While conservatives said we were overreacting and helping to put America in danger, we tried to warn that Arizona’s new racist immigration bill would lead to increased racial profiling and harassment of Latinos. Unfortunately, Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed this bill into law over the weekend. However this bill, now law, only strengthens the police’s ability to discriminate and intimidate minority groups.
People of color finding themselves in Arizona would do well to carry on their person a state issued driver’s license, a social security card, and their official birth certificate at all times as Arizonans Abden and Jackie learned last week. Apparently, if you speak with an accent and aren’t part of the white power structure, you are presumed to be an illegal immigrant and must prove otherwise. Gone is even the veneer of innocence until proven guilty. What about our right to decline to show ID? Clearly, Abden was in a situation that required him to show his driver’s license, but a birth certificate? Who would be in favor of such a authoritarian governmental expansion?
Cheering this government overreach are the conservatives and Tea Partiers that make up the Republican party. Those that love to march in protest of “big government” see nothing wrong with requiring large segments of the nation’s population to carry sensitive documents at all times in order to prove their status at a moment’s notice, lest they be arrested. Why? Well of course, because conservatives and Tea Partiers are, for the most part, older white males who are part of the white power structure and will not suffer under this – and so this worries them not. This line of reasoning also applies to why you’ll never see a Tea Party protest on Wall Street or in the lobbies of companies who helped steal from Americans by taking bailout money.
“I don’t think it violates anyone’s civil rights”, says Bill Kristol on Fox News. Is this how you really feel Mr. Kristol? I would think that as someone of Jewish heritage, you would do well to remember where the blood-stained paths that started with requiring individuals to publicly identify themselves can end. He goes on to say it is not “draconian”, despite it sounding all too familiar to requirements of Blacks in both apartheid South Africa and the post-civil war South. Bill, Do you not see that what you are belittling is actually happening already and has dangerous precedents? I have to think you are only cheering on your party’s racist wing in order to tow the party line and cannot seriously believe you support such a thing.
While many Republicans are voicing their support for this bill, only a few have been willing to speak out against it including (surprisingly) Tom Tancredo. I wrote last week about the White House’s lack of enthusiasm in tackling our country’s immigration problems. Obama has since come out against this bill but again is doing nothing to treat the problem itself. Until we enact anti-racist immigration laws and as long as the administration is willing to let reactionary politics rule the day, minority groups will continue to suffer.