Politics & Power Quote by Roger Mahony

Calling the scapegoating of immigrants “fashionable” is Mahony’s neatest move: he frames nativist backlash not as sober policy debate but as a trend, a social accessory people wear to signal belonging. The phrase “almost politically correct” flips a well-worn accusation back on its users. Instead of liberals being the speech police, Mahony suggests a new orthodoxy has formed on the right: it’s now socially rewarded to punch down, and dissent is treated as naive or disloyal. That inversion carries clerical bite without sounding like a sermon.

“Hard-working immigrants” is equally tactical. Mahony isn’t defending an abstraction; he’s defending labor, contribution, and the basic dignity of people whose economic role is often quietly relied on even as they’re publicly condemned. By narrowing his focus to Mexico and Central America, he names the real targets of the moment’s anxiety and implies the subtext most politicians prefer to launder: this isn’t just about legality, it’s about which kind of foreignness is deemed threatening.

Context matters: as a prominent Catholic leader in California, Mahony speaks from an institution with deep ties to Latino communities and a moral vocabulary built around the stranger, the poor, the worker. His intent is to reassign blame: the “ills” aren’t caused by migrants, but by the politics that need a villain, and by economic systems happy to exploit immigrant labor while denying immigrant belonging. The line is less an argument than a diagnosis of how prejudice gets normalized: not through rage alone, but through social permission.