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If the Major League Baseball Players Association has its way, the 2011 All-Star game will not take place in Phoenix, Arizona. The MLBPA has joined dozens of other organizations in protesting that state’s recent controversial law.
While President Obama announced recently that he has dropped immigration reform from this year’s Congressional agenda, the state of Arizona has moved forward with immigration reform by passing Senate Bill 1070, signed by Governor Jan Brewer, on April 23. The new law makes being in Arizona without federal legal permission a state crime of trespassing. The law now requires law enforcement officers with “reasonable suspicion” to question any persons they believe are in the country illegally about their immigration status and requires suspected persons to produce legal documentation of their immigration status. Persons unable to produce documentation may be fined and detained. Arizona recently experienced an influx of immigrants, according to the Associated Press. Upon signing, Governor Brewer called the law, in a statement released on April 23, “another tool for our state to use as we work to solve a crisis … caused by illegal immigration and Arizona’s porous border.”
The controversial law is raising protests and boycotts across the country, and rightfully so. A radical law such as SB 1070 encourages racial profiling, and is damaging in the long run to the economy and reputation of the state and nation as a whole.
Based on this law, local police will wield the power to stop any person they believe with “reasonable suspicion” is in the country illegally. But on what grounds will local law enforcement officials find reason to suspect that one is an illegal alien? Because of Arizona’s location on the United States-Mexico border, an increasing number of Latin American immigrants are crossing into the country through the state, according to private publishing company United States Immigration Support. At the same time, about thirty percent of Arizona’s total population is Hispanic, according to National Public Radio correspondent Ted Robbins. How are the actions and appearance of an alien distinguishable from a non-alien? This law enables abuse from law enforcement agents as all Arizona residents of Hispanic descent may be labeled as aliens and undergo racial persecution, including legal immigrants and citizens.
If police stop one person for illegal trespassing, they should stop and question all persons. After all, illegal immigrants from around the world enter the United States, not just Hispanics from Latin America. Six percent of aliens to the United States are from Europe and nine percent from Asia, according to a 2005 report by Hispanic Pew Center. Any racial profiling in a country such as the United States that thrives off of its rich multicultural heritage is disturbing.
The law’s prejudicial nature can be compared to the Jim Crow laws of the 19th and 20th centuries, which ordered segregated facilities for Caucasians and African-Americans. “We have not seen this kind of legislation since the Jim Crow laws,” Pima County, Arizona legal defender Isabel Garcia said in a CNN television interview on April 20. “It is the single largest attack on our communities.” By the logic of this law, all Arizona residents whose skin tones imply Hispanic descent will be in a segregated group due to being forced to carry legal identification or risk deportation, even if they are legal residents.
Perhaps this attack was the intended purpose of Senate Bill 1070. Arizona Senator Republican Russell Pearce, who sponsored SB 1070, has a history of political attacks on immigrants. According to his web site (www.russellpearce.com), he has sponsored a half dozen other bills pertaining to illegal presence and immigration status. In 2006, in an interview on Phoenix, Arizona radio station KJZZ, Russell stated his support for a revival of the 1954 Operation Wetback by the United States Immigration and Nationalization Service, a program that was responsible for the removal of over one million illegal immigrants from the country, primarily Mexicans from the southwest. The term “wetback” was used to describe Mexicans who swam across the Rio Grande to enter the United States. According to the Texas State Historical Association online Handbook of Texas (www.tshaonline.org), local police and Border Patrol agents went into Mexican-American neighborhoods conducting arbitrary ID card checks of any person whose appearance suggested Hispanic descent, similar to the power SB 1070 now provides Arizona police.
Furthermore, controversy eclipsed the senator when he was photographed in 2007 with neo-Nazi leader J.T. Ready at an anti-immigration rally. I question Senator Pearce’s intentions with SB 1070. I believe the immigration situation is no longer a matter of rights and legality, but involves a personal bias.
In addition, driving out aliens may harm an already suffering economy. Immigrants, including some illegal workers, are integral to the economy of Arizona and the country. Mostly performing unskilled labor, immigrant workers are responsible for about eight percent, or $29 million of the state’s output, according to a 2004 study by the University of Arizona. By deporting immigrants, Arizona faces the possibility of losing this valuable supply of laborers and their income in an already faulty economy.
Finally, SB 1070 undermines the United States’ much-lauded notion of the American dream. Our country’s founding fathers were immigrants searching for freedom from the repressive authority of their motherland. Brutally denying the attempts of those who seek their fortunes, escape from harsher living conditions and seek a better life is, to me, hypocritical of the spirit upon which this nation was founded.
It’s ironic that the throwback to this law is Operation Wetback. In the present era, the term “wetback” has become a racist slur. According to the Huffington Post, in 2009 a lawsuit was filed against Sam’s Club groceries stores when managers of a Fresno, California location allegedly used the term to harass employees of Mexican descent. They did not need to resort to hateful language, and the United States does not need to resort to racist policies to solve its quandaries. SB 1070 is not the solution to immigration reform.
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