Mark Follman

"My parents, with admirable foresight, had their first child while they were on fellowships in the United States. My mother was in public health, and my father in a library-science program. Having an American baby was, my mother once said, like putting money in the bank."

So begins Daniel Alarcón's recent New Yorker story "Second Lives," whose narrator is a Latin American man with a potent longing for a First World life. His dream has eluded him; he realizes he is doomed to a "terminal condition" of Third World citizenship, despite that his older brother—the one lucky to be born on US soil—had seized the opportunity to emigrate many years prior.

Alarcón is a writer I've long admired, in part for how he weaves complex cultural politics into quietly powerful narratives. (His luminous story collection War by Candlelight is a must-read.) "Second Lives" arrived with uncanny timing in this politically boiling August. At face value, its opening easily could be another rallying cry for the political far right, members of which have been stirring up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hysteria from California to Texas to lower Manhattan.

Even by today's standard of partisan politics, the hot wave of demagoguery hitting the country feels off the charts. Take the fear mongering of Louie Gohmert, the Texas congressman pushing the "terror babies" conspiracy on national television: Shadowy foreigners are plotting to give birth in the US, only to take their tots overseas, train them as terrorists and send them back decades later, courtesy of the 14th Amendment, to wreak havoc inside the country.

That this theory is plainly ridiculous, and has been debunked by FBI and US Customs officials, is beside the point. As Ruben Navarrette Jr. wrote from Phoenix, this is political opportunism of a very scary kind.

You might say that Gohmert is just small potatoes. But what about more influential Republicans eager this election season to foment an anti-Islam crusade? The tactics aimed at the so-called "Ground Zero mosque"—which in name is pure invention—are no less craven. Newt Gingrich put a Hitlerian stamp on the proposed Muslim center: "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington," he said by way of egregious comparison on Fox News. No doubt Gingrich is pleased to be in lockstep with the cowardly Anti-Defamation League; he could scarcely do more to exploit fearful support from Jews than to evoke the Holocaust.

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