Bo French may well have gotten this particular photo wrong. Arguendo, let's assume every person pictured was born in America, loves America, and is completely assimilated into Texas culture. That still doesn't address the underlying anger. It's easy to look at reactions like these, and call them "racism." It's easy to declare the people expressing them bad, and move on. It's also politically stupid, because the anger didn't appear out of nowhere. A lot of Texans (especially people in tech) watched employers use H-1B and other visa programs to obtain cheaper, more controllable labor. These programs are supposed to be for filling shortages, not saving money on payroll. Some have been laid off and then required to train the foreign workers replacing them. Add well-publicized cases of résumé, degree, certification, contracting, and immigration fraud, and distrust is hardly surprising. Even where everything is perfectly legal, immigration has distributional effects. If employers can import large numbers of workers into an already competitive labor market, displaced workers are going to notice. If rapidly growing populations compete for housing in places where supply isn't keeping up, existing residents are going to notice that too. When the federal and state government makes it clear they care more about immigrants than they care about you, you're gonna get mad about that, even if that anger looks "racist" You can argue that some people take that legitimate resentment and turn it into racial hostility. Some plainly do. But "some of the rhetoric is racist" is not an answer to the underlying grievances. If your response to someone saying, "I lost my job, trained my cheaper replacement, can't afford a house, and think my government doesn't give a damn about me" is simply "you're racist." you haven't solved anything. You've just convinced him that nobody intends to listen. Democrats have learned the hard way that dismissing people's material concerns as moral defects doesn't make those concerns disappear. Republicans would be remarkably stupid to make the same mistake, yet here we are.