Well, we always have to have somebody to feel better than.

It is human nature for us to divide into “us” and “them” and the powers that run a society always seem to find it helps to keep those who are not running the society making the distinction and making it incorrectly. As cynics have noted, the robber barons have worked this well for a long time, keeping groups of different white ethnicities on guard against each other, and when that didn’t work, pitting Chinese or blacks against whites. And now the Republican governor is out against illegal immigrants again. And he probably would not mind if his action scared away some legal ones too.

The target is being redirected again. In a Community Voice post on Minnpost.com, Barb Kucera notes

Remember the heavily hyped myth of the "welfare queen" in the Reagan era? She's disappeared — replaced by those "illegals" who are trying to take your job. As long as workers of different backgrounds view each other with suspicion and even hatred, we can't get together to solve our problems.

She concludes by noting

We live in a global economy where millions of people are forced to leave their homes and their countries to find work to feed their families, while millions more are witnessing steep declines in their wages, benefits and working conditions. Meanwhile, corporations pile on the profits, destroying communities, the environment and people's lives with impunity.

Is this the kind of world we want? As long as working people stay mired in name-calling, they'll never ask that question.

We need to resist the temptation to get so carried away with us v. them that we forget that we all are pretty much the same.