What? It's Not Leviticus!

[8]Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.
[9] And he said to his people, "Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us.
[10] Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war befall us, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land."
[11] Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens; and they built for Pharaoh store-cities, Pithom and Ra-am'ses.
[12] But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel.
[13] So they made the people of Israel serve with rigor,
[14] and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field; in all their work they made them serve with rigor.

Exodus, chapter 1, RSV, © National Council of Churches of Christ in America.

Sound familiar?

I have to love (and you know that I mean the opposite) the way anti-immigrant ostensible Christians ignore passages like this in favor of indulging their xenophobia.  Because that's what it really is:  Sheer unmitigated fear of the foreign-to-them.  "They don't speak our language, they don't worship our God (as Tom Lehrer put it, 'Money'), they don't look like Us (and, y'know? on that score, Wrong!), and they contaminate with their Not-Usness!"

(We've evolved a little bit.  A very, very little bit.)

More and more, it seems to me, most of the conservative agenda is bent on the repeal not only of the New Deal, but also World War II.  World War II was (we thought) the graveyard of Fascism as an ideology (never mind it hung on in Spain and Portugal and cropped up in Central and South America, largely in American-allied states).  A lot of the impetus toward being less officially hateful was that many combat veterans had seen the results of hate-as-official-policy up close and personal and took that home.  A lot of them got elected to Congress and to state legislatures in the '50s and '60s.

People like, oh, let's not mention names because I'd have to disinfect this blog, think World War II is an old movie.  Nazis are guys with funny accents who are always thwarting Indiana Jones.  Couldn't be anything wrong with their ideas; why, their ideas were very popular!

Their ideas are poison.  All of their ideas are poison.

(Yeah, well, Godwin.  Not that I'm arguing with anybody.  If I were, I'd bring up Stalin and Pinochet.  And possibly Mao Zedong.)