A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

But issues concerning Barack Obama's recent comments just keep springing to mind. Consider his side comment about "anti-immigrant" sentiments that he attributes to people in small towns who "get bitter." Now, to be sure, xenophobia certainly has been known to increase in tenor and pitch when hard economic times come about. But as I and others have argued, if we are talking about the controversy surrounding our current immigration policies, we have to acknowledge the fact that concerns regarding those policies do not merely exist because of hard economic times. Immigration policy has always been a hot-button issue. It was a hot-button issue while the economic expansion was going on in full force during the Bush Presidency. It was a hot-button issue when the Reagan Administration offered amnesty for illegal immigrants if only those immigrants declare themselves (the economy was growing quite nicely then too and people felt very good about the direction of the country and their own personal fortunes).

Moreover, as with the issue of trade, Obama shows a strange tendency to accuse others of sins he is primarily guilty of. He decries as most unfortunate the fact that the unwashed masses might become protectionists in hard economic times, even as he opposes free trade in general and NAFTA and the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement in particular. And when it comes to the issue of immigrants--or more generally, the Other--Obama is more than willing to stoke resentments even as he pronounces the existence of those resentments as sorrowful and regrettable.

Remember this? It contained the following passage:

. . . This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

Just out of curiosity, if a candidate for the Presidency goes out of his way to rhetorically stoke fears that the foreigners are out to get your livelihood, would said candidate be rightfully described as "bitter"?

Or is it all right for Barack Obama to play on fears of the Other even as he (rightfully) decries such fears when it comes to our attitudes towards immigrants?