Wow, Lou Dobbs has balls, big ones. He held a live "town hall" meeting in San Antonio, Texas talking about the border problem, the problems of drugs and immigration from Mexico and more. What he may not have been aware of is that San Antonio is mostly sympathetic to Mexican migrants. Nobody there wants to use the words "illegal alien" because they say it sounds like space beings. Well, that's true, but the word is older than that. San Antonio folks on the show were pretty pissed off. Understandably, so. But it is indeed a sign of the coming culture war.
Dobbs comes off like a racist white snob. Lulac members came off as angry people with a different agenda. The whole thing turned into a high school debate.
The thing nobody wants to say is that there are mixed loyalties along the border. (not necessarily close to the border itself) This not new and not unique to the US borders. People living in border areas around the world have mixed loyalties and different identities than. I can understand and empathize with the various views on this issue, and I can not take a side. I do believe that there is a much bigger conflict brewing on this subject and it has been brewing for a century or more. On the hispanic side there is a lot of anger at a century of repression and racism. There is even an undercurrent of the idea of a "greater Mexico" nation, though nobody has phrased it as such. The fact of history is that the US and people from the US did usurp half the territory of Mexico. This too is relevant and part of the situation.
It is pretty easy to say that rich white Americans are also trying to apply their personal values and beliefs to a whole different population and even another country.
Another dynamic of this is the linguistic roots of cultural differences. English has dominated the US forever. But many communities have existed throughout the US with other languages used in daily life. Those language communities have been tolerated as much as they've been antagonized. Curiously, it appears to me that most northern European language communities have been more tolerated. Logically, this is due to a more similar culture. The Latin versus Germanic cultural divide is big, even in Europe. This bias is clearly evident today in the US. It is as much due, however, to the size of the Spanish language community. There has never been such a large language group in the US before.
Naturally, people feel threatened by linguistic and cultural differences. This is evident throughout history and throughout the world. The solutions are never easy, never simple, and never perfect.
Belgium has 2 major language communities that divide the tiny country into two nations that still do not mix much and do not feel connected or one. Canada has a similar situation. India has dozens of languages. The UK even has multiple languages.
Dialect of language is even a dividing line.
It's a mess. A mess that has been blindly ignored for a century or more and is not going to be fixed or solved by a simple fence or a single generation. It is not one simple problem, but many will and do try to oversimplify things and this fuels the fires.
