On Wednesdays We Wear Pink

We’ve all heard someone quote, “on Wednesdays we wear pink,” from the movie Mean Girls. This movie documents a girl, Cady, attending school for the first time in America after being homeschooled in Africa. As she assimilates to life in school, some not-so-nice girls take advantage of her, trick her, make her do things that she did not originally wish to do and blame her for things that are not her fault. Like Cady, immigrants must adjust to a new environment, people, and customs and are often not treated with the utmost respect.

In “The New Politics of Immigration: “Balanced-Budget Conservatism” and the Symbolism of Proposition 187,” Kitty Calavita addresses why Proposition 187 had so much support when it was known to be fruitless and why it made immigrants out to be a fiscal burden. Immigration politics are symbolic in that people knowingly voted for Proposition 187 in order to express their anger and discontents. This act had an impact even though the initiative remained inoperative (Calavita 300). The symbolic conflict reflected the struggling economy that led to balanced-budget conservatism, which focuses on “government spending and the budget deficit as the source of economic and social malaise (Calavita 300).

Americans were mean to immigrants in a similar way that the mean girls were harsh to Cady. Americans blamed them for “depressed wages, labor strife, and the emerging “sweatshop system” (Calavita 287). Immigrants were blamed for the lack of jobs and poor economy along with numerous other things, even when statistics showed that the opposite was true. Cady, like immigrants, was given undesirable tasks and blamed for things that weren’t her fault. Her classmates spread rumors about her that were untrue, just like immigrants were blamed for the being an economic burden when in reality there was a “net fiscal gain” (Calavita 290). Being thrown into a new school, though on a smaller scale, has many similarities to arriving in a new country.