Convinced

Last year, I was in Mississippi, to visit family. It was an interesting place. I don't go down there very often, and in the past it had always been for funerals, so I was never there long. This last trip, I had some time to spend, and so in addition to meeting with family, I had the opportunity to meet some of the neighbors.

One of the neighbors was an older White lady, very nice, and quite talkative in the way that people can be when they meet someone new to them. As part of out very wide-ranging discussion, she informed me that the area was changing, in part due to the number of immigrants to the area. Having come down from the Seattle area, the place struck me as being nearly immigrant-free; I think I could count the ones I met on my fingers. But a jump from two to four is often more noticeable than going from ten to twelve, so I understood how the low baseline number made even the modest increase seem large by comparison. One of the things that the neighbor told me about the influx of people was that they were purchasing small businesses. My mother, who spends much more time down that way than I do, had told me about South Asians buying a couple of local businesses from owners who were retiring. Again, I didn't think anything of it at first; immigrant-owned small businesses are fairly thick on the ground in the Puget Sound area.

The interesting piece of the conversation came when the neighbor told me that the new arrivals had purchased their businesses with grant money given to them by the federal government, as a means of helping them to displace the locals. No evidence of this was offered; instead, it was described as "obvious" to anyone who understood anything about the area.

One of the things about conspiracies is that they can offer straightforward answers to questions without requiring a lot of background knowledge of the topic. And in this case, it freed the neighbor from needing to understand the economics of migration, overall. While there are a number of people who cross the border between the United States and Mexico because they're poor, and looking for better work than they can get at home (and sometimes, work period), immigrants from many other parts of the world are fairly well-off. After all, they needed to be able to afford intercontinental air fare. And given that many of them are locked out of the domestic market for the skilled jobs they held in their home countries, buying and running a small business was one of the better options available to them. Attempting to explain this to the neighbor, however, was something of a lost cause, mainly, I suspect, because her original story not only made sense to her, but it allowed the circumstances around her to make sense to her. So I didn't push very hard; there would have been no real benefit in winning.

Still, I felt badly for her. I know a good number of people who have a distrust of government, and for some, it's a very frightening state in which to live, constantly suspecting that "the people in charge" have it in for them. They strike me as some of the people that the Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025" is designed to appeal to; the sort who see agents of the government as nefarious.

Given the fact that egosyntonic stories about the world aren't going anywhere, there may not be much to be done about things like this. Which is unfortunate, because the fear and worry that underlie many of these ideas is a burden that weighs down people who are already laboring under the weight of having few options to advance themselves..