so to make sense of the op i had to do a bit of research into the bizarre-o political world that appears to have taken shape on the arizona/mexico border, which seems to have benefited very few people outside some militia groups and the straighter politicos who attempt to benefit from their support and the hysteria machine that both rely on to keep the whole nativist/fascist thing from getting too far forward. in that peculiar world, the words "mexican" "illegal immigrant" and "drug smuggler" appear to be interchangeable, and this despite certain problems like...o i dunno....take for example the footprints that were tracked going away from the murder scene outlined in the first article toward mexico. like leaving. like...
well, this is the least of it, really. in the paranoid militia-space occupied by bloggers like those who write from the arizona sentinel
The Arizona Sentinel
there's some kind of invasion going on and it is only the heroic action of gun-toting army-playing militia vigilantes that gives nativist folk a fighting chance well hell the governments done let them down by not turning the border into a fortress and not mowing down these people who come streaming across looking for work (THE HORROR) or who move back and forth running contraband commodities (perhaps us drug laws are a Problem? )
and there have been certain...um...excesses as well carried out by these vigilantes, which explains why the minutemen dissolved themselves over the past days following on an ugly little dust-up involving the group's leaders and killing a 9 year old latina girl. but hey, as long as the ultra-right feel "safer.."
of course there's an ugly "legitimate" politics side to all this, the nativist-to-merely reactionary political and law enforcement types that you can read about here:
Phoenix News - Feathered Bastard - Phoenix New Times
now i do all this knowing that as a "pub discussion" there should be no real information. but the op is set up in a fundamentally misleading way, acting as though the information it uses is not problematic, as if the issues that information frames are not **really** particular, only resolvable as the op makes them out to be from a **Very** particular and ultra-rightwing viewpoint, as if the conclusions drawn make sense outside that context. because they don't. not really.
context matters.
it is not at all obvious that there is an "invasion" of the us of a by "illegals"----but it is politically expedient for alot of ultra-rightwing groups and politicos to act as though this is the case.
it is not at all obvious that the category of "immigrant" really makes sense when characterizing these informal transnational labor flows. in more documented flows, the outflow can be as high as 80%...so for every 100 people who enter, 80 leave. are they the same people? impossible to say. but there's very considerable fluidity---it's not a flow of people who are coming into the united states to stay in the main.
it is not obvious that drug trafficking and these labor flows have much to do with each other--but it sure makes for inflammatory copy and that helps ultra-rightwing politicians sell surreal pieces of legislation like you can read about in the weekly blog linked above.
it is not obvious that there's any rational link between individuals having and using guns and this ultra-rightwing non-issue. the details of the murder are not obvious at all. nothing about that case is obvious except that someone ended up killed. whether that death can be exploited to make some larger case of petit-bourgeois conservative victimization is not obvious.
what **is** obvious is that there are conservatives out there for whom the story of their own victimization never, ever gets tired. and that is amazing to me.
there's more that could be said about this.
and i don't live in arizona.
it'd be nice to have folk closer to that space speak to it/about it.