Why is Congressman Steve King so fixated on the bodies of high-school graduates who were illegally brought to the United States as children? In an interview a few days ago with Newsmax, King, an Iowa Republican, said that he was tired of people talking about those young people, who would benefit from measures like the DREAM Act, as if they were mostly good—as if they even belonged in families. “They aren’t all valedictorians. They weren’t all brought in by their parents”:
Those people—the ones with cantaloupe calves—are “undermining our culture and civilization.”
In several interviews since, he has defended those remarks by returning, again and again, to the bodies of young immigrants, in a way that veers on the odd. To an Iowa radio station (via the Washington Post):
And on Thursday, on the floor of Congress:
Physical characteristics, girls wrapped in straps—King speaks as though he thinks that if he could just convey the figures and shapes of these young people, their sheer physicality, others would recoil, just as he does, at the idea of letting them be American. What he asks is not that we listen to their stories, or add up their accomplishments, or read the history of this country, but just that we look at them, like he does. At their legs, arms—anywhere, it would seem, but in their eyes, where he’d have to acknowledge their individuality. As with Anthony Weiner, another subject of political mortification, it is a manner of looking that, once shared, makes the viewer repellant, not the viewed.
Other Republicans know this. “There’s no place in this debate for hateful or ignorant comments from elected officials,” John Boehner, the House Speaker, said Thursday. King embarrassed them not with his policies—which are widely shared in the G.O.P.—but with his rhetorical proclivities. As Ryan Lizza has written, there are people in the G.O.P. who understand the urgency of immigration reform both for the country and for their own political survival, and desperately don’t want to been seen as the party that thinks Hispanic Americans look foreign.
King, who has also talked about the need to keep an eye on Muslim Americans (including, as it happens, Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, who he once suggested, on no basis, had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood), does not help; he underscores the impression that Republicans will be pleased if immigration reform fails. The more insistently King talks about muscles, the more one wonders whether what really catches his eye is the color of the skin—and whether his way of speaking is merely a fetishized version of his party’s vision of immigrants and their children, and of a whole lot of America.
Photograph by Drew Angerer/Getty.
