Latinos Take to the Streets against Anti-Immigration Law

It’s going to be a “unified” May Day in Los Angeles where, in the interest of immigration, the demonstrations will flow together to give voice to the immigrant movement, which had gone back to invisibility after the massive mobilization of three years ago. That was, however, until Arizona passed the infamous Bill 1070, signed this week by Governor Jan Brewer.

This has turned out to be a disastrous move for the image of the state, has been criticized by the federal government, the church, and by major newspapers and mocked by cartoonists and comedians.

The law, which is supposed to become effective next summer, introduces the crime of illegal immigration that authorizes the police to “determine the immigration status of the person” and arrest people “where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States.” There’s a kind of national revolt against Arizona. In the Grand Canyon state, where the main economic resource is tourism, hotel bookings have been canceled one after the other, and some students have decided not to enroll at the University of Arizona. The city council of San Francisco has voted in favor of a resolution to interrupt any economic relationship with their neighbor state. A similar step to withdraw investments and stop commercial relationships with Arizona is under examination in Los Angeles.

The away games of the Diamondbacks, the Phoenix baseball team, have been the target of protests in Chicago. The cities of Phoenix, Tucson, and Flagstaff have sued their own state. In short, it’s a public relations nightmare for a stronghold of conservatives — from Barry Goldwater to John McCain — not to mention a strong presence of Minutemen, an anti-immigrant militia whose aim is enforcing existing illegal immigration law.

Arizona is densely populated by Latinos, around one-third of its 7 million inhabitants are Hispanic, and it’s believed to have around 450,000 illegal immigrants. The law has caused an international diplomatic incident with Mexico, the country that until 1849 included what is now Arizona.

These are the risks connected to the codification of certain desires which, while useful to inflame tea parties and similar arrogant movements, become problematic once institutionalized — particularly in a federalist regime where individual states should submit to the authority of Washington. The law, strongly criticized by President Barack Obama, will be more likely invalidated by the federal courts even before becoming effective, given the impossibility of formulating such criteria as “reasonable suspicion that the person is an alien,” without basing it on racial profiling, an unconstitutional criterion.

In effect, this hard-line logic is similar to the one used in rejecting immigration outright, with the declared purpose of making the life of immigrants in Arizona so intolerable that they leave and go anywhere else. Partly, this is a provocation and, as its supporters claim, an act of exasperation directed at the federal authorities whose policy of fortification of the borders in Texas and California had the effect of pouring illegal immigration into the “Tucson Sector.” Here, customs and border guards patrol the vast desert area used as a “natural barrier” (which every year claims many victims amongst the hundreds of unfortunate people who try to walk across it).

The fact is that this law is posing both practical and ethical problems. On one hand it introduces a racial law targeting a specific minority, while, on the other hand, it makes sure that millions of people with dark skin do not trust state institutions. It doesn’t come as a surprise, then, that one of the first lawsuits to try and block the law was brought to court by a police officer in the Hispanic section of Tucson, whose job would become impossible, adding customs enforcement to his duties while surrounded by a hostile population.

The law is particularly difficult to enforce in the Southwest U.S. where the Hispanic population has historical roots and in many cities constitutes the majority of the population, inextricably linked to the economic and social fabric of the area. In this regard, one of the major fallacies that feeds anti-immigrant sentiment in the American melting pot is the presumed social cost of a population whose economic contribution is actually far higher than the services they receive. It’s an integral part of the global and “glocal” economy, as can be discovered simply by visiting a farm field in the Southwest, cultivated by a workforce that is entirely Hispanic.

The case in Arizona foreshadows the upcoming immigration reform debate which, after finance reform, should be the next battle that Obama will face, a battle that promises nothing more than moderate reform without substantial solutions to a problem that the economic crisis has temporarily minimized.

Beyond this, the state of Arizona has shown that the immigration issue is a problem of our times, suitable for exploitation by demagoguery and blatant populism.