Arizona Immigration

Arizona is a rugged place to live. A mix of mountains, desert, heat and barren from its southern border with Mexico to its northern mountains. You have to want to live there, because the weak of heart are separated out relatively quickly. Its vast, open expanses create a bigness of spirit, and its habitat conditions have created a strong sense of self-reliance and independence in its people over the generations.

Arizona is also now the Ellis Island of the southwest, the main port of entry for illegal immigration into the U.S. Immigration of one part drug and weapons dealers, and a second part of employable workers looking to earn a livable wage for themselves and often their families. (Unfortunately, in the dead of night, the U.S. Border Patrol is hard pressed to tell the difference between these two groups as they sneak across the southern border.) The drugs and arms dealers are a menace to the character and stability of this country. The second group typically consists of decent people willing to do credible work to improve their personal lives, for which they are needed by American employers. Just as millions of Asian-Americans, Irish, and Eastern Europeans before them.

Congress and the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) are supposed to manage this cross-border traffic. Its failure to do so the last 30 years has given us three kinds of residents of Mexican ancestry:

• descendants of those Mexicans living here before there was a United States, similar to the Native-Americans who predate the rest of us;

• legal immigrants who have been properly coming here within the rules, and are now as American as I with my Scot-Irish immigrant ancestors;

• those who have arrived more recently without authorization, unentitled to the rights and privileges of citizenship but welcomed by American businesses and residents for their services.

Why do we care about these illegals? Partly on economic principles. Ever since the War Between the States, America has had immigration quotas. We have tried to manage the flow of people wanting to come here, though the numbers often reflected our own prejudices about who would be allowed in and who would not. The quotas attempted to protect us from being overwhelmed by population growth and/or excesses of people vis-à-vis available jobs – particularly in difficult economic times like our current condition.

We have also been concerned that if immigrants are not self-supporting and contributing to the overall economic well-being, they will drain from and overwhelm our American “safety net” of social services – however incomplete those services may be. We also fear that illegal immigrants will remain “un-Americanized,” necessarily living in the shadows outside of mainstream America, thereby perpetuating old-country cultures, values, language, rules, instincts and assumptions.

And then there is the simple illegality of their situation: they’ve broken American law just by their presence here. Which means that every aspect of their lives going forward is tainted and influenced by this illegal core. Americans do pride themselves as being a law-abiding nation (even when we have regrettably not acted as such many times over). So our sense of fairness says, “be legal, no exceptions.” And we look to law enforcement agencies to correct this violation of our shores.

Unfortunately, Congress and the Executive branches that are charged with making and enforcing our immigration laws have been virtually ineffective with such enforcement. They have not stopped the flow (though our economic recession has slowed it down). Nor have they dealt with the estimated 10 million illegals already here, shy of some token headline-grabbing raids on a few employers. Congress, that land of no compromise, stands on opposite principles of inclusion versus punishment and passes no new tools to manage this problem. And the INS, Border Patrol, and IRS fail to enforce rules already in place. Employers (business and personal) continue to hire workers to do good work most current citizens are not willing to do.

Against this governmental chaos, Arizona passed a recent law requiring state law enforcement officers to force anyone who “appears to be illegal” (read “Mexican”) to prove their citizenship. (Although the law is written generically, it is safe to say that Caucasians, Asians, Mediterranean and Arab-looking residents will be de facto bypassed in this proof process.) Notwithstanding the understandable frustration that generated this law, it is a horrible law. As a native southerner growing up in the 1950s, this smacks of the worst of the Jim Crow anti-negro laws and treatments of that period. Once again, we give away our innate sense of fair play and constitutional justice to our (mostly irrational) fears. Frightened people love the law – and they assume that they are exempt from it – and policemen hate it because they know they will be dammed if they do or don’t under it. A significant proportion of the rest of the country threatens to shun Arizona by economic boycotts.

I personally doubt that this law will stand up under court appeal – at least until it gets to the U.S. Supreme Court when it is anyone’s guess with Justice Roberts and company. Until then, Congress and the Executive need to set aside their rigid either/or orthodoxy and:

• build the deterrences and staff the border to stop the illegal traffic;

• accept the reality of the 10M already here and get them to citizenship and full economic contributors. We blew it, and we need to accept our culpability by acknowledging that we are not going to send all of those people back and disrupt our economy even more;

• create the “guest worker” program that American businesses, farmers and personal employers need;

• genuinely enforce the labor laws to prevent unauthorized work – the true root of the problem.

The current hidden subculture works for no one. Illegally entering the country is not American. But neither is guilty until proven innocent, selective laws by race, or carrying “identity papers.” Arizona passed a bad law that responds to the worst in us. Congress, on both sides of the political divide, needs to act for the national good, not for parochial political benefit. Let our conscience enforce the laws of the land. But let our hearts remind us that we are all immigrants in this country, and we should be guided by the familiar poem mounted in the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddles masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

We need fear not the stranger in our midst.