[lg policy] NYTimes: Alabama: Editorial: The Candidate From Xenophobia

[Harold Schiffman]

Editorial: The Candidate From Xenophobia

As primary elections approach across the land, the award for best
bottom-feeding campaigner surely belongs to Tim James, an Alabama
gubernatorial candidate who vows to put an end to that grave threat
posed by driver’s license tests being conducted in any language but
English. “This is Alabama. We speak English,” Mr. James warns in a
make-my-day growl. “If you want to live here, learn it,” he declares
in a video ad attacking the simple fact that the test is now offered
in multiple languages, the same as in other states.
Running in a four-way Republican nomination race, Mr. James, a
business executive, is transparently intent on tapping into the
anti-immigrant, anti-government mood of malcontent voters. “We’re only
giving that test in English if I’m governor,” he promises.

A primary race, in which politicians compete to pander to the basest
instincts of their party’s base voters, can be a fantasy universe. In
the case of Mr. James’s version of Alabama, it ignores the fact that
the state has been quite successful in wooing foreign automakers to
take root with workers who speak Japanese, Korean and German. And
English. The state is now ethnically rich enough to offer tests in
those languages plus Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, French, Greek, Russian,
Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese and American Sign Language. Mr. James’s spin
on the Know Nothing Movement has a track history reflected in an
English-only driver’s test amendment already in the State
Constitution. This dates to an earlier xenophobic exercise, but the
state wisely declines to enforce it because court rulings suggest that
doing so could cost taxpayers considerable federal aid.

Mr. James insists that he is not pandering to voters partial to
hateful rhetoric about alien newcomers. He’s worried about safety on
the roads and the ability of drivers to understand signs, according to
his campaign. Alabama voters should be insulted. The ploy is right out
of the playbook of Willie Stark, the fantasy gubernatorial candidate
in Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men.” Stark heeded campaign
advice to low-road the voters: “Stir them up and they’ll love it and
come back for more, but, for heaven’s sakes, don’t try to improve
their minds.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/opinion/29thurs4.html?ref=todayspaper
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Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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