{"id":58,"date":"2015-02-08T11:12:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-08T17:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/02\/ill-go-there-is-jeb-bush-racist.html"},"modified":"2015-02-24T21:19:45","modified_gmt":"2015-02-25T03:19:45","slug":"ill-go-there-is-jeb-bush-racist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/02\/ill-go-there-is-jeb-bush-racist.html","title":{"rendered":"I’ll go there: Is Jeb Bush racist?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Jeb Bush was the subject of a fair amount of criticism from conservatives (including me<\/a>) for his flaky comments about immigration back last spring, when he labelled illegal immigration (and that specifically from Mexico\/Central America \u2014 illegal border-crossers rather than visa overstayers) \u201can act of love.\u201d \u00a0I griped at the time that politicians were practically canonizing illegal immigrants, as these wonderfully hard workers dedicated to their families. <\/p>\n

Now he\u2019s in the news again, or rather in the \u201cnews\u201d via a CNN article <\/a>recapping his past comments on immigration.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s what he proposed for the city of Detroit, via some comments at a forum in 2013:<\/p>\n

He even suggested the mayor of Detroit \u2014 the economically depressed Midwestern city where he\u2019s giving his first policy address of the 2016 campaign on Wednesday \u2014 use immigration to \u201crepopulate\u201d the city.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIt just seems to me that maybe if you open up our doors in a fair way and unleashed the spirit of peoples\u2019 hard work, Detroit could become in really short order, one of the great American cities again,\u201d Bush said then. \u201cNow it would look different, it wouldn\u2019t be Polish\u2026But it would be just as powerful, just as exciting, just as dynamic. And that\u2019s what immigration does and to be fearful of this, it just seems bizarre to me.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, I\u2019d read this before, and from what I can tell, he\u2019s never fleshed this out. \u00a0Does he envision a program in which immigrants are restricted to living and working inside the city of Detroit? \u00a0For how long? \u00a0Indefinitely, in a second-class-citizen sort of way? \u00a0And is he simply clueless about the situation in Detroit?<\/p>\n

Detroit is becoming depopulated, that\u2019s true; the current (2010 census) population is less than 700,000, a far cry from the 1 million of 1990 (though even then, that figure took a concerted effort to ensure that the population was fully counted \u2014 too much was at stake, both in terms of city pride and special Michigan legislation for \u201ccities of over a million people\u201d), not to mention the 1.5 million of 1970 or 1.8 million of 1950. \u00a0(See wikipedia\u2019s entry<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

And Detroit has welcomed immigrants, though it\u2019s far from a draw, with the exception of the Arabs, who\u2019ve mostly gravitated toward suburban Dearborn. \u00a0You want hard-working immigrants? \u00a0Other cities may have Koreans, but in Detroit, it\u2019s the Chaldeans<\/a> who run the party stores (small grocery\/convenience stores), and there\u2019s the usual mix of conflict and support when it comes to their interaction with the local community.<\/p>\n

When it comes down to it though, it\u2019s fundamentally insulting to the people of Detroit to say that what the city needs is an infusion of \u201chard working people.\u201d <\/p>\n

There are lots of causes for Detroit\u2019s troubles, and reasons why it can\u2019t manage to recover from them. \u00a0The dependence on the auto industry, and its inability to diversify when the Big Three lost their dominance. \u00a0The power of the unions and\/or the intrenched lack of forward-thinkingness on the part of management. \u00a0The corrupt governance of Coleman Young and his successors causing, first, white flight, and, afterwards, middle-class flight. \u00a0Persistent attempts to fix the situation via big construction projects. \u00a0A death spiral in which the city became ever more disproportionately populated by people with few skills and little education, because people who can leave, do. <\/p>\n

At the same time, though, there are many Detroiters who are doing their best, given their circumstances. \u00a0One of my facebook friends, who grew up in the city, links to articles featuring these sorts of people. \u00a0(See my piece from last November<\/a>.) \u00a0Take the aquarium: \u00a0closed down for lack of funds, and now forced to compete with the for-profit Sea Life in the far north suburbs, it was reopened solely due to the efforts of a fund-raising citizenry and is staffed by volunteers.<\/p>\n

And look again at Bush\u2019s comment: \u00a0to label the city as \u201cPolish\u201d is just bizarre \u2014 the city is 83% black and a mere 8% \u201cnon-Hispanic white.\u201d \u00a0Surely Jeb knows that!<\/p>\n

Which means this: \u00a0was he intentionally playing dumb here? \u00a0It doesn\u2019t take too many leaps to go to think that, when it comes down to it, he wants to swap out blacks for Mexicans, because he believes that blacks simply don\u2019t have what it takes to work hard and rebuild the city, and don\u2019t have that moral superiority, that work ethic, that marvelous love of family contained in the noble Mexican\/Central American immigrant.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeb Bush was the subject of a fair amount of criticism from conservatives (including me) for his flaky comments about immigration back last spring, when he labelled illegal immigration (and that specifically from Mexico\/Central America \u2014 illegal border-crossers rather than visa overstayers) \u201can act of love.\u201d \u00a0I griped at the time that politicians were practically […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9,46,44,45],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-detroit","tag-immigration","tag-jeb-bush","tag-racism"],"yoast_head":"\nI'll go there: Is Jeb Bush racist?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Jeb Bush was the subject of a fair amount of criticism from conservatives (including me) for his flaky comments about 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