Maury official: "It’s just like Ivory soap - 99.99 percent of them are here illegally"

Commissioner adds to "White House"/"Brown House" record of negative comments about Hispanics in general from local officials

"The argument has shifted from undocumented Latino immigrants to the general population of Latinos"

Maury County County Commissioner Bob Farmer is now on record with two negative comments about Hispanics in general, according to the Columbia Daily Herald:

At the February meeting when the [county immigration agent] resolution was introduced, Farmer told The Daily Herald he wasn’t concerned an enforcement officer would result in undue harassment of Hispanics.

“It’s just like Ivory soap — 99.99 percent of them are here illegally,” Farmer said.

Farmer's other comment denoting negativity toward Hispanics in general was the "White House-Brown House" quip caught earlier this year by The Tennessean, in the same context. These two comments are part of a growing list of negative remarks about Hispanics expressed by public servants across the state.

The assertion that almost all of Hispanics as "here illegally" recalls the sentiment published here earlier this week by Latina Lista, namely, that "unfounded stories making their way across the media illustrate how the argument has shifted from undocumented Latino immigrants to the general population of Latinos."

As reported earlier on the Hispanic Nashville Notebook, 46% of all Hispanics in Tennessee were born in the U.S. (story here). To get the total number of Hispanics who are here legally, you would have to add to that 46% the number of Hispanics who are not U.S. citizens but who have legal visas.


Maury County Commissioner Bob Farmer
Source: maurycounty-tn.gov

Soap photo by Anita Bezanson. Licensed under Creative Commons.