Lunch Seminar - Razing Arizona: Critique of Immigration Enforcement Regimes

17 Feb 2011

• Intro
• Arizona's SB90
• Gov Ritter contemplated signing on to Secure Communities, which is a program that includes law enforcement sharing fingerprints with ICE
• Chris Newman (DU grad)
• World magazine calls a certain trend the "Arizonification of America"
• Arizona has emerged as a metaphor and shaper of the larger debate of America's identity crisis
• What's happening in Arizona raises a number of questions that go beyond headlines
• Who is the "we" of the US?
• What do we want to do, as a country, with those who are here illegally?
• One pole: Making them citizens
• The other pole: Deportation and even affirmative punishment (This is Arizona's stance, and a departure from past policy)
• What is the role of police and law enforcement in enforcing and shaping imm. law?
• What rights are sacrificed?
• What social movement will emerge to counter this rising nativist movement?
• My goal: A nationalist conception of America
• Tangent: a bill has been introduced to make AZ the only state in the country to outlaw day laborer centers
• Day laborers are the protagonists in this struggle.
• "The irony of day laborers is that they embody the American dream, and yet they are widely abused and despised in the name of the American dream." ~Author of Fast Food Nation
• First principles
• We're a nation of immigrants, with three groups of people
• Illegal immigrants
• Native Americans
• African Americans
• The point: immigration laws are mutable
• "Illegal immigrant" is a racist, deprecating term. Only actions are illegal
• The term originated in the law that restricted Chinese immigration
• We need to expand what is an appropriate notion of nationalism, for us
• Other countries have bloodlines
• American nationalism is "an imagined community"—common ideals
• We are a nation of unauthorized immigrants who have certain ideals, one of which is to eliminate borders
• (We like tearing down borders for commerce, but not for people)
• The good news: consensus that our immigration laws need reform
• The bad news: it's unlikely that we'll pass reform law soon
• There's a vacuum, and states have entered into it.
• There's a growth of a nativist movement, foreshadowing the tea party.
• There's concern about the inevitable emergence of a nonwhite majority.
• Three goals:
• Policy of attrition
• Laser fence at the border
• Limit to the number of people entering
• The other side of the debate
• Burdened by complexity
• How to regulate immigration?
• No rational discussion possible in DC
• Efforts like those of AZ have poisoned rational discussion
• There is an intersection of the "is" and the "ought" in law—of politics and legislation
• Alfredo Gutieras (from Arizona, founder of a firm)
• You don't want to become Arizonan—Arizona is becoming a word for hate and evil, for what Mississippi once was.
• Hate is contagious.
• Arizona
• Comes to be in 1848, when only White men were citizens
• Arizona was Confederate
• Mexicans were Mistisos, Indians, Mulatos... Not white
• People say "we hate illegal immigrants, not immigrants." Actually, Arizonans hate Mexicans, and have since the state's beginning.
• 1932 repatriation begins
• It's supposed to be aimed at immigrants
• Actually it's just aimed at Mexicans
• Historians say 30% of the people deported were citizens
• "Voluntary departure" is never voluntary. In '32 it was at the point of a gun. Now it's often for people who contract to leave after being in prison for months.
• Operation Wetback
• Forcing out Mexicans who had come in to help harvest vegetables
• Ended in an international scandal
• The program (brosero?) preceding it managed to bring in 4million people
• Question: "What part of illegal don't you understand?" Answer: "What part of complicit don't you understand?"
• The seller act (?) in the 60s, quotas from other countries were done away with, but
• Quotas were imposed on Mexicans/Western Hemisphere
• That created an artificial illegal immigrant crisis
• Operation gatekeeper: A set of operations, started in the Clinton administration, trying to stop Immigration from flowing through the normal routes, and t force it into the AZ desert—the idea being that no one would be crazy enough to cross the desert.
• What that proved, is that the govt never understood what propels immigration in this country, and don't undertand the connection between Mexicans on both sides of the border.
• Ronald Hampton (director of an institute; black, active in AZ politics)
• As a police officer, I found that you cannot protect a community that will not talk to you.
• I worked a foot beat in DC for 20 yrs
• To be successful in crime prevention, you need to have a relationship with the community
• "Secure communities" would have brought a lot of harm to Washington DC. That would have been a disaster, and we defeated it.
• You can't do your job if you're alienating the people you're trying to serve
• ICE-police collaboration damages the already-fragile relationship of trust at the core of the police's ability to protect the commnity.
• Janett Visgierra (from Mexico, in CO for 13 yrs; small business owner; impacted by immigration law)
• I'd like to continue talking about the relationship of the police and the community
• We just moved to Aurora, from Denver, for diversity
• Aurora
• has a lot of unjustified arrests
• We're trying to break the connection between police and immigration
• We're working with the police—they've showed us their curriculum for training, and they've admitted they don't have the training to play a role in immigration
• Also, they don't want to play a role in immigration
• These bills break up family and community unity, breaking trust with the police
• I'm currently in the process of deportation, even though I have three children born in the US, because of a simple traffic violation
• These laws put children and families at risk, and damage them psychologically
• People are afraid to talk to the police, to even go outside and run errands
• People blame immigrants
• I've been here 14 years and I've paid taxes, hired and trained Americans, and never received any public benefits. We give to communities, not take from them.
• We don't need any more anti-immigration laws here in Colorado
• Look at your own family tree—we're almost all immigrants!
• Immigration has always existed, and it's not going to stop because of laws.
• We need to all work together to fight common problems, not divide.
• Laws cost money.
• Questions and Answers
• Q: Have you dealt with White Nationalists [Look this up.]?
• A: White supremacy often does enter into the discussion in AZ. Known Neonazis have public marches there. Documented reports of racial profiling acknowledged and accepted even in Congress as a price of securing borders.