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Arizona Boots Up Brown Immigrants’ Guantanamo
For the past several years, Maricopa County in Arizona has been America’s best-local-effort approximation of a police state. That’s where Sheriff Joe Arpaio rules, where he made his fame imprisoning inmates in tents in the heat of the Arizona desert and issued them pink underwear to humiliate them, where he imprisoned children as young as 12, supposedly with their consent, to teach them lessons, and where he set loose vigilante posses without badges but with arrest powers.
Maricopa County is also where Arpaio began redrawing the rules of immigration by flouting federal law and becoming a one-man, one-county anti-immigration czar. He profiles brown-skinned immigrants without reserve, rounds them up by the truckload, forces his “aliens” to sing “God Bless America,” and keeps them in his jails for extra indoctrination instead of turning them over to federal authorities, as law requires. Arpaio is an enforcer, but not of law. I wrote three years ago that if the federal government didn’t reform immigration soon, Maricopa County would soon be the bleak future of immigration enforcement for the rest of Arizona and other states with big, brown-skinned populations.
That future is here.
On April 23, Arizona Governor Janice Brewer signed into law the most draconian anti-immigration measure in the country since 1924. That year the xenophobic Asian Exclusion Act barred Asians (including Indians) from migrating to the United States. The exclusion act was a precursor to the internment of 110,000 Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps during World War II, a slice of Stalinist subjugation not unique in American history. There’s no telling what Arizona’s so-called “Safe Neighborhoods” act will lead to. Whatever it is, the demonization of an entire race in law can’t have good consequences.
The law turns state and local police into immigration cops even though the Constitution explicitly spells out in Article 1 that Congress alone has the authority to set a “uniform Rule of Naturalization.” Right-wingers who pushed for this law talk a good game of wanting to “restore” respect for the Constitution when they have Barack Obama’s even darker skin in their sights. But they wouldn’t recognize hypocrisy if it bit them in the Arizona.
For the first time in the United States, cops in Arizona have the right to demand that anyone produce identification to prove legal residence. What has been a habit of several European nations and every authoritarian regime on the planet is now Arizona law. Again, conservatives who pretend to want government off their back have just surrendered to one of the most invasive forms of arbitrary state power. Profiling will replace the saguaro cactus blossom as the state flower. Legal residents and citizens will be caught in the same dragnet of overzealous cops scoring their anti-immigration jollies. And the Fourth Amendment protecting against unreasonable searches, the Fifth requiring due process and protecting against self-incrimination, the Sixth protecting the rights of the accused, the Eighth protecting against cruel and unusual punishment (if you’re in Joe Arpaio country) and the 14th providing equal protecting — they’re all history in Arizona’s Dirty Harry act over brown neighbors.
Arizona’s law won’t stem undocumented immigration. The country’s economic crisis did that already, worsening rather than helping the economy: immigrants, legal or not, are more boon than burden. It’s been so historically, in the roaring 1990s especially. The legal status of an immigrant doesn’t trump his contributions to the country, even less so his dignity. But this isn’t a law to reduce undocumented immigration. It’s a tool to exclude, segregate or punish brown-skinned immigrants, legal or non-legal. It’s a reaction against the diminishing whiteness of a country that will be minority-white within 40 years, in a region where whites will lose their dominant perch even sooner.
We’ve been here before. Listen to Walt Whitman, of all people, decrying in an 1846 editorial for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle the contamination with Mexicans of the white race on the North American continent: “What has miserable, inefficient Mexico—with her superstition, her burlesque upon freedom, her actual tyranny by the few over the many—what has she to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race? Be it ours to achieve that mission!”
In a speech from the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives almost a century later, Texas Congressman John Box displayed American nativism at its shrillest when he declared that “Every reason which calls for the exclusion of the most wretched, ignorant, dirty, diseased, and degraded people of Europe or Asia demands that the illiterate, unclean, peonized masses moving this way from Mexico be stopped at the border.”
How different are the words of such eminent Americans of the 19th and 20th centuries from those of the Arizona governor in the 21st, when she declared a few days ago that “we cannot delay while the destruction happening south of our international border creeps its way north”?
The pretext in Whitman’s time was the cleanliness of the race. In John Box’s time it was the protection of America’s white “stock.” Later it would be about protecting jobs. Now it’s supposedly about protecting America from drugs and terrorists. But it’s the same old yellow-horde, yellow-peril racism of the Exclusion Act, smeared brown.
Sixteen years ago California voters approved Proposition 187 by the respectably mobbish margin of 59 percent. The new law was milder than Arizona’s. It didn’t give cops profiling powers. But it authorized them to check into an individual’s immigration status after any arrest for any violation, jaywalking or a broken tail-light included. It barred undocumented immigrants from receiving any social services whatever, including public education–specified in the prohibitions–and all but emergency medical services. It turned social workers into snitches who could finger for imprisonment any suspected undocumented person who filled out government applications.
Proposition 187 was mean-spirited and regressive, although not, in light of history, quite un-American. Courts struck it down.
Arizona’s parody of an immigration law is far broader in scope and enforcement. Courts will strike it down. That’s a given, if the Constitution is still English to Arizona. What courts can’t strike down is the viral bigotry that made Arizona’s law possible. That virus has long ago crossed Arizona’s borders into the rest of America. Its carrier is as white as a bed sheet and as legal as your next-door neighbor. It is also by far the greater threat to America’s character than anything that ever crossed the Rio Grande.
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26 Comments so far
Show AllAmerican politics is certainly becoming more colourful. Americans previously restrained themselves to one colour at a time. There was the Yellow Peril, and then the Red Menace. Now you have the Orange Revolution, Yellow (Terrorism) Alerts, the Green Scare (referring in this case to Islam), and now also the Brown Threat.
The author mentions one other colour: "[Bigotry's] carrier is as white as a bed sheet". Was he thinking of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them?
My father joked that if the Arizona government is going to impose a demand for documentation on its residents, it should make the matter easier by providing them with the requisite documents -- such as an Ahnenpaß (proof of ancestry), as was done when he was growing up ...
By the way, Germany also has a Brown Threat, or at least the more pretentious liberals say so -- but they're referring to Hitler's SA, who dressed themselves in light-brown uniforms which had been made for German forces in North Africa.
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a bedsheet, carrying a burning cross."
-- not Upton Sinclair
Dafoe
Tha virus of racial bigotry has always been there, it shines its spotlight on all the non white races, Africans, African Americans, Chinese, Japanese, now Mexican as been added as a scapegoat for the ills brought on by ,who else but the whites.
This nation is disintegrating from greed, racial and religious bigotry and a system of politics that was corrupt from its early days. Things will not get better in this country with 51 tin pot "diktaters" and their regimes holding power and a citizenry too timid to break the mold. The Second Republic of Vermont looks better as each day goes by.
Sheriff JP has a pair of sexy pink under ware waiting for him in a federal prison. Wedgies all day.
It is clearly evident that Pierre Tristam does not live in Arizona. What is the answer, Arizonans should give their state away, or join Mexico. What a yahoo! Other version of this law are already in the works in 6 or 7 states. Welcome to the future.
Is this Ethnic Cleansing or just plain genocide?
Who is really dominant? White people or the elites, not all of whom are white or male?
Everyone agrees that illegal immigration is breaking the law in any country. However, only in the US is enforcement of this law considered racist and illegal. An foreign citizen arrives in the US illegally, has a child which automatically becomes a US citizen. According to the activist viewpoint since a child is involved the parents should receive ammensty and automatic US citizenship without having to go through the hurdles reguired for legal immigrants. Allowing this is wrong on many levels. Most of all this is a violation of US laws and is a slap in the face to the millions of US citizen who arrived in the country legally. I'm glad to see at least one state enforce US immigration laws instead of turing their backs on the rest of the nation. I'm working to encourage my state to follow their lead. We need immigration reform that allows for more LEGAL immigration in this country. We don't need to grant automatic citizenship to those who has already broken our laws by arriving here illegally.
Sioux Rose
I think you "Sam" have posted under OTHER names spouting your jingoistic flat earth views before. Wonder how you'll feel when you incarnate with dark skin and are born to less than well to do parents next time 'round. "Do unto others," is karmic shorthand for the most cost-effective long-term plan.
Sioux Rose,
Well said, and yours is an understanding post.
Thanks.
Sam, is it really like we're living in a nation of law and order where stemming the flow of illegal immigrants is the last stop to nirvana? I think you're caught in delusions. The illegal immigration is simply another side-effect of the classist campaign that is the "American Way", to conquer foreign markets, conquer foreign people, and conquer foreign lands. The USan goals in Mexico include fueling the Mexican government's oppression of the population, to keep that government as a reliable ally, and to exploit Mexico as much as it can be exploited, in all the realms. Do you think elite agendas are without consequences? Would you happen to be one of the 100 million who voted elites back into office in Nov 2008?
Has anyone here posted approvingly of immigration laws anywhere else?
I'm not sure why you would consider this on-topic.
What America needs is a Catholic theocracy like they have had south of the border, which forbids birth control and abortion even to save a woman or girls life. Then our country will be overpopulated and poverty stricken like the predominately catholic countries that have people who want to get into America. Where will they go if America is as poor as the overpopulated countries they want to leave? The irony is that the conservative Americans who don't want the immigrants coming into our country are the same ones who don't want to support Family Planning clinics and sex education to help these people plan their families according to their economic means and the woman's age and health. The Catholic leaders who force them to have more children than they can afford are demanding that the immigrants be allowed to stay in America. The want to increase the catholic population so they can get votes for Catholic politicians who can deny all Americans Family Planning clinics. Then we can all be as poor as they are in the nations where the people are risking death and imprisonment to cross the border for job opportunities. The more overpopulated the nation is the more opportunity the corporations have to exploit the masses. Get at the root of the problem, the ban on birth control and reproductive health clinics, south of the border.
Catholics learn about birth control pretty quickly when they do not want children.
Openness and education would make this easier. Available contraceptives would make it way easier. However, a social net for the elderly would make the lesson almost instantaneous.
When the US government, the IMF, the World Bank and similar interests can be dissuaded or barred from dictating these things, people will talk to the church.
The US has created and continues to create the deplorable conditions in Mexico and Central and South America which is the genesis for people willing to come to this country looking for work. Until we correct that which we have wrought the undocumented workers from south of the border have as much of a right to be here as the nativist racists who post on this site.
Once we correct the evils which we perpetrated on those south of the border, we can begin making amends to the rest of the world.
If you burn down my house, don't be surprised to find me sleeping on your porch when it begins to rain.
Well put.
You-all may have to make some room on that porch.
The Tristam article is disappointing as well as most of the comments. Like abortion or other "wedge issues" there's usually a hidden agenda happening. How about looking a little deeper on immigration (legal or not)?
This is from an interview with John Ross from Monday's Democracy NOW!:
AMY GOODMAN: John Ross, very quickly, because Congressman Grijalva is waiting in Washington, DC to talk about the immigration laws, this draconian law that has just been passed in Arizona. But the effects of the immigration laws and the war on drugs?
JOHN ROSS: Well, certainly, I always assume—these are hot-button issues in the US press—immigration and drugs. Washington uses these issues to pressure Mexico, to win concessions, and they’re not necessarily concessions in terms of the drug war or immigration at all. They look at security, and they look at economy, and basically energy, you know? Washington wants to see Mexico privatize its oil industry, PEMEX. And so, they utilize this pressure that comes from immigration, comes from the drug war, in order to win those concessions.
Washington wants greater control over Mexico’s security apparatus, so they use things like the ASPAN, the security and prosperity agreement, to be able to—which would integrate security forces throughout the entire continent under Washington’s control. They use things like the North Command, which now penetrates Mexico’s airspace, because Mexico has been declared the southern security perimeter of the United States.
So those are the two aims of Washington at this point: to gain control over the Mexican security apparatus and the privatization of PEMEX. And all of this Mexico bashing that comes out of immigration and comes out of the drug war is really directed at that. And that’s how the White House has operated in Mexico as long as I’ve been there and much longer than I’ve been there.
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So, big surprise, it's about oil and military dominance.
What a great essay!
Pierre always packs a wallop, and this follows the rule.
It's time to kick those bigoted legislators in the Arizona!
Sam In VA-This law is destined to fail. Even the police are against it.
AZ wants to privatize their prisons and fill them up with Mexicans.
The aim isn't to protect anyone from anything.
Good post rtdrury btw. This is about a lot more than jingoism and bigotry.
The real crime is the poverty that forces people to sneak into the United States to do menial, low-wage work, risking their lives and freedom in the process.
If the native Arizonians would learn to build their own local economies and show some dedication and compassion for one another, then maybe they would learn to respect the immigrants. They may even find out why the immigrants keep coming and would do what they could to help the Mexican working class.
"They may even find out why the immigrants keep coming and would do what they could to help the Mexican working class."
Stanley wins the teddy bear.
I will have to give it to one of my two daughters or niece. My niece might get picky about where the teddy bear is made from though. :)
lol. Well played.