Blair Did It!!!!!!!!!

I have an older brother, and in typical older brother fashion, he was a pest most of the time. When he was five and I was two, he was sitting on a table when suddenly, it broke. Meanwhile, I was minding my own business, sitting in one of the chairs surrounding the table. It did not take very long until I started crying and he was blaming the broken table on me. I am not sure what I did to take all the blame, but I guess my mere presence was enough.

Similarly, in Kitty Calavita‘s “The New Politics of Immigration: ‘Balanced-Budget Conservatism’ and the Symbolism of Proposition 187*” it was the immigrants mere presence at the right time that made them the scapegoat for the fiscal problems of America, which in return created a new nativism in governmental policies and society. In the late 1900’s, the American economy experienced a decrease in job security, decline of welfare programs and a decrease in workers’ standard of living, which in turn, strengthened the way Americans viewed the fiscal impacts from immigrants. Previous to the economic decline, America experienced a “Crisis of Fordism” which “jeopardized profitability and the system began to unravel”, causing corporations to create different strategies, such as offshoring, “financialization”, or contingent workers to still bring in profit (292-293). Here is when “balanced-budget conservatism” became influential because it “[served] as a target for the frustration and anger of those facing economic uncertainty, deflects responsibility from the private sectors cost-cutting, and facilitates the austerity measures of the government as it dismantles the safety net” (295). Naturally, citizens will, then, blame the large amounts of spending that go towards social welfare programs on the poor, specifically, the undeserving poor, who are also known as illegal immigrants. Due to balanced-budget conservatism, we connect nativism to the idea of immigrants as tax burdens because the belief that “undeserving poor” receives money they should not because it is a symptom of balanced-budget conservatism. The proposition also serves as a symbolic policy which supports and creates new political beliefs and can even serve as a way for voters to express their discontent with the current situation.

In the same way immigrants are blamed for the fiscal problems, I was blamed for the broken table. But the table isn’t the only thing that broke. On the table’s way down, it broke my leg, and in fear of getting in trouble, my brother blamed it on me to protect himself from my parents wrath. I wonder if citizens blame the scapegoat in fear of realizing that they too played a part in creating this fiscal mess.