There’s no getting past the racist implications of Arizona’s tough new immigration law that requires police to check the citizenship of anyone they suspect to be an illegal alien.
Supporters of the law claim that it is badly misunderstood and that Arizona is only doing a job that the federal government has so far not done. Too many Mexican drug gang fire fights have been spilling into border U.S. states. And we in Virginia have had our own version of such a law — Prince William County’s three years ago that authorized police to check immigration status at all criminal arrests.
Listen to the right wing media, such as American Family Radio, and you’ll hear of some “expert” tell use that Jose and Esmerelda want to sneak their 17 children north past the border so they can suck on the teat of U.S. social welfare programs, when, in fact, Hispanics tend to be among some of the hardest working and most conscientious people anywhere.
But you simply can’t get past the white-skin, dark-skin elements of the immigration dilemma and it brings up some very ugly traits in American society that are both racist and anti-intellectual. Not that long ago, for instance, North Carolina forbade Catholics from holding public office and “No Nothings” went after Irish Catholic immigrants in the 1840s, followed by the Ku Klux Klan in later years.
Immigration laws in the early 20th century set “limits” for what the dominant White Protestant power elite considered “inferior” races such as Italians, Irish, Poles, Croatians, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese and so on. As for African-Americans, the record is incredibly evil. I read on the obit page last week in The New York Times about a champion female diver who was denied use of a swimming club at a ritzy San Francisco hotel in the 1940s because she was half English and half Filipino. Leading colleges held Jews to “quotas” until the mid-1900s.
Turning now to Arizona, one also finds a strange history. To be sure, I have never been there but I have been to neighboring states. For centuries, of course, the land that is now Arizona was dominated by Native American tribes. One of the first Western explorers was non-other than an Hispanic — a Spanish friar named Fray Marcos de Niza. He was wandering around the area in the 1530s, which is quite a bit earlier than the “White” Englishmen who founded Jamestown and Plymouth in the 1600s, or even, for that matter, Sir Walter Raleigh.
Like many areas in the U.S. Southwest, Arizona’s culture was dominated by the dark-skinned Spanish and Mexicans. An 1860 census showed that Arizona was still predominately Native American and was so until 1912 when it became a state.
The big change came in the 1960s when thousands of “White” Americans from the Mid-west and Northeast, many of them retirees from well-paying white collar or highly-skilled blue collar jobs, flooded into to new “communities” to take advantage of the dry, warm climate. They brought with them car-centric urban sprawl and golf courses that demanded millions of gallons of scare water that ended up changing the micro-climate by making it more humid and destroying one of the reasons so many came to Arizona in the first place.
These “Whites” also wanted to shape the state’s culture around what it was like back in suburban Detroit or Chicago or St. Louis or New York. They wanted everyone to speak only English, as they did, and conform with the small family, consumption-oriented lifestyle that they loved, along with white bread, schmaltzy programs such as Lawrence Welk on TV.
Now we find that Arizona is a “crisis” of illegal immigration and the culprits (no getting around this one, sorry) are “brown-skinned Latinos who actually have been in those parts quite a bit longer that the “come-here” and “White” retirees. So, we have a new and hateful law that will probably spur a more conservative federal law if and when it ever comes. The last attempt at one, supported by President George W. Bush by the way, couldn’t clear Congress. President Obama has been too sidetracked by health care and financial regulation to focus much on it yet.
Whatever happened in Prince William and can it be a guide? Consider this blog by Paige Winfield Cunningham in The Washington Post.
At first, she notes, Hispanics, the target of the law, fled PWC. English as a Second Language classes had been growing by 1,500 students a year but quickly fell to 760 before growing again. Surveys show that Hispanics overwhelmingly support local police but did not after the law.
As for the big crime crackdown that was anticipated, well, it turned out to be somewhat underwhelming. Of 12,839 criminal arrests in 2009, only 6 percent involved illegal immigrants.
Peter Galuszka