Copy and Paste

This article over at Pandagon was excellent. It goes in depth on several other laws coming down the pipe in Arizona following Papers Please. I'm gonna talk about a couple of sections but you really ought to read the whole thing. All bolding is mine.

English-only is classic wingnuttery, right down to the bad faith.  The stated intentions are to help kids, but the reality is that the initiatives are about making sure students don’t learn any other skills while learning English.  It’s a racist program that aims to make sure the children of immigrants have just enough skills to do manual and service labor, but no skills that would make middle class aspirations a possibility. 

 This is the issue right here. Whenever right wingers have the "gall" to talk about immigration reform (and fewer and fewer of them are) it's always in the context of letting people into the country to do jobs that Americans refuse to do. They just want to gain the political points with the independents for doing immigration reform and ensure they're strawberries keep getting picked and their chickens keep getting plucked. These people are getting paid but usually minimum wage or lower to do these sorts of jobs. At the risk of sounding pretty strong language wise here, this looks like modern day, legal slavery to me. It's all about making sure that we have a poor class of people who have little choice than to do our dirty work. By keeping important skills from immigrants and children of immigrants we ensure that there isn't and there won't ever be a large, vibrant hispanic middle class. And that, ostensibly, is the American Dream. Which is bullshit itself, but that's another post.

Proponents really do believe that Latinos have nothing to offer, and they often treat them like they’re not even human beings.  Immigrants especially get this kind of treatment.  Having grown up in the Southwest, I can tell you that a lot of the racism that white people express has an undercurrent of insecurity to it.

I didn't grow up in the Southwest. I grew up in the Southeast and 100% of this is still the case. People get pissed when they can't understand what the people ahead of them in line are saying etc. This is, in my experience, a large part of the racism that still pervades the Old South in regards to African-Americans too. White supremacists seem to be deathly afraid that white culture, anglo culture, won't be able to survive unless it's enforced upon everyone. I haven't heard anything so silly in a long time. By that logic white people aren't as good. If our culture would die unless it's dominant than clearly people of color (who's many cultures continue to thrive while assaulted by white racism every day) are better than we are. You can twist this argument around all you want.