Under the cover of the presidency of Donald Trump, more and more Republicans seemingly feel as free as ever to openly flaunt their racism. Audio has now surfaced of Republican Arizona state Sen. Sylvia Allen going on a wild racist tirade at a recent private event that wildly enough, wasn’t held at some secret off the grid location. Rather, it was at the state headquarters of the Republican Party of Arizona, suggesting at least tacit institutional acceptance of her behavior. While there, she railed against immigrant birth rates and complained about immigration “flooding” the United States, a term she repeated over and over — although she doesn’t seem to have ever mentioned how she thinks her white ancestors got to the United States in the first place.
No matter the truth of the issue, she went on a bender, insisting that the United States would “look like South American countries very quickly,” adding:
‘We have a right in our country to have people come in an organized manner so we know who’s coming, so we can provide jobs for them, so we can provide education for them and health care and all these things people need. We can’t provide that if people are just flooding us and flooding us and flooding us and overwhelming us.’
Her implication that immigrants and their advocates don’t care about “order” is blatantly false. No one in power is suggesting that the United States should simply tear down all the fences at the southern border and let whoever wants to come across make a home in the U.S. The truth is that Allen is turning her own suspicion of immigrant communities into claims of some kind of existential threat. It’s not. Is she really that afraid of people who don’t look the same, speak the same language, or eat the same food?
Wildly, Allen tried to insist that her commentary about the U.S. set to soon “look like South America” as a fearsome prospect wasn’t racist. Instead, she claimed, she was really just expressing concern about the spread of “socialism” from South American countries into the United States — which still doesn’t make any sense. Does she think that “socialists” all look a certain way? Does she think that South Americans fleeing violence and seeking asylum in the United States are secret agents of a planned global socialist expansion? Did she even think that far? There is one notable takeaway here — tirades from Trump and other Republicans against “socialism” could be seen as having a possibly underexplored racism component.
Unsurprisingly, local media report that Arizona state Senate President Karen Fann, who is a fellow Republican, “could not immediately be reached for comment” following Allen’s remarks surfacing and making the rounds.
Trump has made racism the main agenda of the Republican Party. Perhaps most infamously recently, he singled out progressive women of color in Congress with a demand that they “go back” where they came from. The examples go well on from there, though — the Trump administration continues to target immigrants from South America despite the complete lack of evidence supporting the White House assertion that they’re a security and safety threat.
Featured Image via screenshot
