As many people have written, one way powerful people and institutions stay in power is by scapegoating immigrants. Dick Dowdell sums it up well:
When wages stagnate, when health premiums rise faster than paychecks, when rent eats a third of take‑home income, people look for a reason. The top 0.01% — and the political entrepreneurs who orbit them — are more than happy to supply one.
Immigrants become the universal scapegoat: they are easy to see, easy to caricature, and, critically, politically voiceless. If you can convince the public that migrants, not monopolies; refugees, not stock buybacks; asylum seekers, not tax arbitrage, are the cause of their shrinking slice, you can keep the real machinery running without interruption.
This general strategy is nothing new – in the U.S., it’s at least as old as slavery. Cristina Jiménez, herself an immigrant, writes:
This is exactly what the president and his administration are doing. They are blaming immigrants for the costs of eggs, housing, a failing healthcare system and an economy that benefits only the rich. They are scapegoating immigrants to distract us from this administration’s cruelty and fealty to rich men like Elon Musk, who are stealing our resources, our data and our money while the majority of Americans are struggling to make ends meet.
“Bad” immigrants being the nation’s scapegoat is not new, but the faces and cultures of who we define as such have. In the 1920s, during the Prohibition Era, German, Italian and Irish immigrants were also labeled as immoral, un-American drunks and blamed for threatening public welfare and deteriorating American values. Ironically, many of those same immigrants have now become “white” in America’s story, and some of their descendants are now saying the same things about people like me, and calling for the mass deportation of immigrants.
The only thing startling about the current round of scapegoating is how overt and gross it is. Alarming and obviously ridiculous stories about immigrants – like the claim that they are stealing and eating our housepets – are made, not by anonymous nobodies on the internet, but by the leeches bleeding the country from the White House.
It’s infuriating. And it harms America – bad morally, bad culturally, and bad economically. We will all be worse off for it. I’m just hoping that eventually the damage Republicans are doing can be undone or at least mitigated.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels, all set in an industrial-looking urban area.
PANEL 1
Two characters – a wealthy businessman, and a worker – are speaking. The businessman is dropping a couple of coins into the worker’s palm, and the worker is angry.
BOSS: Here’s this week’s pay.
WORKER: I can’t live on this, you greedy-
PANEL 2
The Bossman puts his arm around the worker’s shoulders and points to another man standing a little distance off. That man, who has brown skin, is facing another way and reading his phone.
BOSS: Whoa! Listen, friend, I’m on your side! It’s not me keeping your pay low! It’s immigrants like that guy!
PANEL 3
The Bossman gets right in the worker’s face as he rattles off things he’s blaming the immigrant for. The Worker looks panicked.
BOSS: He’s stealing the good jobs! Taking all the housing! He’s lazy! Doesn’t even work! Living off welfare! Eating your pets! Doing all the crime!
PANEL 4
The worker is now lying prone on the pavement, with the Bossman’s foot on his back. The worker angrily shakes his fist at the immigrant, and yells.
WORKER: HEY YOU! YEAH, YOU! GET OUT!
BOSS: Good boy.
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is an archaic cartoonists’ term for unimportant and often silly things drawn into comics.
The signs in the background are filled with references to the classic children’s novel Charlotte’s Web: “Some Pig,” “Terrific,” “Radiant,” and “Humble” are things Charlotte writes about Wilber the pig with her webbing. The names of three characters from Charlotte’s Web – Wilbur, Templeton Rat, and Fern – are also on signage.
In panel one, a rat examines a beer bottle on the sidewalk. In panel two, the rat guzzles from the bottle. In panel four, the rat has passed out with a big stupid grin.
In panel one, a scrap of paper on the sidewalk has a picture of Matt Feazell’s character Cynicalman. A newspaper lying on the sidewalk, entitled “The Daily Weekly,” has a headline that says “Study: 91% of Headlines on Litter Not Germane.” A subheadline says “Subheadlines also found meaningless.”
Blame The Immigrants! | Patreon
I giggled at the Charlotte’s Web references. It just seems like such a weird thing to pair with the main subject of the comic.
The chicken fat is usually pretty random and not particularly connected to the main subjects. :-)
“And it harms America”
It’s the same in the UK.
My situation is a little different. I am a network engineer. My company is a IT service provider; we will run your mainframes in your data center remotely, or migrate your mainframe applications and data to mainframes in our data centers. We also will help you migrate to cloud (a public one or our private one), run hybrid infrastructures (MF + cloud + open systems), etc. We have about 200 clients.
We have about 30 network engineers, working around the clock. About 3/4 of them are Indians. A couple are here in the U.S., but most are in India. We have about 6 American engineers here in the U.S. – and if it were not for the fact that some of our clients are municipal, State, and Federal government entities that insist that only American citizens can work on their systems, we’d all be replaced by Indians in a second, because my company can hire 3 of them for what they pay one of us.
Thanks for enlightening us about your situation, Ron.
@Daran: It’s the same in France, South Africa, Sweden, Australia… and so on and so on.
I don’t doubt it, @Watcher, but I limit myself to talking about what I know, which, as a Brit, is Britain,
It’s good to see the British Government coordinating their policy announcements with this discussion on Alas a Blog. Say what you like about Labour, they’ve got their finger on the pulse.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/asylum-and-returns-policy-statement/restoring-order-and-control-a-statement-on-the-governments-asylum-and-returns-policy
The allusion to Charlotte’s Web would have seemed completely random last week. Or maybe not completely random, but maybe just hinting about a police state with pigs in the background. (I don’t know when Barry started drafting this.)
But now ICE pulled a lot of agents out of Chicago after losing a lot of lawsuits. They aren’t saying the end of “Operation Midway Blitz” has anything to do with the court orders, but they are sending many of those agents to Charlotte, NC to begin what some pig named “Operation Charlotte’s Web.” White’s grandchildren are furious, but that’s the official ICE name.
I don’t blame them for being furious. But that it came up in my cartoon is just a coincidence. :-)
The official DHS Twitter account basically did this comic in so many words but genuinely:
https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1991532782003044710?s=20
I’m not sure what’s more cartoonishly evil: The cartoon character in your cartoon or this official government missal.
Here’s a perspective of the impact of illegal immigration you might be interested in:
https://pjmedia.com/jamie-wilson/2025/11/20/the-lie-that-broke-a-nation-jobs-americans-wont-do-and-the-economic-and-social-devastation-it-hid-n4946215
So what does that have to do with immigration, then?
@Elusis: Beyond any political convictions, Ron just feels his personal life and experien es are very interesting and informative and we all need to hear about it.
@RonF I am going to go out on a limb and say that many (most?) of this site’s audience are well aware that “jobs Americans won’t do” means “jobs Americans won’t do under the currently offered wage and working conditions” and has meant that for a long time. This is not the fault of immigrants. They are not the ones squeezing workers for more profit. The ratio of CEO pay to worker pay has exploded since I was a child. It is hard to imagine that the average CEO of a company is really worth 400 times more than the people doing the work, but this is where we are.
So, are you interested in raising the minimum wage and extending it to protect all workers, Ron? How about requiring basic dignity at work, like regular water breaks, and access to toilets on all job sites? Do you imagine that things like that will just happen organically, without government intervention, if we just get rid of the immigrants? Unfortunately, it looks like we’re going to find out, because the volume and cruelty of current deportations is tearing and scaring immigrants away from their jobs. But, don’t count on those jobs naturally improving as a result. Farmers and small businesses don’t have the margins to pay more, because commodity prices have been flat for decades. The 1% and big corporations will not voluntarily loosen their grasp and take slightly smaller profits. They’ll just push the government to start offering the use of prison labor – maybe many of the very same people who were in those jobs before.
We can’t keep sending an ever-growing percentage of the wealth workers produce to the top 1% without the rest of us becoming increasingly impoverished. The immigrants aren’t the problem. Insatiable greed at the top is the problem. But, by making immigrants the scapegoats, the wealthy can divine an conquer.
@Kate
We already know what will happen. Alabama passed a vicious anti-immigrant law in the 2010s. Crops rotted in the fields and unemployment (and wages) didn’t change much at all.
Sources:
https://asanonline.org/how-alabamas-immigration-law-is-crippling-its-farms/
https://www.mic.com/articles/8272/alabama-illegal-immigrant-crackdown-destroys-farm-business
Raising the minimum wage will increase prices to a certain extent (competition will keep them from going completely out of sight) unless CEOs and capital partners decide they don’t need to make $100’s of millions. And also accelerate automation. I’m already tired of having to be my own grocery cashier. Part of the problem, though, is that minimum wage jobs were meant to be done by high school kids or people just starting out in the job market. [Boomer Warning]When I was a kid [/Boomer Warning] minimum wage jobs were never intended to be careers.
Seems to me that we have laws already on the books to require those. I’m all in favor of the Dept’s of Justice and/or Labor to put a priority on them.
No. Although people who are here legally have more leverage to get them enforced because they don’t have to worry about being thrown out of the country.
It’s certainly a problem. And people often make the mistake that those people want all that money so they can buy $500,000,000 yachts and the like. To a certain extent that’s true, but what they really want is to access and exercise political, social, and cultural power. But just taxing them doesn’t seem to be a good solution to me. As the late noted philosopher P. J. O’Rourke once said, “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”
Referring to “immigrants” as if all non-citizens in the U.S. are regarded equally by either the law, the current administration, or the general public paints far too broad a brush. Deporting people who are here illegally and favoring permitting people who can support themselves and will broadly assimilate into American culture are not mutually exclusive concepts. People who have a problem with the case of an Afghani immigrant who was allowed to come to the U.S. because he hated the Taliban more than he hated the U.S. drive across the country to shoot a couple of National Guard troops while reportedly yelling “Allahu akbar” generally make that distinction. I think immigration is a fine thing, but we need to enforce our laws (doing otherwise is anti-democratic) and be more selective about who we do allow in.
Actually, we don’t.
https://stateline.org/2023/06/20/many-states-decline-to-require-water-breaks-for-outdoor-workers-in-extreme-heat/
And in some states, we actually have laws forbidding such rules being imposed on employers, so that companies have the freedom to make their employees work backbreaking manual labor in lethal heat without water breaks.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/23/greg-abbott-texas-governor-bill-water-breaks-heatwave
https://www.citizen.org/news/desantis-signs-law-banning-water-breaks-and-cooling-measures-from-florida-workers/
That’s just nostalga, Ron. All the crops were not being picked by high school and college students. The slaughterhouses and food processing plants were staffed by full-grown adults. By the end of the 1980’s we already had an amnesty because so many people were in the country illegally pursuing such jobs. If there was a time before that when illegal workers were not flowing in, black people denied access to other job oppotunties were forced into those roles.
If you’re thinking about fast food. That seemed to be true from, my perspective (gen X from a moderately affluent suburb) as well. But, even there the women working “mother’s hours” before we showed up after school legit needed those jobs. They were not just earning pin money. Many were working second jobs after they put the kids to bed. And, when I went into the city, one thing I found surprising was that all the fast food restraunts were staffed by adults as well, mostly people of color.
The “current administration” is randomly rounding up brown people working at low wage jobs or just in the wrong place at the wrong time – undocumented, documented, U.S. citizen – even Native American. They’ve given themselves some cover by also harassing some random white Canadian girls at the border because they accidentally ticked a wrong box on their Visa forms, or some such shit. But, mostly it is about getting rid of the brown people.
The shooting of those national guard troops was a tragedy. But, that was one man in a population of nearly 200,000 Afghan refugees. Do you think we should have left all the Afghans who helped us as translators, guides, etc., to be murdered by the Taliban along with their families? Because that was the alternative.
So, you think turning over the levers of power to the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, et al. is LESS like “giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys” than putting that power in tha hands of representative chosen by voters, who can be voted out if people are dissatified with the results? I disagree. I believe quite the opposite.
And, thanks to Dianee and Megalodon for those links!
People keep repeating this trope and pretending as if no person older than 25 ever worked a minimum wage job before the 1970’s. Back in the good old days, we’re told, minimum wage drudgery was only for bright eyed youth to earn summer pocket money while all the adults and elders had dignified gainful employment that paid living wages and more. It’s rose-colored bullshit.
Even in the golden age post-war boomer years, there were legions of adults, middle-aged and older, who spent the bulk of their working years in dead-end menial occupations that paid minimum wage or less. Day laborers, migrant workers, sanitation workers, road crews, elevator operators, doormen, gardeners, groundskeepers, farmhands, deckhands, seamstresses, launderers, maids, kitchen workers, cleaners, custodians, janitors, orderlies, cashiers, the list goes on. These jobs were not reserved for spring chickens and adolescents. Plenty of middle-aged or gray haired persons occupied dismally paid positions (because they actually needed the money, not just to “keep busy” in their golden years). I’m sure some boomer schools (urban, suburban, or rural) had a middle-aged or elderly janitor or custodian doing minimum wage menial work while the students sneered at them.
Describing PJ O’Rourke as a “noted philosopher” makes me blink a little. Plato, Kant, O’Rourke…it just doesn’t work.
That aside, though, he’s got a point. Give money to the government and who knows what they might do with it. Why they might fund cancer research. Or provide food to starving people. Or even provide people with weather forecasts–for free! Yep, just give away the information that there’s a storm coming to everyone, without regards to whether they’re rich or not.
Oh, well, at least the current administration is unlikely to do any of those horrible things. They’ll just do good things like murder Venezuelans, pardon drug dealers and traitors, and try to deport citizens. Good Republican values in action.
Hilarious that Ron thought that an appeal to the authority of PJ O’Rourke would work.
Elusis:
Having your job taken by an immigrant – illegal or otherwise – is not something restricted to blue-collar workers these days. Or even people who AREN’T immigrants and aren’t even in the country; even though that’s not directly related to immigration it sets a tone. Resentment is building up among various socio-economic levels.
I had a manager who lost his job to someone here on an H-1B visa. It’s one thing for a company to bring someone in because they have technical qualifications the company claims it cannot find otherwise. But none of us saw anything unique about his managerial capabilities. In the job I have now you have to go 4 levels above me in management before you hit someone born in the U.S. That’s absurd. There are plenty of people who have middle management capacity and experience in the U.S.
If I lost my job to someone with an H-1B visa, I’d assume that one of two things was going on. Either they were the better person to do the job, in which case, yeah, I’m annoyed, but it’s better for the organization, so that’s life. Alternately, they’ve been hired because my boss cared more about cheap labor than competence, in which case I’m well out of the organization and just feel bad for the person who got stuck with that horrible boss. In any case, why would I blame the person who took the job? It’s not their fault either way.
Why? Is there something about the management that makes the jobs 1-3 levels above you better done by a US-born person? I can’t imagine what secret power being US born gives someone that makes them a better manager.
In case you’re wondering, yes, I have lost a job to an immigrant, more or less*. My response was “poor kid, taking a job in this snake pit”. She quit within a couple of years too.
*It was more complicated than that. It always is.
“In the job I have now you have to go 4 levels above me in management before you hit someone born in the U.S. That’s absurd.”
Why?
Again, Ron, you said:
What do ~20 Indian people living and working in India have to do with immigration?
And as for the other ~2, you know it’s possible for people of Indian descent to be born in the US, right?
Directly? Nothing. But it does negatively affect people’s overall attitudes towards their fellow countrymen coming over here on H-1B visas.
Watcher, Dianne, there are plenty of American citizens with experience in tech industries who would be just as good at management as someone here on an H-1B visa. We should not be importing non-citizens who will work cheaper to replace citizens.
Dianne:
Your boss may have had nothing to do with the decision to only hire people here on H-1B visas for that job. He or she may well have been sent resumes from HR and got told “Here are the candidates you can consider.” Heck, I have found out that in our company the main recruitment company we use is an Indian company. For hiring people to work in the U.S.!
Possible? Yes. Is that the actual situation? No.