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doesn’t want ’em back, first of all. Think what happens if we round—first of all, where do we store 11 million Hispanics just waiting to ship ’em back to Nicaragua, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico. Where do we store ’em? . . . The Superdome! Exactly. And the Astrodome in Houston. That’s where we’ll put ’em.”33 During a 2006 broadcast, he addressed the same theme: “When we defeat this illegal alien amnesty bill and when we yank out the welcome mat and they all start going back to Mexico, as a going-away gift let’s all give them a box of nuclear waste. Give ’em all a little nuclear waste and let ’em take it on down there to Mexico. Tell ’em it can—it’ll heat tortillas. Or something like that.”34

More mainstream characters are almost as bad. Here is Lou Dobbs, formerly of CNN, now a Fox business news host: “There are some Mexican citizens and some Mexican-Americans who want to see California, New Mexico and other parts of the Southwestern United States given over to Mexico. These groups call it the reconquista, Spanish for reconquest. And they view the millions of Mexican illegal aliens in particular entering the United States as potentially an army of invaders to achieve that takeover.”35 Dobbs—echoing nineteenth-century concerns about hookworm among Chinese immigrants on the West Coast—likes to equate immigration with infectious disease: “The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans. Highly-contagious diseases are now crossing our borders decades after those diseases had been eradicated in this country.”36

Glenn Beck is another respectable mainstream fanatic. Here he is on Muslims: “All right. Here it is. Tonight’s exclusive: In 10 years, Muslims and Arabs will be looking through a razor wire fence at the West. . . . The Muslim community better find a spokesman who isn’t a ‘yes, but’ Muslim. They shouldn’t even understand the word ‘but,’ because if they don’t, when things heat up, the profiling will only get worse, and the razor wire will be coming.”37

Like Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly—who is more respectable than the baby-faced, conspiracy-theorizing, ranting, dry-drunk Beck—dabbles in reconquista paranoia. On May 1, 2006, while Latinos were marching for their rights in California, O’Reilly warned some of his 3.25 million weekly viewers, “And then there’s the hardcore militant agenda of ‘You stole our land, you bad gringos.’ This is the organizers of these demonstrations: ‘The border—we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.’ That is their slogan. That you stole our land, and now, we’re going to take it back by massive, massive migration into the Southwest. And we’re going to control those places, because you stole it from us, and that’s the agenda underneath.”38 At times his war rhetoric gets more explicit: “You have no policy unless you have border security. . . . So now, it’s becoming a race war. That’s what it’s becoming—a race war. You see half a million people show up in L.A. and they were waving Mexican flags. And they’re saying, ‘Hey, we have a right to be here.’ No, you don’t. If you’re illegal, you don’t have a right to be here.”39

Season of Hate, Again

In 2010, immigration politics heated up again with the passage of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, which ordered all police officers to stop and interrogate anyone they suspected of being undocumented. Furthermore, it allowed citizens to sue if they felt an officer was negligent in these anti-immigrant efforts.40 SB 1070 embodied the lifeboat politics of armed adaptation. Internationally, the face of the bill was Governor Jan Brewer, whose bleached-blonde hair, spray-on tan, and perpetual, unblinking, grimace-like smile gave her a robotic affect. The backdrop to all this was Arizona’s economic crisis: it had the third-highest foreclosure rate in the United States and an unemployment rate that reached 10 percent in July 2010.

With the new law, thousands of terrified undocumented Latinos fled the state. Critics said the bill would, among others things, make Arizona less safe as it would be harder for police to solve crimes if Latinos