RSS Feed MenuSince Arizona passed its tough new immigration bill last week, many liberals and some conservatives have been ripping apart the Grand Canyon State.
Critics of the law’s usefulness and legality are correct: the new statute is not the answer to Arizona’s immigration woes. It is difficult, for instance, to foresee how Arizona can enforce the statute without the unintended consequence of racial profiling. Though Arizona police cannot pull over individuals solely to check immigration documents, many policemen will undoubtedly use traffic violations as a pretense to check immigration statuses, much like Sherriff Joe Arpaio and company already do.
But amidst liberals’ breathless calls of racism/Nazism/Maoism and the sometimes ugly cultural chauvinism of conservatives (like John McCain’s opponent JD Hayworth), there has been dishearteningly little discussion of what got Arizona to this point to being with. The Grand Canyon State’s legislators are not arbitrarily mean-spirited and racist; rather, they are struggling to find their own solution to the very real problem of lax federal border enforcement.
The poor state of border enforcement is not a terribly controversial issue in Arizona and its neighboring states. Border state Republicans and Democrats recognize it. In 2005, for instance, two big-name Democratic governors of Border States — Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Bill Richardson of New Mexico — declared states of emergency as a wake up call to Washington D.C. and as a means to earmark money for border enforcement.
Since then, border state representatives in Washington have been active in pushing action on immigration reform. For Arizona’s part, Senator McCain, Senator Kyl and Representatives Jeff Flake, Jim Colbe and John Shaddegg have all, at some point, taken the lead on immigration and border reforms. They know that illegal immigration is more than conservative racial fear mongering (as liberal commentators seem to see it), but it is a legitimate public policy dilemma.
Unfortunately, Arizona’s new law is not a solution this dilemma. Instead, it is one local government’s ugly attempt to deal with a problem that some conservatives, most liberals and seemingly all of Washington D.C. view fatalistically.
ottovbvs // Apr 29, 2010 at 8:28 am
“Though Arizona police cannot pull over individuals solely to check immigration documents, ”
…….Actually they can Mr Craft…..re read the law not edited versions of it presented by apologists for it!……and as you point out there will be the inevitable over reaching that will make national headlines…….the problem with your piece blaming it all on “liberals” (which alone betrays your motivations) and Washington you seem to have forgotten one thing…….it was those same liberals in Washington allied with McCain and the Bush admininistration who tried to address this problem in 2007 and it was blocked……….by conservative Republicans!!!…….this is going to prove a slow motion train wreck for the GOP nationally but it was problem created by them not by “liberals”
sinz54 // Apr 29, 2010 at 10:34 am
ottovbs: .it was those same liberals in Washington allied with McCain and the Bush admininistration who tried to address this problem in 2007 and it was blocked……….by conservative Republicans!!!…….this is going to prove a slow motion train wreck
It might still have been a “slow motion train wreck” even if the McCain immigration bill had passed. It might have been slower motion, but it wouldn’t have been a GOP triumph for the Hispanic bloc.
Once those 12 million or more illegal aliens got their path to citizenship, they wouldn’t be grateful to Bush and vote GOP. They, like all newly arrived minorities in America, will still vote Dem.
That could easily tip the Southwest and maybe even large parts of Texas into the Dem column.
The GOP, with its free-market philosophy, has never been able to appeal to a poor ethnic bloc. They can’t outbid the Dems when it comes to doling out favors to poor people.
The GOP always had to wait till that ethnic bloc had achieved the American Dream and was now scared of losing it. That was the case with the Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans who used to vote Dem but then became the so-called “Reagan Democrats.”
Bush got some 40% of the Hispanic vote by promising immigration reform. The GOP shot that down so McCain got only 30%. That suggests that the Hispanics whom the GOP could sway with immigration reform are only 10% of the Hispanics currently registered. And once we got 12 million illegal aliens citizenship and voter registration, that percentage would be even smaller.
forgetn // Apr 29, 2010 at 10:45 am
That’s right its all Obama’s fault. Sure that makes sense, any failure is the federal government any success is the state government, especially if its a republican administration! Sometimes governors and state senators have to suffer the consequences of their action, sure you can sympathize with their dilemma, but their solution is almost worse than the problem.
For the first time in a long time (I think you have to go back to the post civil war period) non-whites have to demonstrate that they belong. The right has made jokes about Obama’ s socialist agenda. Now the state of Arizona has to admit that they have actually implemented the same laws as the National Socialist party of Germany [for those who don't know history that was the name of Hitler's party -- yeah the guy with the short mustache that America fought during the second world war].
lovely neighbors…
ottovbvs // Apr 29, 2010 at 10:51 am
sinz54 // Apr 29, 2010 at 10:34 am
“Once those 12 million or more illegal aliens got their path to citizenship, they wouldn’t be grateful to Bush and vote GOP. They, like all newly arrived minorities in America, will still vote Dem.”
…….It’s all a matter of degree…….the GOP’s anti hispanic stance is going to give the Dems a lock on 80% of the hispanic vote as civil rights gave them a lock on 90% of the black vote and the thirties gave them a lock on 70% of the Jewish vote……with a more tolerant approach it might only have been 55% of hispanics…………the Reagan democrats btw don’t exist any longer
Honestly 22 // Apr 29, 2010 at 11:40 am
Remember the Secure Border Initiative (SBInet) program initiated in 2006 for a new integrated system of personnel, infrastructure, technology, and rapid response to secure the northern and southern land borders of the United States. An overarching program of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to organize the four operating components of border security: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the United States Coast Guard.
The contract (primarily security/survailance) was awarded to Boeing (airplane maufacturer) and was supposed to integrate sophisticated technologies to the tune of 3.7 billion (adjusted for overcosts) . I don’t know what the original price tag was, but 3.7 b was spent and experts were saying it could go as high as 8 billion for completion due to overcosts. A virtual border fence with a tower system incorporating radar, long-range cameras, broadband wireless access points, thermal imaging capabilities, and motion detectors in addition to UAVs and command centers.
Needless to say the project was deemed a total failure by both democrats and republicans alike because of equipment failures, time delays, incompatibility between electronic equipment from different subcontractors, and overcosts, in theory and practice the technological applications do work, but the DHS and Boeing both mismanaged the project and in Aug of 08 the DHS ordered Boeing to stop work on the contract.
Had they awarded this contract to the appropiate companies, illegal immigration might be a non issue today.
Rob_654 // Apr 29, 2010 at 11:42 am
PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY – applies to States also.
The Far Right always babbles on about “Personal Responsibility” – except for things they do of course then they “Just had to do it, because someone else made them”.
Arizona decided the language in the law – they decided the specifics – it is their law – regardless of what anyone else did or did not do…
By the way – isn’t it the Far Right who keeps shouting that the “Federal Government Can’t Do Anything Right?” – but now they blame the Federal Government for NOT doing something.
Come on – at least pick a side and stick with it!!!
ktward // Apr 30, 2010 at 1:33 am
@sinz54
Your sober analysis of the GOP’s no-win predicament with the Latino vote only scrapes the top of it, as Greg Palast’s investigations have long examined. (Some of his characterizations are a bit too zealous for my tastes, but his deep, well-documented research and findings are spot on.)
I did not paste the whole report, but it’s worth a click to read in its entirety.
The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.
I don’t buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.
What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote — and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.
Beginning after the 2004 election, under [then Secretary of State] Brewer’s command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.
That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you’re not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.
So I asked Brewer’s office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?
No, not one.
… [A] federal prosecutor was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western mesas looking for these illegal voters. “We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost 2 years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case.”
This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.
Iglesias’ jurisdiction was next door, in New Mexico, but he told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.
“They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments,” Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.
But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as “Prop 200,” which required proof of citizenship to register.
But what’s wrong with requiring folks to prove they’re American if the want to vote and live in America? The answer: because the vast majority of perfectly legal voters and residents who lack ID sufficient for Ms. Brewer and Mr. Pearce are citizens of color, citizens of poverty.
It is important to see the Republicans’ latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party’s desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box.