The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky Read Free Book Online

subconscious level she realized that the stories of the people she worked with just couldn’t be hermetically sealed off from her own life experiences. The poverty she saw terrified her and stoked up a host of bigotries and stereotypes. But at some level she recognized how intricately her own story was tied up with that of the destitute people of whom she was so scared.
    Nowhere is the attempt to wall off the poor as having, somehow, separate narratives from the rest of us more overt than in the roiling politics around illegal immigration. Many observers have noted that starving public institutions of cash is a pastime that state electorates sign off on during times in which populaces are in flux. Smaller, more homogenous populations rarely vote to defund social safety nets and educational infrastructure that they see as benefiting mainly people culturally, linguistically, and racially more like themselves. When, by contrast, public goods are seen mainly as benefiting “others,” people who are blacker and browner, who don’t speak English well, and who have a different set of cultural references, then support for the public sector wobbles.
    That’s a theme well developed by the California journalist Peter Schrag in books such as California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment . Schrag describes something akin to a breakdown in collective empathy, and a growing sense, based more on illusion than reality, that the taxes paid by one group are going to fund the benefits received by others. No accident, this analysis goes, that social democratic systems emerged in historically homogenous countries such as Sweden; no accident, either, that as those countries have absorbedmore immigrants in recent years, more “others,” so support for the comprehensive welfare state has shown signs of stress. It’s an issue that Harvard University’s Richard Parker also deems to be critically important. Large pools of undocumented immigrants and transient workers, he says, make it that much harder to generate mass support for institutions seen as somehow illegitimately rewarding these families for their illegal entry into, or stay within the borders of, America. And as with southern Louisiana parishes and the racism of some of their residents, oftentimes the most extreme politics on immigration comes from people who live in close proximity to, and experience the daily presence of, undocumented populations.
    FIGHTING TALK
    In a televised debate in 2010, Arizona state senator Russell Pearce, author of the nation’s toughest anti–illegal immigration law, argued that the Constitution “does give the federal government the responsibility to protect the states from invasion. But it’s right also in the Constitution, it says, when there is an invasion the states have a right, even—even to declare war if you will, you know, they have a right to protect. And again, we’re sovereign states, I mean, just like everybody here. We’re not citizens of the United States. We use that term, well, we’re actually citizens of one of the several sovereign states.” 22 Pearce, who strongly felt that Arizona was, indeed, suffering an invasion, believed that there ought to be a moratorium on all forms of immigration into the country, be it legal or illegal; that the right to citizenship for those born in the United States should be modified to exclude children of illegal aliens; and that such children should be barred from all state benefits—including access to education and healthcare. His bill gave police in Arizona the power to demand residency papers of anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally—a vague criteria that, not surprisingly, immediately ran into a barrage of litigation—and was specifically crafted to scare large numbers of immigrants into moving away from Arizona. It was a clumsy law, unsubtle in its requirements,and likely to lead to almost as many problems, almost as many run-ins with law enforcement, for