Dear Gov. Jan Brewer:
Like you, I arrived in Arizona in 1970 as a carpetbagging immigrant.
An O'odham elder on the Gila River Indian Community took pity on me, though, and taught me a bit of Arizona history. One of our first outings was to the concrete remains of the Butte Japanese internment camp on his reservation, where thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans were detained in the Sonoran Desert for three years. At one point in the mid-1940s, it was reportedly the fourth largest city in Arizona.
"Wax on, wax off," my O'odham friend mused, referring to famous line in the popular Karate Kid film.
Noriyuki "Pat" Morita, the American-born star and Oscar nominee, had been imprisoned as a child at this Arizona internment camp, as well.
For my O'odham friend, whose indigenous community has resided on both sides of the Arizona and Mexico border for centuries, the Japanese internment camp was just one episode in Arizona's (and our nation's) long and twisted history of anti-immigrant spasms.
"Beware of outsiders coming to Arizona," my friend warned, "they've always been the most anti-immigrant." My O'odham friend was fond of the popular slogan in those days: Welcome to Arizona, Now Go Home.
Let's be clear: The issues of a porous border, and immigrants and crime rates, have nothing to do with the latest Arizona debacle.
As Arizona's immigration soap opera plays out in the national headlines this week, this will only be another battle in the 200-year culture war over who will be the gatekeeper of the American Dream in Arizona -- and whether or not the implicit historicide of state's past will be in full view for those who care to take a deeper look.
Since its inception, Arizona has always sizzled as the nation's final frontier over who controls and defines the American Dream -- transient and fickle, not quite California, never Mexico, southern as much as southwestern, more invented than understood.
Dear Gov. Brewer, I thought of my O'odham friend when I read your outrageous comments that Arizona has been "under terrorist attack" by undocumented workers, and that the majority of illegal immigrants are "drug mules."
Even with increasing immigration, you know that crimes rates in Arizona are the lowest in four decades, or since we both arrived in Arizona.
While some news reports even question whether your cronies will financially gain from the anti-immigrant law, the truth is that you are simply carrying on the divisive history of the state that dates back to your fellow Phoenician politician Jack Swilling and his effort to drag Arizona into the Confederacy.
No one ever mentioned to Swilling, I bet, that the first non-native (illegal immigrant) to enter Arizona in the 1530s was an African Moor scout and slave -- most likely a Muslim -- who led the first Spanish expedition. I stumbled on a solitary landmark for Estevan, a park in Tucson, which featured the only swimming pool for African Americans for years.
The Confederacy and the federal government both recognized Arizona on February 14th, Valentine's Day, a date that you now celebrate for Arizona's statehood in 1912.
Yet, over a century ago, carpetbagging Arizona politicians bucked a US House Committee's recommendation to conjoin Arizona and New Mexico as a single state. Their reasoning: "Arizona is America, New Mexico is Mexican," and the reality that New Mexico's Mexican Republicans would outnumber Arizona's Anglo Democrats unleashed a racist campaign that shocked the nation. Arizona preferred to give up its state rights, rather than acquiesce to a "different race."
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Five years after its statehood in 1912, Arizona politicians and mining interests made good on their promise of ethnic separation, as a harbinger of anti-immigrant policies ready to spread across the nation. A decade before nearly one million Mexican workers were deported from the US, having worked in the agricultural and booming 1920 industries, an Arizona mining company violently rounded up striking immigrant copper miners in Bisbee in 1917 and deported them by force.
The first of many "great deportations" had commenced. Governors like yourself found a convenient tool: Over the past century, Arizona's border crisis and "illegal immigrants" have been rediscovered every 20 years or so by carpetbagging politicians whenever the economy weakens, wars end, or election time heats up.
Real Arizonans know better.
"America is best seen through the eyes of immigrants," wrote nationally acclaimed Arizona novelist Alfredo Vea. In his debut novel of immigrants and migrant workers on the edge of Phoenix, La Maravilla, Vea's Yaqui Indian grandfather tells his grandson: "You don't become America, America becomes you."
Gov. Brewer, you and I became Arizona, even as recent carpetbaggers, just as illegal and legal immigrants have defined Arizona's economy, cultures and histories over the past two centuries.
For Arizonan Balbir Singh Sodhi, a turban-wrapped immigrant Sikh from India, that America and American dream died on September 15, 2001, when he was gunned at his gas station in Phoenix -- the first post-911 hate-crime murder. His gunman, Frank Silver Roque, had gone a killing spree to "shoot some towel-heads."
"To undo a mistake is always harder than not to create one originally, but we seldom have the foresight," Eleanor Rooseveltdeclared, when she visited the Japanese internment camp in Gila River, Arizona in 1943. She added: "We have no common race in this country, but we have an ideal to which all of us are loyal: we cannot progress if we look down upon any group of people amongst us because of race or religion."
Dear Gov. Brewer, when Arizona, under your leadership, enacts the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act this Thursday, July 29th, Arizona's borders and immigration machinations will not be resolved.
But you, dear governor, will remind the nation that the denial of the American Dream in Arizona remains a never-ending mistake.
Ben Daniel: Arizona Immigration Law Founded on Fear and Falsehood
I don't like the law because it encourages racial profiling; I don't like the law because I doubt it's constitutional; but most of all I don't like the law because it was passed in response to fears about immigration with little grounding in reality.
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While claiming to be "pro-immigrant" it's these modern day "Simon Legrees" you are supporting. Such rhetoric is also a slap in the face of all *legal immigrants* from around the world. & for those of us whose ancestors were here long before the Mayflower arrived, we understand that the land only supports so many immigrants before it is destroyed & living conditions worsen. That's why we have a *legal* immigration system & legal quotas each year.
Slavery is NOT the answer.
*Controlled borders*
*Ending birthright citizenship*
*Worker visas at minimum wage*
*No amnesty*
These ARE the answers.
Once paid the minimum wage suddenly Mexican workers will be fairly compensated & wont be in such demand.
ILLEGAL ALIENS need to go back to their own countries to make their dreams possible.
The ugliness, distortion, and outright lies of the republicans and their race baiting has been a shocking spectacle to see. There was an article on the generation gap in american politics that points to the fact that the GOP appeals to the fears of the elderly (as seen at Teabagger rallies) while the Democratic Party's elevtion in 2008 was made possible by the enthusiasm of the young.
I have read articles of latino citizens in Arizona who have already faced police harassments and threats over SB 1070 and are planning to leave the state to a place where they will not face racial harassment from the police over the color of their skin. Jan Brewer must be stopped in November or else she will drag Arizona into economic collapse, her "government" looks more like a banana republic than a democratic administration. There seems to e a willingness to deny the obvious, that her misrule and addiction to lies and race baiting are destroying the State of Arizona...
Why is it "ugliness"?
http://www.wsbtv.com/video/23438712/index.html
We need to secure the border for our own safety and not just from the 12,000 people who cross it illegally each day.
It is not race, but a laundry list of separate issues that makes people support SB1070.
One is that many feel we have too many foriegners here without permission, which most nations require. Asking for amnesty for 12 mllion foriegn nationals seems a bit much for Americans, especially since Mexico claims most of them are theirs.
The border cannot be secured except through military means because Mexico would rather work against us than with us.
But race really isn't the issue; It's nationality.
The Japanese interment is almost a good example. They were American citizens and legal immigrants. The hysteria of war led many to think they were the "enemy within".
These are foriegners who are not immigrants and from nations close enough that many could simply walk home. As much as Mexico and other nations would lke us to think of them as our citizens they are not. And most Americans agree that 12 million unregistered in our country is far too many. Arizona is asking them to leave. Even a judge said that Arizona has the right to be as inhospitable as they wish to illegal aliens.
Sorry, it's not race, it's nationality and no amount of propaganda will change that.