Lying To Make Friends

For those of us no-name types, Twitter provides an outlet for the little germs of wisdom we come up with while drunk and/or pathetically lonely. For political types, however, Twitter is an easily mockable (and equally misguided) excuse for a soapbox. Josh Treviño (former Bush writer of some sort, who now runs a “strategies & media” company, whatever that means) is the latest to whittle some dumb politics into a pithy political fumble via Twitter. On Monday, he had this to say: “Dear Border Patrol: my red hair and pale skin IS my passport, bureaucrats.”

By this, Treviño meant, I don’t think we should have to show passports where I live in Texas, because it is inconvenient to me, and this is my ill-phrased way of showing my annoyance. (This understanding of his stance took some time in gathering, as I had to get it via a sequence of 140-or-less-word blurbs.)

Although Mr. T (if I may call him that) has since declined to endorse racial profiling (and by calling for open borders, pissed off some, ahem, racists who immediately came to his e-defense), his statement is very telling. Mr. T is half-Mexican, although he doesn’t look it, and he identifies racially only as “Texan.” (Except when he is defending himself against charges of racism, when he then identifies as half-Mexican. But I digress.) The thing that Mr. T gets at so well is that buzz-words like “security” and “border control” and “fighting terrorism” all sound good until they start affecting you personally, when they suddenly become very annoying – or worse.

What a lot of civil liberties and immigrant rights groups have been saying for some time is that even if your “red hair and pale skin” are protecting you now, if you don’t look around at what is happening to the other Texans without your same “passport,” there will be no good law to protect you from that Border Patrol cavity search down the road, if I may be so blunt. Mr. T is lucky that so far his red hair and pale skin have still functioned as a passport outside the Border Patrol checkpoints. Now that local law enforcement actors are being deputized to enforce immigration laws (thanks to the disastrous 287(g) program), anyone with a name like Treviño would be wise not to count on that passport for too long – especially not if he plans to make any road trips to Arizona any time soon.

-AS