Michele Waslin: 79% of the people deported through Secure Communities are non-criminals or were picked up for lower level offenses, such as traffic offenses.
In One Weekend, Tea Party, Neo-Nazis, and ‘Border Activists’ Rally behind Arizona
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Andrea Nill: As proponents of SB-1070 insist that their support of the law has nothing to do with race, they can’t deny that for some people it boils down to “white people who are not afraid to stand up,” as one Tennessee rally attendee noted.
University of Phoenix: Right Out of David Mamet
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Joseph Palermo: Any institution that calls itself a “university” yet tells its enrollment officers to “burrow” down deep into the “pain” of its students with the aim of hooking them into government-subsidized debt to rake in the profits not only doesn’t deserve to be accredited, but should be barred from having any access to federal student aid programs.
States Might Jump Off Arizona’s Immigration Bandwagon
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Seth Hoy: State legislators are citing fear of costly lawsuits and a charged political environment in which restrictive immigration legislation might not pass as factors in their decision.
Most Arizonans Believe SB-1070 Will Heighten Racism, White Supremacist Groups On The Rise
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Andrea Nill: SB-1070 enjoys high levels of support amongst members of the National Socialist Movement. However, the majority of SB-1070 supporters are not neo-Nazis. What’s troubling is that despite the widespread belief that SB-1070 will lead to increased racism and racial profiling, the majority of Arizonans still support it.
Meg Whitman Believes Arizona Law ‘Should Stand for Arizona’
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Andrea Nill: Whitman’s stance on Proposition 187 is also a contradiction in itself. During her primary campaign, Whitman released an ad featuring former Gov. Pete Wilson (R-CA) who affirmed that Whitman will be “as tough as nails” on immigration. Wilson’s endorsement might have scored some points with right-wingers, but it also meant a lot to California Latinos who remember him backing Proposition 187.
Turning the Tables at Netroots Nation: ICE Checkpoint Forces Participants to Think about Profiling
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Will Coley: About ten of us, including several undocumented DREAM students, wore navy blue shirts and affixed paper ICE badges and patches to our hats and shirts. We stopped anyone who looked “European” and let all others pass without hindrance.
Arizona’s New Law Upends Federal Priorities
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Michele Waslin: While the proponents of SB1070 say that Arizona will help ICE enforce immigration laws, the fact is that it would impinge upon ICE’s ability to fulfill its mandate, set enforcement priorities, and allocate resources effectively.
J.D. Hayworth Challenges Administration on Immigration Enforcement Weeks Before National Guard Deploys to Border
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Seth Hoy: Campaign politics aside, challenging the Obama Administration on immigration enforcement—an issue that immigration advocates have criticized the President as being too heavy-handed on, in fact—just doesn’t make sense.
SB-1070 Proponents Accuse DOJ for Not Going After ‘Sanctuary Cities’
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Andrea Nill: Proponents of Arizona’s new immigration law, SB-1070, have a new talking point: they are now arguing that if the Department of Justice (DOJ) is going to legally challenge SB-1070, it should also go after “sanctuary city” policies as well. “Sanctuary city” is a right-wing derisive term used to describe cities that have adopted community policing policies that prevent police from asking about the immigration status of or detaining and arresting immigrants solely for being undocumented.
Pistol-Packing Politicians and the Prince of Peace
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Berry Craig: Now one office seeker from the Wild West is appearing in a TV commercial, shooting guns and invoking the Almighty. She’s Machine Gun Gorman, an uber-conservative candidate for Congress in the Arizona Republican primary.
Conservatives Repeat False Claim That Phoenix Is ‘Kidnapping Capital of the World’
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Andrea Nill: Mike Huckabee defended SB-1070, telling Greta Van Susteren that Arizona was perfectly justified in passing the draconian immigration law partly because the state is the “number one kidnapping capital in the world.”
Arizona Senators Decry DOJ Lawsuit Yet Won’t Support Immigration Reform
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Seth Hoy: The point is that the “federal government’s responsibility”—a government which Sens. McCain and Kyl are certainly a part of—to reform our broken immigration system is being thwarted by the same senators who complain that the government isn’t doing enough.
Jan Brewer, the Sarah Palin of the Desert
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Mario Solis-Marich: Jan Brewer is a lousy Governor. Any objective view of her performance to date indicates that Jan Brewer is the Sarah Palin of the Desert.
Kyl Now Admits Obama Is ‘Doing A Lot’ To Secure the Border, But It’s a Question of ‘Strategy’
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Andrea Nill: However, according to Kyl, securing the border is like the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. “It’s not enough to say ‘gee, we have a lot of people down there’ — the question is but are you succeeding,” explained Kyl. Kyl believes it boils down to “different strategies that need to be employed.”
In Defense of Ethnic Studies and American History
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Simon Balto: Amidst the recent assaults on ethnic studies in Arizona and beyond that propagate a myth that such programs are divisive and exclusionary, I now find myself seeking to defend and justify their importance, and to wrestle with their place in American history.
SB 1070 “Gets Tough” on Arizona’s Housing Market
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Seth Hoy: According to the Arizona Republic, housing experts anticipate that SB 1070 will not only drive illegal immigrants out of the state, but legal residents and potential new homebuyers with them—“departures from a state where growth is the economic foundation.”
Physician Warns That Arizona Immigration Law Could Turn Doctors Into Criminals
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Andrea Nill: Lucas Restrepo, M.D., published a piece in the New England Journal of Medicine that provided a whole new angle on the effect SB-1070 will have on the medical profession. Restrepo points out that, under the law, health care providers who treat undocumented immigrants could be considered criminals.
When Does Border-First Become Border-Only?
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Seth Hoy: While President Obama and Gov. Brewer agreed that “federal inaction on a comprehensive immigration overhaul is unacceptable,” she has done nothing to substantiate that notion. Meanwhile, Gov. Brewer admits that crime is down in Arizona (as well as other border towns), even though she has repeatedly claimed that her state is “under siege” from border crime
Tens of Thousands March in Protest of Arizona’s SB 1070
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Seth Hoy: Tens of thousands of protesters from across the country gathered in Phoenix over the weekend to protest Arizona’s SB 1070. According to some reports, as many as 20,000 protesters carried flags, banners and signs reading “Do I Look Illegal?” and “Where’s the change? Mr. President, how can we trust you for re-election?”
Riding the Anti-Immigration Wave: Short- and Long-Term Political Implications
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Seth Hoy: Can the Republican Party (once the ‘Party of No,” then the “Party of Hell No” and now the “Party of Papers Please?”) really afford to further alienate the fastest-growing U.S. voting bloc—Latinos?
Sarah Palin Supports Arizona’s Law? You Betcha!
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Seth Hoy: After weeks of negative press, calls for boycotts, and talk of legal challenges to Arizona’s law, Gov. Brewer is on the defensive—as evidenced by trotting out Sarah Palin to launch a new website. For the most part, Palin used Arizona’s controversy as a soap box for her Tea Party talking points—Washington: broken, President: bad, Sarah: good.
A Modest Proposal: “Give Arizona Back to Mexico”
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John Delloro: Giving back Arizona may potentially jumpstart our economy and stimulate our national imagination towards creating a greater common vision. If returning Arizona to Mexico doesn’t work, we can always revisit and adapt Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” and sell and consume undocumented immigrants as food in the ultimate and most seamless form of assimilation into the body politic of the US.
Native American Suggests He Was Profiled By Arizona Police: ‘New Bill Targets People Of My Color’
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Andrea Nill: It’s also worth noting that a study by the ACLU on racial profiling in Arizona found that “while African-Americans, Latinos, Native-Americans and Asian-Americans are more likely to be stopped and searched by law enforcement on suspicion of carrying contraband, whites were actually more likely to be carrying contraband.”
What in the Sam Hill Is Wrong with Arizona?
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David A. Love: I don’t know what it is exactly about Arizona, but I do know that the state needs to be boycotted like a Montgomery bus. That state must realize that you cannot treat any group of people as lesser than the rest, nor can you disrespect the country’s largest minority group and expect to emerge unscathed. There must be a price to pay this time, and what better place to start than with the Arizona economy? When an Arizona lawmaker wants to boycott his own state, you know how bad it is.
Arizona Law Author Kris Kobach Wants to Cast a Wide Net Against Latinos
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Andrea Christina Nill: Wonk Room recently obtained an email written by Kris Kobach, a lawyer at the Immigration Reform Law Institute — the group which credits itself with writing the bill — to Arizona state Sen. Russell Pierce (R), urging him to include language that will allow police to use city ordinance violations such as “cars on blocks in the yard” as an excuse to “initiate quieries” in light of the “lawful contact” deletion
Jan Brewer’s Big Weekend
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Mario Solis-Marich: While the state known as Arizona seethed and Latino parents fell on their knees with Rosaries in hand to pray for the future of their children Governor Jan Brewer went out for a tony dinner with gal pal and media made millionaire Sarah Palin. So happy was Brewer about her night out that she posted it on her Facebook page. It seems that after a week of “agonizing” over her decision to make Latinos the subject of racial profiling she needed a night out to blow off the steam. I guess creating wholesale big government discrimination made her hungry.
Arizona Students Arrested for Protesting Police State
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Mario Solis-Marich: The arrests led to even more unrest as supporters of the incarcerated youth turned up at the jail and demanded their release. Today passions remain strong as young Latino activists commit to continue to hit the streets demanding national leadership on the immigration issue and a veto of the Arizona State Bill 1070.
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