Sitting, as I am, at ground zero for the modern know-nothing movement — that’s Arizona, the Grand Canyon state to you non-news-junkies — I have a certain less-than-impressed perspective on the latest wave of jingoism. For starters, while the state’s recent directive to law-enforcement agencies to drop everything else they’re doing and focus on harassing brown people draws wide support, it strikes me that it enjoys an especially enthusiastic reception among all the snowbirds who settled here after they got tired of waiting for global warming to creep its toasty way north and finally render Minnesota more habitable than the surface of Mars. They upped stakes, bought houses in Phoenix, and woke up one morning with the disturbing sensation that everything around their new domiciles is a little spicier, more colorful, and suntannier than it really ought to be.

At least, once you scratch through the bullshit concerns about crime (hint: violent crime is down statewide), and get past the relatively small portion of the population really fearful of competition for jobs (strangely few native-born Americans hanker to repair roofs when it’s 115 in the shade), the conversation always seems to turn to fears that American culture is being swamped by a cilantro-seasoned wave of foreignness. If my interactions with folks who live here and support the immigration law are anything to go by, odd music, odd food and odd Spanish conversations have more to do with anti-immigrant fears than do  worries about crime and jobs. Around the state, the nativists whisper that new arrivals will transform the culture and turn it into something alien.

If you can step back from the fray, it’s amusing to watch the cultural barricades shift over time as people rally to defend an ever-morphing true Americanism. In 1905, the New York Times railed against “immigrants and evil communications from the shores of Italy and Austria-Hungary.” (My ancestors came from Naples and a German-speaking part of Serbia, so I take the hint). A century later, Domino’s “pizza” and Olive Garden are everyplace (for which my great-grandparents can’t be blamed) and part of the culture that Sheriff Joe “son of immigrants and evil communicators” Arpaio has so bravely stepped forward to champion against the foreign hordes.

For my part, I’d welcome a little more cultural transformation. I like the Mexican attitude toward family, friends and life (not so different from Mediterranean culture) and feel more comfortable with it than I do in a room full of sullen midwesterners silently nibbling on plates of tuna casserole.

Unfortunately, the part of the American tradition that I like the most — that of the restrained state — is being jettisoned by the nativists themselves. Fearful of the alien influx from the south, the know-nothings are turning their back on America’s original distrust of overbearing rules enforced by armed government employees, and turning — or trying to turn — the U.S. into a European-style bureaucratic state. They’re not trying to defend the entire culture, you see, just the bland, repressed part.

Hell, if I want to be stopped at checkpoints, bound in red tape, and taxed to the max to pay for an inspectorate employed by an ever-expanding state, I’ll move my family where I can get it with the scent of garlic and olive oil in the air, la dolce vita and a glass of red wine in my hand.

Damned culture-killing nativists.

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