Normally I try to post a few of the best editorial cartoons from the week on Fridays as a lighthearted, thank-goodness-the-weekend-is-here feature. This week is a bit different, since I've been meaning to comment on this cartoon by John Cole that appeared last Saturday in the Louisville Courier-Journal:

This is, of course, the animated version of the standard trope that being against illegal immigration is somehow racist. In fact, on the same day this cartoon appeared in the Courier-Journal, the New York Times published an editorial saying much the same thing:

The anti-immigrant hard-core -- no amnesty today, no amnesty tomorrow, no amnesty forever -- must not be allowed to hold the nation hostage. Like nativists of generations past, they think the country is being Latinized, and they fear it.

Notice the ease with which the Times conflates the concept of being against illegal immigration with being "anti-immigrant."

The two positions are manifestly distinct, as the Times writers would have known if they had read the results of their own poll released last Thursday. While majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents expressed support for some aspects of immigration reform, respondents across party lines were even more united in their opposition to illegal immigration:

Seventy-five (75%) percent of respondents - including 72% of Democrats, 76% of Independents, and 77% of Republicans - favored higher fines for companies who knowingly hired illegal immigrants

When asked "should illegal immigrants be prosecuted and deported for being in the U.S. illegally," sixty-nine (69%) percent answered in the affirmative, including 64% of Democrats, 72% of Republicans, and 73% of Independents.

The Times and others -- including those Republicans in Congress who favor comprehensive reform -- do themselves no favors, intellectual or otherwise, by suggesting that opposing illegal immigration equals racism or that those who worked to defeat this bill are somehow "anti-immigrant." Even liberal darling Barack Obama voted in favor of a "poison pill" amendment which contributed to the bill's ultimate demise.

One final twist to the John Cole cartoon. Cole actually doesn't work for the Louisville paper; he's the editorial cartoonist at the Scranton Times-Tribune. A version of the same cartoon actually appeared in the Times-Tribune two days earlier, on June 7:

Look at the button on the person's shirt sleeve. It reads "Vote Barletta." For those who don't know, Lou Barletta is the Mayor of Hazleton, PA, who made news last year by pushing a bill (which eventually passed the City Council) that suspended business licenses for employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens and also penalized landlords that rent to them.

On June 3 at a rally in Hazleton supporting Barletta and his stance against illegal immigration, some folks in the crowd yelled at the Hispanic-American editor of a local Spanish-language newspaper, telling him to "leave the country" and "go home."

That incident was the basis for Cole's cartoon (he explains on his blog here), and it provides much-needed context.

But that only makes the version that appeared in the Courier-Journal two days later that much more offensive, since it lacked any context whatsoever and fell back on the easy slur of taking an isolated incident and extrapolating from it a stereotype to smear a much larger group of people.

I don't know the details of how the second version appeared, but I'd be surprised if the Louisville Courier-Journal changed Cole's cartoon on its own or, at the very least, published the change without his approval.