Apartheid Returns to America: SB 1070, the "Papers Please" Law

There’s only one way an American can repay the debt for our Constitution and Bill of Rights—among the world’s greatest guarantees of dignity, liberty, and equality—and that’s to pay it forward. When we fail to do that, when we deliberately jettison somebody else’s rights and dignity, we spit in the face of God.

SB 1070, the harsh new “Papers Please” law that Arizona’s GOP government just enacted, requires Arizona police to demand the papers of anyone they “reasonably suspect” is in the country illegally. It also says that any person can sue the authorities if they don’t do just that.

Ironically, SB 1070 does nothing to stop illegal border crossing. Nor is it actually aimed at “illegal immigration” generically. It isn’t aimed at Canadians or Europeans or Icelanders or Polynesians. In Arizona, illegal immigration is a south of the border thing, meaning that this law’s effective impact is exclusively directed at Latinos, Mestizos, and Hispanics.

Unlike a border control station, SB 1070 just doesn’t treat all people equally. Blue eyed, fair skinned “illegals” have no worries. The chances they’ll be carded are zero. That makes this law unconstitutional.

Effective impact means how this law will operate in real life, so let’s get honest. There’s no way to tell by looking who’s here illegally. Given this new mandate and our proximity to Mexico, that’s going to pose a big problem for our police, because here in Arizona, 10% of the population is Native American, and 30% of the population is Latino, Mestizo, or Hispanic.

Of that combined 40%, hundreds of thousands of Arizona residents belong to families who have inhabited this land long before any Anglo ever did, which should make the prospect of carding any one of them cause repeated reflexive vomiting. And then there’s our indigenous American population. Thousands and thousands of them are in fact physically indistinguishable from a Mestizo or an indigenous Mexican, Honduran, Guatemalan, or Ecuadorian, and all of them are in fact citizens of the 21 other sovereign nations in Arizona that we call tribes.

Because this law requires our police to detain anyone they merely suspect might be here illegally; and because it targets Latinos, Mestizos, Hispanics, and Native Americans exclusively, it combines everyone in these groups—US citizens, tribe members, legal residents, illegal residents alike—into one giant suspect class based on nothing but racial characteristics such as skin and eye color, facial structure, and body type.

In other words, unless our governor in her vast wisdom produces other criteria for identifying a suspected illegal immigrant, it seems inescapable that SB 1070 will force Arizona's jurisdictions to engage in illegal racial profiling—there being no alternative—or be sued. That’s called legitimized race discrimination.

So, thanks to SB 1070, now all Arizona residents whose skin or eye color, facial structure, or body type may provide “reasonable suspicion” of illegal residency must now carry papers in case they are stopped--on mere suspicion and without warrant. My citizen friend Antonio, who looks like a Mayan prince, could be detained when he walks his dog. My citizen friend Roberto, a former Senate chief of staff, could also be detained, as could any Hispanic, Latino, Mestizo, or indigenous US soldier. As could their families. As could physicians, and educators, and hard-working roofers, construction guys, gardeners, nannies, chefs, inventors, investors, citrus pickers, miners, architects, waiters, and artists, all because the police can’t tell by looking and our GOP government doesn’t really give a good goddamn about the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

This makes me almost indescribably angry. But it gets worse.

Added to the powers to arrest, detain, and deport without warrant, giving police the power to demand proof of citizenship on the basis of mere suspicion and without warrant is as fundamental to the police state as a network of secret prisons. In fact, it is the ground-level, on-the-street hypodermic syringe that every single one of them must have in order to inject into their people the pervasive terror that keeps them in power. Get it?

What you get when you add race discrimination to police state powers is called Apartheid. It is no less Apartheid in Phoenix than it was in Johannesburg. It is no less ugly, no less an affront to human decency, and no less a threat to the entire citizenry here in the US of A than it was in South Africa, because once this kind of thing is permitted to take root, it will only grow.

For this (I would think obvious) reason, our brilliant Constitution limits police powers, reserves border control to the federal government, protects us from unreasonable search and seizure, and prohibits indefinite detention without specific cause and due process. We undermine and debase those protections at everyone’s peril, because the generation that will sells its country’s freedoms at any price is also least equipped to buy them back again.

The bottom line here is that, as history repeatedly affirms, if given enough popular fear and outrage, lawmakers everywhere can and will justify anything, no matter how heinous or obscene. In my view, that simple truth puts the participation of Tom Tanton’s Immigration Reform Law Institute in writing SB 1070 into what I hope is horrifying focus. Please: Follow that link.

A lawyer for the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI)--the group that helped write Arizona's law--boasted about being "approached by lawmakers from four other states who have asked for advice on how they can do the same thing. IRLI is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Immigration Reform (FAIR), an extreme anti-immigrant group that has recently been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 'In a nutshell, the IRLI has been behind most, if not every, local legislative immigration crackdown over the past few years. . . .'

[The Progress Report, April 29, 2010] Please: Follow that link, too.

In other words, entities that the very estimable Southern Poverty Law Center calls “hate groups,” entities that, with the help of Fox News and Lou Dobbs and Glen Beck and Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh other loud-mouthed Far Right propagandists, have been spewing virulent lies for years about the extent and consequences of illegal Hispanic, Latino, Mestizo, and indigenous immigration are now drafting Arizona state law.

If that doesn't frighten you and make you hopping mad, either you’re not breathing or you’re stupider than a can of sand, and you sure as hell aren’t an American patriot.

I'm scared and I'm furious. I’m also frightened and sickened by the enormous erosion in the last 30 years of Americans’ common understanding of ourselves as a people and of what we stand for as a nation. More and more of us—mostly good people, many well educated—are entirely ready to jettison somebody else’s constitutional protections in less time than it takes to strike a match, and then have a party to brag about it.

We’ve already seen Americans lie down and take it as GOP lawmakers happily cut out some of our constitutional right of privacy and some of our habeas corpus protection in the wake of 9-11. We’ve also mostly kept our mouths shut as state after state has made a lower caste of gays and lesbians. And now the Arizona GOP, unwilling to name, much less target, the real causes of illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and human trafficking, has made itself a racist police state the likes of which the USA hasn’t seen since Jim Crow.

Horribly, mystifyingly, no body of fact, no argument however elegant, no appeal to reason or Christ or common decency--no force in the known universe can make these people see that it actually isn’t white skin, flag waving, Bible thumping, and prayer in public schools that makes a person an American.

What makes us real Americans is standing up to fascism whenever, wherever, and however it arrives. It doesn’t make a bit of difference whether fascism gets here on the tip of a missile, carrying a cross and draped in the flag, or on the pen of a fundamentalist, white supremacist lawmaker, because once we let it in the door, it’s hell to get it out again. As we know.

From its predictable and profound negative economic, tourist, and international repercussions, to the human fodder this law throws to Arizona’s obscene for-profit prisons, to the hoped-for decimation of Hispanic votes in November, to the legislature’s usurpation of exclusively federal powers to regulate immigration, this law is a travesty.

But note well: This isn’t Arizona’s first modern venture into Apartheid.

In recent years, anyway, the first was Arizona’s segregation of GLBT people into a second class for which marriage and its enormous social and economic benefits are simply not accessible.

So it’s natural, now that we have yet another instance when an Arizona Republican government has intentionally created a lower-caste citizenry, that sentient beings might wonder what the third, fourth, and fifth instances will be. I’m deadly serious. These Christianist, Far Right extremists have a rather developed taste for limiting other people’s freedoms. As they’ve got Tom Tanton and Fox News to give them political cover, and an unusually high number of really whipped-up bone-stupid voters, and don’t hold themselves even the teensiest bit accountable to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, what’s to stop them?

People will always find reasons, but both the truth of history and the founding of our own country surely shout that nothing ever justifies spitting on the principles that make us uniquely American and for which many generations of our families and neighbors—yes, even “anchor babies,” “coloreds,” “Indians,” and “queers”—have died.

As pundit Michael Gerson put it in yesterday's Washington Post, the only truly American answer to “May I see your papers, please?” is “Go to hell! I’ll see you in court.”

Soon as that's past our lips we'd best deal quickly with the REAL causes of illegal immigration, starting with multinationals' pillaging of the nations south of the border, the American agribusiness, meatpacking, construction, and entertainment business demand for cheap (and even slave) labor, and shoe-shined Wall Street coke dealers.

An Open Letter to Partur

Partur sent this comment yesterday to a post I wrote some time ago, called "Belatedly, AZ Republic Blasts Immigrant Suffering":

"Wow. I hardly know where to begin.

"First, I want to make it clear that I don't wish death upon any of the people crossing the desert in search of a better life. I admire that kind of determination- we all want that for our families, and death should never be a result of our efforts to do so.

"However, breaking the law should never be a part of that mission, either.

"With that in mind, I pray tell, what is the answer here? Whose responsibility is it to prevent this sort of thing from happening? Is lack of compassion really the issue, or is it the fact that the people who died crossing into Arizona made that choice and took that risk on their own? Why is it up to American citizens to open wide our borders and our pocketbooks for those who made the foolish choice to evade our laws in the first place? No one who upholds the sovereignty of our borders thinks these people deserve to die- believe it or not, we are capable of compassion- but we do see it as a natural consequence of MAKING THE PERSONAL CHOICE TO ILLEGALLY CROSS THE ARIZONA BORDER VIA THE SONORAN DESERT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SUMMER. It's like anything else in life- when poor choices are made, the consequences can be very, very painful.

"On another note, as much as I disagreed with your 6/17 post "Should This Man be Our President," it was good reading. Interpretation is tricky business. I try very hard to understand the liberal viewpoint and criticisms of the conservative movement, and it definitely helped me see how those opinions are formed. We may not see eye-to-eye on most things, but I appreciate your blog nonetheless!"

I'm answering Partur here because this dialog is too detailed to bury in comments to a months-old post.

Dear Partur,

First, thank you for writing and for your kind comments. Second, please excuse my typo in my brief "redirecting" comment at my original post. I know your alias is Partur, not Parfur!

(1) Tragically, there's a huge "data divide" separating conservatives and progressives on this and many other issues. Conservative commentators such as Lou Dobbs, conservative legislators such as AZ's Russell Pearce and CO's Tom Tancredo, and conservative websites such as Free Republic rely for immigration information primarily on ten organizations. All of them were founded by one man, John Tanton.

You can test this for yourself by noting the names of the organizations that Dobbs and the others cite or invite. Then you can research John Tanton and decide for yourself what to make of his enterprise. For instance, see what the highly regarded Southern Poverty Law Center has to say, for starters. Check its sources.

Check the righthand column on my blog, under "Heads Up." You'll find a number of immigration-related links. These are the data sources progressives rely on.
The chief differences are that the latter are not generated by organizations founded by one person, are regarded as nonpartisan and academically reliable, and report findings that are widely replicated by researchers in a large variety of institutions, including the President's own Council of Economic Advisors--hardly a bastion of liberal thought.

I encourage you to take the time to compare the findings of the two groups. It's not that Americans are "interpreting" the same data differently. It's that we're operating on two entirely different sets of data. (I don't know your background. If you've got a degree in any research-based field, you will know the basic rules for evaluating whether a given study by anybody is credible or not. If you don't know these guidelines, email me privately and I'll dig them up for you.)

(2)To say that immigrants "choose" to come here is like saying the people at the World Trade Center "chose" to go to work that day. It's technically correct, but only in the most restricted, grossly misleading, and self-serving sense. Please bear with me. I don't want to insult you, but you asked my take and I'm laying it out. I invite you to do your own wide and deep research to test whether I'm telling the truth or not.

On the one hand, Mexican and Central American low-wage workers are being forced out of their own countries by impossibly harsh economic conditions. On the other, US agribusiness, construction, meat packing, landscaping, roofing, hotel, restaurant, and other industries are still actively advertising jobs in the US, luring them here to provide a cheap and docile workforce. And so they come. These are facts, not opinions. We can dispute opinions, but you'll agree that it's insane to dispute facts.

Economic realities are what's driving Latino/a low-wage workers out of their own countries. If you haven't already, please consider reading informed critiques of NAFTA and other global "free" trade policies. I'd strongly recommend Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine for a general overview. It's well researched, carefully documented so that readers can evaluate her sources for themselves, and very readable. It's not "opinion." It's fact. (For instance, there's no rational question that the Chicago School of Economics exists, or that it masterminded Pinochet's 9-11 coup in Chile or that Milton Friedman is conservatives' all-time favorite economist, or that Friedman espoused what Klein says he espoused, or that what happened in Chile and the other laboratory countries she deals with actually happened.)

After The Shock Doctrine, it would be worthwhile to read critical exposes of Monsanto's genetically engineered seed enterprise and its effects on indigenous farmers in Latin America, the US, and Canada, just for starters. Also look into water privatization initiatives in 3rd World countries globally-- e.g., Bolivia. (There's a new book about about Monsanto that conveniently packs a lot of information in one source.) All this can be dismissed, of course, but pretending it isn't actually happening won't mean it isn't actually happening.

The point is that fair-minded people who live in a reality-based world dig into the causes behind illegal immigration, and consider who benefits from the status quo.

(3) For decades, US administrations of both parties have collaborated with US industries in several sectors to ensure a steady supply of cheap, docile labor. You know that's a fact. Why this goes on and who benefits is pretty obvious. I recommend a book called Nobodies, just for one tiny case study.

Yet at the same time, US immigration policy sharply restricts the number of slots open to low-wage workers from Mexico and Central America. Immigration policy is available online. See for yourself. Despite steady appeals from US business to increase the quotas, it doesn't happen. Therefore, the fact is that vast majority Latino/a peasants driven from their own countries and lured north by promises of green cards and good jobs can't come in legally. However, having gotten as far north as the border, they've then got two practical alternatives: go back to starvation, which they can't do and can't afford to do, or cross illegally. I know that if you were in their shoes, you'd do exactly what they're doing, which is why conservatives' moral indignation about this is so galling.

(4) Who's responsibility? Not the peasants', IMHO. They're caught between the corruption in their own countries and the corruption in ours and in multinational businesses. They can't control US immigration policy or stop global "free" trade. But to say that they "choose" implies that they have some alternative, when the reality appears to be that they don't.

To me, it doesn't take a vast empathic capacity to understand that nobody sane "chooses" to walk across the Sonoran Desert any time of year, let alone in the summer. This is obviously driven by sheer desperation. If you doubt it, talk with the Humane Borders people, and talk with some immigrants themselves. You'll then be in a better position to judge them. And you do have the option to talk with these experienced sources. You don't have to take my word for it.

(5) If conservatives and Rightwingers were as vocal, organized, outraged, and militant about, oh, say, drunk driving, the $billions fraudulently disappeared in Iraq, Medicare fraud, tax evasion, contruction companies that repeatedly ignore safe crane regulations, Wall Street thieves, crappy levee construction, Pentagon purchasing scams, wife beating, unsafe FDA practices, ignored mine regulations, and so on, I'd be a lot more persuaded by their concern over the lawbreaking aspect. I'm sorry, but I don't buy the crocodile tears of outrage, and even if I did, nothing justifies Postville, IA and what's going on here in AZ. Nothing. We're supposed to be civilized, democratic people who believe in much higher values.

(6) This belated fixation on illegal immigration: It's been going on for decades, even longer. Our cities and towns and we ourselves have benefitted from it and still do, or you can be sure that it would have been ended. So why the sudden frenzy?

My conservative paratrooper WWII fighter father taught me to follow the money, never trust government, not to believe everythng I'm told, and do my own homework. My progressive mother agreed. So I ask myself whether there's any possible correlation between the explosion of for-profit privatized prisons that are reimbursed on a per capita basis and the sudden frenzy of immigrant roundups. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me. I ask myself whether there's any possibility that focusing America's attention on a pretty-much made-up crisis might have anything to do with diverting its attention from the systematic destruction of the US middle class. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me, and it sure isn't unprecedented. So, more suggested reading: Top Heavy, The Great Risk Shift, The Global Class War. We report, you decide.

(7)Last but not least, and with all due respect, the piety of US conservatives is profoundly disturbing to me. Not that you expressed piety yourself. To your credit, you didn't. But you will grant the heavy emphasis conservatives give to their reverence for Christianity, I'm sure. For that reason, even though you won't like it, I'm calling your side of the aisle on your own widely trumpeted "Christian" values.

See, to me, immigration directly calls up "do unto others," the Good Samaritan parable, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' repeated cautions to the pharisees about narrow fixation on legal technicalities, "if you do it to the least of these," and many other explicit Christian values I learned in church and at home from parents who were each the child of a minister.

The thing is, I was taught that these are meant to apply to real life. But from conservatives' and Rightwingers' behavior and writings about immigration, I gather that Leviticus and Deuteronomy have been far more influential in your lives than Jesus.

It's not that I think my side of the aisle is perfect. Not hardly. It's just that I NEVER see conservatives founding or staffing or supporting groups like Humane Borders. Instead, I see them slashing the tires of Humane Borders' water trucks (I can provide documentation) and threatening to kill "illegals." You know I'm not making that up.

I'm saying, among other things, that this is a hugely complex issue that takes a lot of time to research. It's not a question of rhetoric and pumped-up outrage. There aren't easy answers and the bad guys are everywhere, including us.

If it were up to me, I'd rengotiate NAFTA and all the rest of these disastrous trade pacts. Then I'd employ our vast economic, trade, and diplomatic power to force source countries' corrupt elites to create stable, fair working conditions for their people. Then I would ensure that US businesses adopt living wages and decent working conditions for ALL workers, both to attract native born labor to jobs they (sanely) won't take now AND to keep greedy corporations from playing off cheap foreign labor against US workers. I would go after what I consider to be predatory capitalism a la Monsanto and Coca Cola. Then I would enact fair, enforceable, and comprehensive guest worker programs, not the Braceros kind or the kind being proposed by Napolitano and other US governors now. (This is too complex to go into here. Do your own homework.)

Your mileage may vary, Partur, but one thing's for sure: You'd do exactly the same thing in the shoes of these immigrants and you know it. I wonder what that simple moral truth suggests to you about your own next steps.

Thanks for writing,
Pico