I like Arizona. It has a dry climate, beautiful skies, and the Grand Canyon. But now it is about to be hit with a boycott, and may lose the granddaddy of federal civil rights law suits. What can be done to help the state?
This all seems to be about illegal aliens; everyone appears to be worried about then. A friend of mine, the grand-daughter of immigrants from Eastern Europe, told me that while she supported legal migration, she totally opposed illegal immigration. She is also a big hobbyist of genealogy, tracking her family roots overseas. Go figure.
So who are these evil-doers, that have everybody in a tizzy? And how can knowing this help Arizona? History is a useful guide in this case, or, as Al Smith used to say, "Let's look at the record."
This topic seems like one of those longstanding debates that goes back a long time, maybe even to the dawn of the Republic. After all, we've been arguing about this forever, had illegal aliens since the days of the Founding Fathers, correct?
Simply put: no. That is not accurate. The term illegal alien only dates from the 1920s, no earlier.
There is useful history here. While America has always had immigrants -- it was founded by people whose ancestors weren't born here, for crying out loud -- we didn't divide them into categories till fairly recently.
During the late nineteenth century, Americans were becoming concerned about newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe. We called this the new immigration, compared to the older streams from Northern and Western Europe. Places like the British Isles (excluding Irish--they were only good at being big city bosses) and Germany. We had our favorites, of course--the old was good, the new was bad--and we passed some mild restrictive laws, but no one knew from illegal aliens.
In 1914 the First World War started, and cut off the flow of people migrating from Europe -- anywhere in Europe -- to the United States. No one could get across war zones to make it to the ports, and passenger ships weren't going to buck the submarine threat, either.
Many Americans feared that after the war there would be a flood of immigrants, not from Latin America or Asia, but from the places that had been sending immigrants here before the war: Southern and Eastern Europe.
And in one sense they were right. With the end of the Great War, 1919 saw the second highest number of immigrants arrive at our shores of that entire wave of immigration; only in 1906 were the figures any higher.
Adding to the concern was the 1920 Census, which showed that for the first time in American history, 51% of Americans lived in cities. Forget the fact that the Census defined cities as any place with 2,500 or more residents--I've lived in apartment buildings with more people--the old ways of the small town and the farm were going. And immigrants were taking over from the native born.
So Americans took action. They passed the immigration bill of 1921.
This was a nasty bit of work. It set a total limit of immigrants allowed in each year at roughly 350,000. It also set a quota for each country, derived from their percentage of the population.
Put in as plain language as census descriptions ever get, each country's quota was based on how many people had either immigrated directly from, or else descended from, folks who had arrived from that nation.
This was a rotten game, designed to rig the results. If ten people had arrived in 1750 from someplace, anyplace -- let's just take... oohhh... Great Britain as an example -- the number of that original cluster's descendants would be huge by the twentieth century. And the base year was 1910, set back a decade to exclude from the figures all those who had recently fled the devastation in Europe.
But that wasn't sufficient. In 1924 we revised this with another immigration act, even lousier. This one cut the yearly total in half, to 165,000.
Even more important, it moved the base year to 1890, thus totally excluding from the quota count the entire generation of immigrants who had recently come and made their home in America, from Southern and Eastern Europe. The figures for some nations were moved way down under this revision, way up for other nations. Guess which kinds of places fell into each category?
Thus, these bills were specifically designed to keep out, not just too many immigrants, but immigrants from specific places, places that were undesirable. Places like Italy and Poland. Places that were Catholic and Jewish.
But these laws also changed our language. Because the quotas were so low from the countries where a lot of people wanted to emigrate to America, and so rich from countries where there weren't many people interested in coming here, there was pressure to beat the quotas, to come in over and above them. Thus we created for the first time, the terms "legal" and "illegal" aliens.
To put this bluntly -- but also as historically precise as possible -- the concept of illegal alien did not come about to describe people from Mexico, or Latin America, or even Asia. It was created to describe folks from Southern and Eastern Europe. If you are Greek or Russian or Polish (Catholic or Jewish), Italian or Slovak, your ancestors were the ones we created the term "illegal alien" for, to keep out the rest of your kind. And the folks who came up this idea probably wanted to send your family back as well, even if they had come over before the law was passed. You're the first generation of "illegal aliens".
So how can this help Arizona, in its current difficulty? The new bill says that law enforcement officials at any level can stop anyone and ask for their citizenship papers, force them to prove that they're not illegal aliens, or face dire consequences. Opponents of the law claim this will violate federal law, which bans racial profiling. And that would lead to big problems for the state.
So history provides a simple, effective solution for Arizona's dilemma. Simply look back to the traditional definition of illegal alien, and ask everyone for their papers. All those folks with funny European names, the children and grandchildren of the people who terrorized us years ago. Yes, that word. That's how scared we were of these people. Who knows what germs, disease, bombs, their descendants are carrying?
Checking all these white folks for their papers, and incarcerating those without proper documentation, will have a lot of impacts. First, it will make Arizona a safer place. Second, it will eliminate the charges of racial profiling that surround this law.
And third, it should do wonders for tourism to the state.
I'm afraid that the need to find a scapegoat for current economic troubles is turning into a deepening of the ethnic/racial divides that have troubled the US since its beginnings. While I do feel that the US has done more to work on "diversity issues" than any other country, the bad times are erasing a lot of progress.
She also suggests residents of the state wear buttons that read, "I Could Be Illegal," much like gentile residents of Denmark wore Stars of David when the Nazis took over.
http://www.nde.state.ne.us/SS/irish/unit_2.html
Ironically, Irish immigrants evolved from being among the most hated group to one of the most politically influential, a point that anyone paying attention might note.
It seems that the need to find a scapegoat group is a constant; the charges against the group stay the same, only the scapegoat changes.
The House Engrossed Version can be found here:
http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/sb1070h.pdf
the millions of "illegals" here now are enabled by citizens here. They are here to work to provide for their families and laws meant to prevent them being here are useless until and unless we crack down much harder on those who hire them.The problem with criminals isn't an "illegal alien" problem, if they are doing crime they already ARE illegal.
Building a fence has been tried throughout history , how well did that work out for the Great Wall?
1 … create a guest worker program, giving first opportunity for ALL of the jobs involved to citizens first and limiting them, as necessary, as unemployment requires. This would allow guest workers to enter and leave the country at will and with dignity through standard ports of entry, without adverse effects to the American public, turning an adversarial relationship into a cooperative one.
2 … severe criminal sanctions for employers of illegal aliens outside of guest worker limits.
3 … remove the question of amnesty from government's hands and the corruption of politics by requiring a 75% majority public vote on ALL increases in immigration as well as amnesty for illegal aliens.
4 … repeal the obsolete provisions of the 14th Amendment making anchor babies citizens. Our creation of anchor babies is tantamount to shooting ourselves in the foot. We must stop it.
5 … zero “positive” rights and zero entitlements beyond emergency medical care and other necessities for all non-citizens. Tax employers of guest workers to pay for emergency health care and other unavoidable expenses associated with the workers’ presence in America, effectively adding these costs where they belong – to the products produced.
I realize that this would throw a monkey wrench into the left's plans to import voters as well as corporate interest in getting cheap labor, but it is long past time.
ENFORCE THE LAW!!! NO AMNESTY!!!
Please convince your own state governments to arrange for safe passage of the 400,000 undocumented workers currently in AZ to your own home state.
Once they get there , give them your job. Any takers?
If not mind your own business.
And the small percentage which make up the violent offenders, the murderers, the gangs, the terrorists, the drug smugglers, carriers of infectious diseases, and all who harbor malicious intent? I would like to see them move into your neighborhood, so that you can enjoy the benefits of unfettered immigration first hand, not as some far-away self-righteous observer.
I haven't seen in this whole discussion is what constitutes "proof of citizenship?" I'm a gringo, born in the USA, but what would it take to prove that? Needless to say, I don't have a green card. Drivers licenses can be faked, so I don't know that would suffice. Will I have to carry my passport when (and now IF) I visit Arizona? Even when it eventually would turn out that I was a bonafide citizen of the USA, I could face 6 months in jail plus a fine for not having the papers on me.
Anyone caught swimming in Arizona can, I imagine, be safely assumed to lack proof of citizenship on their person. Law enforcement would be justified in assuming they were in violation of the law and should arrest them. At least, that kind of crackdown should be free of racial profiling.
That's the answer: arrest all swimmers. And nudists.
At $25,000 per birth, the initial cost to us, just for the 400,000 ANCHOR BABIES being born per year, is $10 billion dollars.
Education costs per child $10,000 per year, $120,000 per child for 12 years of education, another 48 BILLION DOLLARS FOR EDUCATION
EVERY YEAR, WITH THE BIRTH OF 400,000 ANCHOR BABIES, AMERICANS INCUR AN ADDITIONAL DEBT OF $58 BILLION DOLLARS; EVERY YEAR, AD INFINITUM
AND THAT'S JUST THE COST OF BIRTH AND EDUCATION. IT DOESN'T INCLUDE WELFARE, FOOD STAMPS, SECTION-8 HOUSING, ETC, OR THE RELATIVES THAT WILL NOW BE ALLOWED INTO OUR UNITED STATES. THE COSTS ARE BANKRUPTING US.
IT'S TIME TO END BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP FOR ILLEGALS
http://bit.ly/7vCkH6