'Anyone Can Be an Illegal': Color-Blind Ideology and Maintaining Latino/Citizen Borders

Previous research has shown that nativist ideology racializes nonwhite immigrants, but little research has looked at how color-blind racist discourse shapes how people accomplish this while maintaining a race-neutral identity. This study examines how online discussion forum participants of an anti-immigrant organization in the United States use color-blind racist discourse. The qualitative analysis of 200 threads (2,168 posts) shows that forum participants use the color-blind discursive tactic of diminishing the importance of race through rhetoric of legality, cultural racism, and reverse racism. This rhetoric frees forum participants to conflate illegal, criminal, and Hispanic. This neutralizes contradictions in their claims of a race-neutral stance, which is most evident in their discussions of Puerto Rico whereby participants reinforce a dichotomy between citizen and Latino. While color-blind racism has been used to explain race relations between white and nonwhite citizens, this research shows how the ideology extends to include nonwhite immigrants.