PRRI’s 2024 Post-Election Survey asked to what extent Americans agree with the following statement “The immigrants entering the country illegally today are poisoning the blood of our country.” Nearly four in ten Americans say they either completely agree (15%) or mostly agree (23%) with the statement, compared with the majority who completely disagree (35%) or mostly disagree (25%).

There are substantial differences by party and religious affiliation. Two-thirds of Republicans (67%) agree with this statement, compared with one-third of independents (33%), and just over one in ten Democrats (13%).

Especially troubling: White evangelicals were the only faith group in which a majority — 62 percent — of members agreed that immigrants who enter the country illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

https://www.prri.org/

I know this post may be political, but how can folks think that illegals are poisoning the blood of the country? How can we reason with such individuals?

It appears we are returning to the time period where the Book of Mormon (before recent editing) contained the following:

And in 2 Nephi chapter 5, verse 21 it says:

And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.

From the Book of Moses:

And Enoch also beheld the residue of the people which were the sons of Adam; and they were a mixture of all the seed of Adam save it was the seed of Cain, for the seed of Cain were black, and had not place among them.

Perhaps the Book of Mormon (and the Pearl of Great Price - Book of Moses) were prescient in the 1830s to attract the racists among us in our time. Sigh

This made me think the LDS church should put all the racist stuff back in the BoM and emphasize it loudly. Instead of playing it down and pretending it doesn't mean what it said, they should flaunt it now in this environment. It would probably attract more of that 62% they want to join!

OK, I'm sort of kidding.

There are several factors I see for the stats you discuss.

Straight up propaganda
Humans tend to be tribal animals fighting for resources. They want someone to fight. They want Barbarians at the gate to fear and hate. The propaganda delivered that in spades.

Racism
A lot of people are flat out racist and always have been. The difference is that now they are emboldened to be openly racist.
I think these people have always been with us. I don't think there is any chance they will change. Certain people need to feel superior and resent having to compete.

Lack of Empathy
Most of us are immigrants, a generation or two removed. Why can't people see the plight of today's immigrant with empathy as if it were their own family? I think it has to do with not relating to the suffering of others. A lot of people simply don't care about pain or suffering unless it actually happens to them. They don't care about things like cancer or starvation until they experience it themselves for example. I think this issue is partially hard wired in people. They don't have empathy for how calling someone poison feels.

How can we reach them? Be vocal about how propaganda is making people unfair targets. Watch for people who are being targeted and support them any way you can.

I hate to be Debbie Downer, but I don't see that humans are ever going to overcome this issue. We can push it back for periods of time, but hateful warring little humans are always going to crawl out from under the rocks.

The idea of "immigrants poisoning our blood" can be traced directly back to Adolf Hitler. Besides the current U.S. President and some of his staff, Tucker Carlson has been poisoning the media with this idea since the first Trump administration.

One more point regarding polling data. I believe I heard this on an NPR program recently: a majority of male Gen Zers (I believe that's 20 and under) do not believe in the equal rights of women. This is a complete reversal of views held by the two previous generations and forebodes of more problems to come.

Finally, while I very much agree with Dagny's assessment of the situation, I would also add that the Internet, while assisting many trying to free themselves from Mormonism, is full of racist tropes that many people, especially young people, don't have the ability to counter--they haven't been trained in how to parse out information. This problem is especially true on social media sites and is expected to grow now that efforts to fact-check posts have been cut back or eliminated entirely.

Yes, the internet and social media are a big part of the problem. I wish I had included that in my comments.

The internet is where opinions of idiots seem equal to the voices of experts by the uninformed public. The loudest of idiots gets amplified with little accountability or fact checking. Racism and cranks can spread faster than ever before.

Are other places seeing more large, outdoor lighted crosses being built? Some here in Washington state, check the Seattle Times story 2/9/2025 about a cross under construction in Chelan county, near touristy Leavenworth, WA.

I work with migrant and immigrant families every working day. Most of the families that I work with are coming in from Central America via the southern border. A few are from South America. Almost none are coming from Mexico, and I'm not sure why that's the case. Perhaps the economy has improved there?

About half have arrived at my school legally, with refugee status.

And my experience with these children and families has been overwhelmingly positive. Most families have a mother and a father, and they both work. They are very industrious. They raise their children to be loving, respectful, and hard working. I could not ask for better students.

But when I tell this to the anti-immigrant folks, they don't want to hear it. They are focused on the few who are gang members, criminals, etc. They don't want to hear that most migrant and immigrant families are responsible, hard-working people who are not looking for a handout.

I do support legal immigration, and I tell that to those people. I just don't want to see the migrants and immigrants demonized. Honestly, these are the kinds of immigrants that we want. But yet they continue to be demonized.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/2025 04:13PM by summer.

Part of the reason there are so few Mexican immigrants is that they are not eligible for refugee status. A person can’t apply for refugee status from within their native country. They have to be somewhere other than their country of citizenship. Kind of weird, but there it is.

It is sort of like the rule that you can’t apply for a visa while you are in the country you are asking to grant the visa. I once tried to renew my Canadian student visa when I was driving back to the US. When I went to the immigration desk, the agent chuckled and told me I had entered the building through the wrong door (the door by the road of vehicles leaving Canada headed into the US). If I had come in the other door (US headed to Canada) I could renew, so stop by on my way back to Canada - which I did.

My friend's church has several families from Mexico who attend. The fathers all work. The mothers are happy and friendly. The children are completely adorable. They bring me joy.

I'm grateful that Canada embraces multicultural ideals as a longstanding national value.

I myself am an immigrant, from England, along with my parents and older sister. We arrived in Canada when I was 3 years old so this has always been my home as far back as I can remember.

I never lose sight of the fact that we are so very, very fortunate merely by virtue of place of birth and I feel grateful, and proud, that my adopted country has a heart for the less fortunate folks in this world.

Many/most of us are not prospering due solely to our own innate worth or talent but merely because of our place of origin, our first language and, sad to say, the colour of our skin, all of which give us better options than all too many of our fellow humans enjoy.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/2025 04:35PM by Nightingale.

+1

Ah the silliness. When I came to the US, entering through Detroit, I with my family were on a temporary work visa until the permanent resident visa came through. We were settled in SLC for a few months when the permanent visa came through, but to activate it we all had to return to Canada and reenter through Detroit.

"For every Christian who says they're a Christian, I'll show you a Christian who's not a Christian."

Wamba The Fool, "Ivanhoe" (1952)


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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-secular-life/201807/religion-secularism-and-xenophobia

Why is religiosity so consistently correlated with ethnocentrism, nationalism, and xenophobia? And why are secular people less prone to such prejudicial orientations?

Two new surveys were recently published, both showing the same thing: Religious people were more likely to be suspicious and unwelcoming of people who are different, while secular people were more likely to be open and accepting of those who are of a different race, ethnicity, religion, or country.

Put another way: In the surveys, tribalism and ethnocentrism were strongly correlated with being religious, while exhibiting a more universalistic, cosmopolitan embracing of all of humanity was strongly correlated with being secular.

Let’s start with the first survey, a 2018 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) study looking at how Americans feel about the significant demographic changes that are taking place in the United States. In this study, Americans were asked how they feel about census predictions indicating that by the year 2043, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and other peoples of color will constitute a combined majority of the population, with whites being in the minority. More than half of white Evangelicals (52%) said that this demographic shift would be a negative development, 39% of mainline Protestants similarly see it in a negative light, along with 32% of Catholics. But the “religious group” least likely to see such a change negatively were actually those without any religion at all; only 23% of non-religious/secular Americans said that they viewed the predicated changing racial and ethnic demographics as a bad thing.

It's unclear, but it could be that religion taps in to our naturally evolved predisposition for in-group favoritism and out-group antipathy. The religious symbols and rituals that bind believers to one another, the cosmologies that construct “saved” vs. “damned” dichotomies, the rigorous patrolling of who a person can or can’t marry, and the obedience to authority that is so endemic of most religious traditions—all of these tend to make people more tribal, which results in viewing outsiders with suspicion, if not contempt.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/2025 04:38PM by anybody.

It’s not a coincidence that the BiBle Belt and the Confederacy are a near complete overlap.

There is considerable evidence for that--or at least for the continuity of regional values.

Anthropologists, historians, and political scientists have found that the four waves of immigration from different parts of Great Britain between 1620 and 1750, each with its own dominant religion, left a deep imprint on the four parts of early American colonies in which they settled and in the regions into which they spread. Their folk tales, religious tendencies, and politics were distinct and remain so in subtle ways.

Two of those regions--Tidewater Virginia-Carolina and Southern Appalachia--and the areas into which those cultures expanded as the country grew larger were the core of the Confederacy, and are very similar to most definitions of the Bible Belt today.

This can also be seen in France where, certainly until the end of the 20th century and probably even now, the side supported by a region during the French Revolution was a good predictor for the side of the political spectrum (left/right) for which it voted.

I was surprised when I first encountered the thesis about the United States, but the underlying evidence is compelling.

Your saying the same is true of France seems a bit more obvious insofar as we know various regions have been relatively stable culturally and in terms of food, accents, etc., for centuries whereas Americans have been far more mobile. But the patterns of migration in the US are so consistent--people from the South migrating west and congregating in the same states rather than moving north, for instance--that we end up with the mobile version of cultural stasis.

On further reflection, I remember decades ago wandering around Europe and eating a particular form of non-Western comfort food in many different cities. In the interests of anonymity, let's call it Arab cuisine. What was interesting is that the immigrants all migrated in groups: Algerians tended to move to the same parts of Europe, where they spoke the same dialect and sometimes shared families and acquaintances from their homeland whereas Syrians tended to cluster in different European cities and Egyptians in still others. The result was that the famished tourist would encounter one subset of Arab food, dialect, and culture in Marseilles, another in Amsterdam, another in Berlin, still another in London. The same is true of Arab food in the United States: you get something very different in Dearborn, Michigan than in greater Washington, DC.

That clearly happened in the early US, too, as peoples from the colonial regions moved to the same newer regions--where they felt comfortable with settlers who spoke the same dialects, ate the same food, and worshiped the same God--and thereby spread their original political and religious cultures into specific new geographies.

The instinct makes perfect sense: people want to live where they feel culturally and politically comfortable regardless of whether they are staying put or moving to distant lands. William Faulkner, the chronicler of that most enduring of American cultures--the white South--captured this truth when in Requiem for Nun he observed:

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Intriguing thought to munch on.

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It’s not a coincidence that the BiBle Belt and
> the Confederacy are a near complete overlap.

That's interesting.

Sadly the current POTUS is furthering this racism by inviting white South Africans to immigrate to the USA. Cuz, you know, they’re so persecuted. No such invitation to native (black) South Africans, who have been the true victims of racism.

TG

It is a pity that tribalism will never go away. I was always of the opinion in my younger years that human kind would evolve. But current events have proven otherwise as we start another cycle IMO.

A utopian existence will only be found in a science fiction novel.

Even if human kind was down to two last individuals, I am sure that tribalism would rear its ugly head.

"Why don't we just wait here for a little while...see what happens?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzbIA8xZU-0



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/10/2025 02:00PM by anybody.

Silence is Golden Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> A utopian existence will only be found in a
> science fiction novel.

Seems like a sound conclusion.

Too bad though. I've always been waiting for us to "evolve" towards brother/sister-hood. Only because that seems like the best outcome to me and I thought everybody would be on board with that.

Apparently not.

Evolution only happens over very long time horizons and where natural selection occurs, meaning that people who behave badly suffer a disadvantage in reproductive terms. Yet as we daily see, the "immoral" as a group seem to do just fine.

That technological progress occurs at light speed relative to "moral" improvement (if any) means that modern humans are just archaic humans with much bigger clubs. Which, in turn, leads to my proposed solution to Fermi's Paradox: intelligent life is self-limiting.

Example: The Pledge Of Allegiance

The Pledge was originally conceived of way to unite a nation of immigrants. And it didn't mention "god."

##########

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance

This is from the Salon article I mentioned.

We're facing not just white "christian" nationalism but authoritarian fascism -- the same evil our grandparents fought against four generations ago in WW2.

Very, very, dark days ahead.

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https://www.salon.com/2025/02/18/his-mission-is-to-eradicate-woke-jesus-how-money-lies-and-religion-are-abused-to-gut-democracy/

"The Reawaken America tour is a traveling, pro-Trump conspiracy-fest. They set up in mega-churches around the country. Each one draws thousands of participants. It's organized by Mike Flynn, who's a close ally of Trump, and Clay Clark. Usually one of the Trump kids shows up to speak. And that they always have these very political preachers. It's rooted in the independent charismatic movement. They're hawking all these goods and telling people to buy precious metals. The attendees aren't poor, but they're certainly not wealthy. They're working or middle class, but the kind of people the information economy left behind.

But it's not just about fleecing them, but exploiting them for political gain. They do that by promoting fear. They tell them evil woke demons are going to come after you in your house. They're going to change your kids' gender against their will in their public schools. They're gonna control every cent you own. The fear makes people susceptible to manipulation. How do you get half of American voters to support a guy who is a convicted criminal, who exploited all of these people that he's gone into business with? Well, you do it by convincing them that he is being persecuted, that the election of 2020 was stolen, that God's hand is on his shoulder, and if anyone else is elected, then that goes against God's will."

Someone needs to tell this @&(@*)#($%* that it's the 21st Century, not the the 19th Century...


############


https://www.salon.com/2025/02/25/slavery-produced-a-genuine-affection-between-the-races-hegseths-church-foretold-dei-firings/


The levels of gaslighting and hand-waving on the right are getting to ridiculous levels, in their unconvincing efforts to deny that the firing of Brown was discrimination. So to offer more context for Hegseth's resentments of Brown, it's helpful to look at the church Hegseth joined a few years ago, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). The denomination is led by a pastor named Doug Wilson, whose work Hegseth has promoted in podcast appearances and his writings. In December, I wrote about how Wilson's teachings about women's inferiority appear to inform Hegseth's hostility to women in the military. Wilson's views on race are just as grotesque, unscientific, and ahistorical.

"Slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since," Wilson wrote in his 1996 defense of Confederate slave owners, "Southern Slavery As It Was." "There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world," he continued, painting slavery as an Edenic paradise for those captured in it. "Slave life was to [the slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes and good medical care."

In 2020, Wilson tried to defend these repulsive quotes with a blog post insisting they're taken out of context. But reading further, it's clear he hasn't changed his views. He admitted that there were "abuses" under slavery, but insisted "the benevolent master is not a myth." He quoted formerly enslaved people saying stuff like "Whippings was few," they were allowed "preachings and prayers" and the enslavers would sometimes "teach the young ones how to read and write" to defend his minimizations. Wilson also insists that his 2005 book "Black and Tan" is a better example of his views, but in it, he writes, "the South was right on all the essential constitutional and cultural issues surrounding the war" and "it was possible for a godly man to own slaves," so that's not quite the defense he thinks it is.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/25/2025 09:41PM by anybody.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay!

Lol, slavery produced genuine affection between the races.
Which is why Sally Hemmings, one of Jefferson’s 600 slaves, had 6 of his children.

Racism has deep roots in America and it’s not going anywhere.
It’s like rape and murder, you can punish people all the law will allow but it’s never going to be enough to make it stop.

We need to move beyond race and division, by finding common ground of prosperity and peace and building useful pragmatic structures that can withstand extremism, on either pole of the political aisle.

What about the children and descendants of these illegal immigrants?

How long do they have to be here before the stain goes away, if ever?