is nothing new, if you read any of Studs Terkels books, where he interviewed people from all over, none of this is new, this divide was there in the past, too, what once was the province of racial segregation and the ideas behind that, have shifted onto other things, where perception and mis perception and a perception rule, and where people donât necessarily want to deal with the truth of things; better to blame illegal immigrants for the kid messed up on drugs, then the real causes of it.
