Arizona has gone off the deep end. California’s neighbor, and a home for many ex-Californians, has passed and Governor Jan Brewer has signed a radical and extremist bill, SB 1070, that legalizes racial profiling and implements a host of unconstitutional rules that abrogate civil liberties and subject anyone not carrying proper identification to immediate arrest.
The backlash to SB 1070 is already underway. Presente.org is organizing a a boycott of Arizona, which I’ve joined. I have a lot of family who live in Arizona, but I’m not going to subject myself to a police state to visit them; they can come to California.
The picture at right, of Governor Brewer’s signing announcement, tells you all you need to know about what is happening here. Despite the fact that people with brown skin lived in Arizona long before anyone with white skin, and despite the fact that Arizona has had a long heritage of Latinos predating US conquest, and despite the fact that Latinos and Native Americans and other non-whites have lived there up to the present, a vocal minority of Arizona’s white population has decided that being brown in Arizona is a crime.
Using “illegal immigration” as justification, Republicans led by Russell Pearce are waging a war against a people who are as Arizonan as they are, against a “culture” that is indigenous, not foreign. Here’s what Pearce had to say to NPR in 2008:
Invaders, that’s what they [undocumented immigrants] are. Invaders on the American sovereignty and it can’t be tolerated….
Pearce claims illegal immigrants are responsible for much of Arizona’s crime and he admits to feeling uncomfortable with the way society is changing in Arizona. He attributes it partly to Mexicans’ and Central Americans’ “way of doing business.”
“Drive around parts of Phoenix. I get calls all the time and it’s not that they’re Hispanic, it’s because the culture is different. The gangs are bigger. There’s more violence, kidnappings are way up,” he says.
This conflation of “illegal” with “Hispanic” is by no means new, even though there are lots of Irish undocumented immigrants in the US. What Pearce represents is the very same phenomenon we’re all too familiar with here in California: white anxiety at the fact that their country was never as white as they believed, and is becoming steadily more diverse. Blaming “illegals” is merely an easier way of couching one’s racism.
This is especially true in private conversations. Just as one can very easily find anti-Latino racism expressed in white Orange County households, you can find it even more commonly expressed in white communities in Arizona. This is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of Arizona whites moved there from California in search of a less diverse, more white place to live.
As anyone with any knowledge of California history ought to be aware, Arizona is merely following a trail the Golden State blazed long ago. In the 1850s during the Gold Rush, Anglo Californians harassed, attacked, killed, deported, and took the land of Latinos, whether they were native-born Californios or people who came here to seek wealth in the gold fields.
Over the next 150 years racism persisted, only to be dramatically reinforced when Proposition 187 was passed by 2/3rds of voters at the November 1994 election. Prop 187 was ultimately ruled unconstitutional by the courts, and it led to a shift of Latinos away from the Republican Party and towards Democrats in California that has never been reversed.
Today’s Republican Party remains every bit as anti-immigrant and anti-Latino as it was in 1994. The two candidates for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, have spent weeks airing TV ads trying to outdo each other in immigrant-bashing. Steve Poizner wrote in his new book that “From an intellectual standpoint, I absolutely know not to expect Silicon Valley-type caliber ambition and smarts from East San Jose schoolkids,” most of whom are Latinos.
We can expect California Republicans to use Arizona’s SB 1070 as a model for similar bills they will almost certainly push this year in the Legislature. California Democrats still hold enough seats to block this, but we have to continuously reinforce to them the fact that Californians opposed these kind of anti-immigrant laws.
It’s also a powerful argument for the federal government to get off its ass and finally act on comprehensive immigration reform. Californians Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer would do well to act quickly, to ensure that no other states follow Arizona’s unconscionable and horrific lead.
Oh, and we might want to put up some signs on Interstate 10 in Blythe warning eastbound travelers that they’re about to enter a police state.
UPDATE: Sign the act.ly petition to have CalPERS divest itself of investments in Arizona companies and Arizona real estate. Let’s make AZ regret this.
Arizona… Republicans have gone crazy but what else is new?
Poizner is a moron doubling down on basically the same anti-immigrant rant that is going to loose him the Republican nod because you can’t be bat-shit crazy and get elected here.
Whitman is treading thin ice here, she better be careful but honestly here behind in in trouble, she’s still behind in most polling, I don’t think this race is a toss up, its Brown’s to LOOSE.
I was born and raised in California..I’ve seen alot of good Mexican people come over the border and make lives for themselves here..
But the type of people coming now are not like the ones of those times..some are but the biggest majority aren’t..
I don’t know the answer to this problem but I do know SOMETHING has to be done..
It’s time for action..but this is discrimination..they will be stopping and harrassing legal hard working American citizens..It’s typical right wing action..
Seems to me you are overreacting.
It’s already law just about everywhere that upon being stopped you are required to show ID, even for loitering. And it doesn’t seem unreasonable for law enforcement officials to turn over illegals to the INS. So, the only real issue at stake here is what constitutes reasonable cause and whether appearance clues constitute reasonable cause. So if it looks alike a duck and walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s not a duck? Teh SCOTUS will eventually decide.
Look, this is a huge problem, one we were all willing to overlook when it only involved agricultural workers but with 13,000,000 illegals we are talking about the loss of factory jobs and depressed wage rates for all. Even multi-generational Mexican Americans in my acquaintance can’t stomach that. Especially in a collossal recession. I don’t think the political mo is on the side of illegals. Something needs to be done and progressives will either come up with something gentler or the result will be something even far more draconian than the AZ law.
And if Mexican Americans want support for civil rights and solidarity they might try providing it, unlike what they did on Prop. 8.
When I lived in L.A., I was routinely mistaken for Hispanic. I have my Greek grandfather’s dark coloring, spent more time at the beach in those days, and studied Spanish in school. But I was born in Los Angeles. Both my parents were born here too. And I refuse to go someplace in my own country where I have to prove that.
Furthermore, having grown up in Southern California, I knew a lot of illegals. I worked with plenty of them when I was a waitress. Most are hard-working folks who just want to earn a living. Most long for the day when they can do that at home. Howard Dean used to say that, if we really want to change illegal immigration, we have to change our trade agreements so that people don’t have to leave home to earn a living. I agree with him. I might also add that we need to break the grip of the Catholic Church whose teachings on birth control have lead to overpopulation and poverty.
But, whatever you believe is at the root of Mexico’s poverty (and we could easily throw government corruption in there), if we want to be enlightened citizens of this world, we need to look at the causes of the poverty that drives people from their homes and families. We need to look at the economic system that exploits that poverty. We need to address that in whatever way we, as a neighboring county, can. We do not need to create a police state here. Nor will it solve the problem. It will simply drive the coyotes (people smugglers) to California and Texas. Which I suppose will make the Arizona legislature happy. At least until they discover how much more expensive their lives will be without all that cheap labor. But you can’t have it both ways folks!
Arizona is a beautiful place. Too bad some of the people there are so ugly.
Sadly, it should come as no surprise that after Janet Napolitano was appointed to the President’s cabinet, Arizona would take a hard turn to the right.
New Democratic presidents need to be more concerned about the automatic replacements for their cabinet appointments. There are always multiple good people from which to choose for just about any cabinet appointment. Who takes over should be a factor.