Illegal Immigrants Get Them Stomping

As long as this morning's Tennessean needs to hitch to Eric Crafton's recent celebrity: we need not call Eric Crafton a racist in order to consider the racist intentions of English Only and First. It has already been pointed out that Jim Crow voting laws discriminated against black voters without ever mentioning them specifically or the general idea of race. English Only and First does the same thing. I don't think that you have to be a racist to support racist policies; you only need to be an opportunist. George Wallace proved that to be true. From PBS's The American Experience:

When [George] Wallace turned to the politics of race one of his supporters who was horrified, said, "George, why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?" And Wallace, sadly he thought, said, "You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about n*****s, and they stomped the floor."

Illegal immigration also fires up voters, even at the local level, where little can be done because local government is mostly about service delivery. Demagoguery in the 2K-aughts is not that different from the demagoguery of the 1950s.