top dog

The Economist goes to the red-hot heart of what is usually (that is, abstractly) referred to in the blogosphere as the “immigration issue”:

In the rarefied world of national politics (and in America’s even more other-worldly universities) blacks and Latinos tend to be lumped together in what Nicolás Vaca, a California lawyer, calls a “presumed alliance”. Last month Barack Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate whose father was Kenyan, assured a Hispanic conference that such a bond existed. Quoting Martin Luther King, he called the two groups “brothers in the fight for equality”. On the streets of America’s cities, however, rather less lofty attitudes are apparent.

“We’re being overrun,” says Ted Hayes of Choose Black America, which has led anti-immigration marches in south-central Los Angeles. “The compañeros have taken all the housing. If you don’t speak Spanish they turn you down for jobs. Our children are jumped upon in the schools. They are trying to drive us out.” Not, Mr Hayes emphasises, that he has anything against illegal immigrants personally, or against Mexicans who are in America legally.

Do you see any presidential candidate—of either party—who is capable of addressing the tribal tensions rising in America? (Neither do I.)