“I think it’s going to be extraordinarily difficult to ask our Border Patrol agents and our [internal enforcement] agents to stem the tide that is driven by a huge economic engine of employers looking for people to do work that won’t be done by Americans.”

What I’m not sure about is how much different is that from what Mexican President Vicente Fox said [translated from Spanish] several months ago that touched off so much controversy:

“There is no doubt that Mexicans, filled with dignity, willingness and ability to work, are doing jobs that not even blacks want to do there in the United States.”

Yes, clearly Fox’s statement underscored an ignorant and prejudiced view of the Black community, only reinforcing the “us vs. them” racial tension between the African American community & the Mexican American community.

But is the essence of these two statements all that different? Current attitudes about immigration are fueled by this arguably denigrated view of immigrants and the labor they provide. So the comparative audience is wider (Americans vs. Blacks), but the content of the statement sounds identical. When Fox originally made his comments, Ruben Navarette Jr wrote a insightful commentary on this topic:

“Every generation is supposed to have a cushier job than the one before it. We accept it. We expect it.Whether those Americans are black, white, brown or purple doesn’t matter. What matters is that, as Americans, many of these people have come to see things like office work and soft hands and short hours as entitlements – things that come to us because we were lucky enough be born in this country. That’s a shame.

And that’s exactly the conversation we should be having at the moment, instead of one more bitter argument about race.”

So why isn’t there any protest about Chertoff’s comments, which seem more egregious as a high-ranking U.S. government official?