Half of border agents are Latino, and they are part of a long history of Hispanic support for – and enforcement of – harsh immigration policies
Why? Latinos have often occupied an uneasy middle ground in American society – subject to discrimination and exclusion, yet also susceptible to appeals that promise belonging, security and status. Like every other group, they can embrace political movements that harm others and sometimes even themselves.
This precarity is why Latinos join immigration enforcement agencies in such large numbers. For years, scholars and historians have tried to find other explanations, including economics and stable employment, a desire to serve their communities and seeking proximity to whiteness. But these capture only part of the story.
The phenomenon began as early as the 1950s, when prominent Latino leaders and organizations supported deportation campaigns such as Operation Wetback, which sought to remove hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants (and their citizen family members) from the country. Their support was often rooted in not entirely unfounded fears of labor competition; US employers routinely used migrant labor to undermine unions, suppress wages and break strikes.
Downloaded Reddit after 2 years without it. The default homepage, after it reads your geolocation, is filled with pro-MAGA posts, or posts that encourage MAGA behavior in Spanish-speaking communities. It literally feels like exploring Elon Musk’s X/Twitter.
It’s so disgusting. I am Mexican, and a lot of the young men I see there (and TikTok, Instagram and X) literally say the most misogynistic shit ever, especially toward our president, Claudia, without really arguing or sharing a reasonable or convincing reason as to why. Also a lot of xenophobia, discrimination, just absolute childish madness. It’s super reactionary and immature. A lot of them are very pro-USA, they love the USA more than themselves. One of them threatened me with violence today because I told him that the Mexican cartels get most of their guns from the Iron River. He’d respond with shit like “Fucking chairo, kill yourself, you are always blaming others for your problems, you leftie commie.”
“How do you want Mexicans to defend themselves from narcos that have advanced warfare technology? How exactly is that their fault?” “Shut the fuck up and die. Where do you live? I want to kill you with my own hands.” All because I told him he never had a real democracy in the first place, that he isn’t a Mega Donor who ever paid for a single ad or campaign of the politician THEY wanted. Also told him that he doesn’t have even a quarter of what the average baby boomer had at their age, and asked him why, because he was very pro-capitalist and considered himself a genius, referencing a niche political book about democracy dying or whatever. He got so, so mad.
All this literally started because he was saying Mexico is becoming Nazi Germany, literally. He was arguing with another user that everything Morena is doing right now is fascist, and I debunked his claims, and then he insulted that and said shit about democracy dying or whatever, and I told him he never had it in the first place, then he got increasingly violent, absolute irrational, an animal. A literal wall. And it was so damn ironic because his profile photo had Batman in it.
I seriously think more than half of my country, Mexico, is absolutely lost. Irredeemably ignorant. I hate to see it. They are young and being filled with bullshit in their feeds. It feels very deliberate, very on purpose.
Sometimes I wish I was born as a Bonobo monkey instead.
It’s very interesting to hear your perspective. They’re getting hit by propaganda, that’s for sure, and I see a lot of Mexican-American men in Los Angeles acting the same way. There is definitely a toxic masculinity problem for young Latino men, as bad or worse than White men.
I’m not sure if half your county is lost, but without proper education and upward social mobility they may remain ignorant. Poverty and religion tends to promote ignorance, and Mexico has a lot of that. At least your president and government seems to be doing a fantastic job from what I can tell (although the bar is pretty low). Universal healthcare, public support for affordable EVs… uh, their own national chocolate production(?), I hear a lot of things almost every week. It might not change overnight but that’s how you push for better future generations.
The right wing elites and their billionaire donors captured social media for propaganda.
What a fucking lunatic. Funny how he’s so worried about the cartel while repeatedly threatening violence against a complete stranger. Dude is a legitimate threat to everyone around him.
And you’re right that it’s deliberate. These social media companies need to be treated like terrorist organizations. They’re intentionally fanning the flames of violence and aggression because that’s what makes them money.
100%. I really wish TikTok, X, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit got banned. But you can imagine the revolt and anger that’d cause. They’d call us fascists and authoritarians.
We are incredibly cornered, I really don’t know what I can do. It’s easier when it’s a foreigner, but when it’s someone from your country, it hurts differently, I feel a lot less compelled to even try, because well, you saw what happened, and there’s also the risk of actually interacting with a narco who can use Pegasus to locate my phone’s coordinates.
Every year is a new generation of thousands of brand new children receiving access to the Internet and being exposed to these things. With parents who are increasingly more economically depressed and neglectful; just give them an iPad and move on type of parenting.
It’s really scary. I am so angry at the top 1%, you have no idea. It’s crazy how people get censored the most when they express violence toward the top 1%, like the whole Luigi Mangione and Elon Musk censorship in Reddit and Insta. Also the word “Jeffrey Epstein” getting banned in X I think, for a while, to stop people from talking about it.
But people saying heinous shit get a pass, like say, Asmongold, who thankfully got banned today, but still, it took so long, and it should’ve been a permanent ban, because he literally said, out loud to his audience of millions of people in Twitch and YouTube, that he would “shoot and kill Mexican women, men and their children for crossing the border.” He does dog whistles like that everyday, but just because he did it so blatantly this time, he got the ban. Shit like that is what I mean. It’s so transparently clear.
Sometimes I wonder if they are trying to boil the pot until it explodes, which makes no sense, because I am very sure they would likely be the ones getting burnt the most. I don’t think they are that smart, even if they hire dozens of psychologists and economists to tell them their best plan to keep squeezing people for profit. They are just killers to me, not different from the narco at all. They behave exactly like a Mafia. Just imagine being Trump, going to sleep knowing you gave an order that killed a bunch of little girls in the Middle East just to distract people from some files that prove you’re a pedophile who raped children and even killed them ala House of Cards to silence them? Like what the fuck? Why is this reality? What kind of job is that? What kind of world is this? How are we still supposed to praise and love God if this is their world? If God exists and cares, why are they not doing jackshit about all this pain their children are going through? Everything is incredibly cynical. It seems like only the most sick, blind and delusional people can thrive. Those are the most loyal, therefor the most rewarded by these monsters. I hope Historians manage to record all of this in a way it can never be forgotten or ignored by future generations. As a warning we should never forget.
Oh I know, people would revolt if we took their precious dopamine fix away. Some regulation might help but it’s a very difficult problem to solve.
At this point I feel like only some kind of cosmic event can save us from social media, but that wouldn’t be so great either.
The rampant cynicism is everywhere and it’s making even small societal problems difficult to solve.
Remember: Elon and his stupid fanboiz are “free speech absolutists”, though. I mean, he had to buy Xitter, because, otherwise, conservatives had zero free speech, LOL. Because something something shadowbanned, etc.