It always starts innocently enough:  you belong to a community of people online, and as you browse the various recent forum topics you come across an off topic post, a debate about the new Arizona law enforcing spot check ID sessions for anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant.   Cautiously you may even open the thread and have a look at the responses people have given, but by then it’s too late: you’re going to post and your blood pressure is already on the rise.

I’ve been apart of this debate many times before in different settings with different people and it never turns out any differently.  My argument is well tuned: I’ve got the facts, figures, and links all to hand.  As one who is an immigrant, I can provide insight into a system most people don’t know a thing about…. and I do.  I first read the points others have made… if you can call them points.  Mostly it’s parroting of conservative media propaganda: Mexicans take our jobs, they ride the welfare and benefits system, they choose to come here illegally as opposed to legally.

So I lay my argument out: 99.9% of Mexican migrants do not qualify for any of the US visas which would allow them to live and work in the country legally.  The current systems needs to undergo reform so that we may ensure wages are taxed correctly, that equal wages are being given for equal work (most illegal immigrants make far less than minimum wage… which is why companies hire them), and have a means by which to track who is working.  Illegal immigrants are unable to claim for or file for any government assistance programs, and the statistics even show that there are far more  white, able bodied Americans taking advantage of the government welfare system than any other ethnic group.

So what am I countered with?  Not logical thought, facts, and sources but thinly veiled racism / xenophobia, outlandish claims based on what an individual has “seen” or “witnessed” and little gems of intelligence such as: “They come over here and have 5 or 6 kids each. And don’t tell me that’s their culture… they are trying to take over the country!”  And I hang my head in shame.  I love my home country. I have alot of pride for America and I try to defend America and Americans at any cost especially since living abroad, but comments like the aforementioned one make me so ashamed of my fellow countrymen.

And I thought that this being a DEBATE people would be on the same page: a coherent stance on an issue backed with actual facts and logical arguments.  But sadly this is “TEH INTERWEBZ, LULZ!” and such a thing doesn’t exist.  Instead it was page after page of the most ignorant opinions I have ever had the displeasure of reading… and it wasn’t the STANCE of the opinion that forces me to say that, but rather that most of the people in the debate could not form complete sentences with proper grammar let alone a coherent argument.

But I digress, this post isn’t actually ABOUT the debate itself.

Later that night I run the debate by my husband as we are lying in bed so I could at least salvage an intellectual conversation about the topic from the experience.  And he brought up the most interesting stance of all:  The way these people feel, the racism, the fear, the mere parroting of conservative scaremongering, was natural. It was more than that: it’s evolutionary.  We are nothing more than a group of monkeys and we have food, water, land and mates that we perceive this other group of monkeys (illegal immigrants) as wanting to come and take from us.  It’s us against them and we are primordially programmed to fear those different than us for the fear that what we have, now, will be overtaken.

“But if that’s the case that makes us no better than crapping in our hand and throwing it.”  I argued.

“Exactly.” Mark mused.

The thought certainly bothered me: all the evolution we’ve undergone, all the things we’ve accomplished as a species, ages of literature and thinkers and scientists and yet still all the average person can muster isn’t but a step ahead of flinging one’s own shit in self defense.   At the same time it made perfect sense: we’re nothing more than animals ourselves really, why should I expect us to rise above such primal dividers such as territory and race?

But I did have an answer to the question that had been bothering me:  Why, when you present someone with logic, reasoning, and facts, can you not change their minds?  The answer is simply because we are not programmed at a primal level to see beyond the Monkeysphere. We are a group, a clan, and we  have things we perceive others want to steal from us.  So we bear our teeth in a threatening display and raise the alarm, which will be heard and repeated by all the other monkeys.

Then, we fling our shit.  And it’s never going to get any more advanced than that.

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