A human rights emergency is happening in Arizona and the rest of us need to look lively, because it is spreading. Yesterday I heard a phone report by a group of feminists, journalists, and grassroots organizers who went on an emergency Mother’s Day delegation to Phoenix, to meet with immigrant women and children and find out the impact of Arizona’s approach to immigration.

 

            Alert for those who have not yet heard the news: Arizona recently passed a new immigration law, SB1070, which basically criminalizes being Latino/a. Police are now required to interrogate anyone who looks like an undocumented immigrant. And what does an undocumented immigrant look like?

 

            Well, as far as I’m concerned, an undocumented immigrant looks like my grandma. She came to the US in the early 1900s and, though my grandpa eventually became a citizen, she never did. Maybe she thought she was covered under his papers. Or maybe she was afraid to try because she couldn’t speak English and couldn’t read. Grandma was afraid of a lot of things, including government officials.  

 

            A lot of people in her generation didn’t have papers. I mean white people—Russians, Poles, Italians, Irish, Jews. No doubt there are still undocumented white people around, if anybody is looking, but that’s not who they are looking for in Arizona. They are looking for Mexicans, by which they mean anyone who looks like the indigenous people who lived in Arizona before the whites came. Leslie Marmon Silko, a Laguna Indian writer who lives in Tucson, has made this point repeatedly. In a 1994 essay “Border Patrol State,” she says:

 

            "’Immigration,’ like ‘street crime’ and ‘welfare fraud,’ is a political euphemism that refers to people of color. Politicians and media people talk about 'undocumented aliens' to dehumanize and demonize undocumented immigrants, who are for the most part people of color. Even in the days of Spanish and Mexican rule, no attempts were made to interfere with the flow of people and goods from south to north and north to south. It is the U.S. government that has continually attempted to sever contact between the tribal people north of the border and those to the south."

 

            So now we have Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa Country, child of Italian immigrants, setting policies that criminalize the indigenous people of the region as “illegal immigrants.” American history is full of such ironies.

 

            Joe Arpaio, currently the subject of a federal grand jury investigation for abuse of power, calls himself “America’s toughest sheriff.” He is known for making frequent sweeps through Latin neighborhoods with hundreds of officers, who stop people at random to ask for their papers and arrest them for serious infractions like jaywalking. Arpaio’s approach to law enforcement has included making male inmates wear pink underwear; limiting prisoners to two meals a day; and setting up a tent city where people arrested for immigration violations are penned outside, in temperatures that can reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

            The women’s emergency delegation to Arizona heard a lot about Arpaio and his raids from people whose family members were caught up in them, like the nine year old girl who came home from school one day and found that both her parents had disappeared. She didn’t see them again for months.  The women’s report says:

 

 

 

 

            So what’s all the fuss about? Part of the current alarmism about immigration is just politicians stirring the pot, making soup to feed the volunteers for right wing electoral campaigns. Part of it is fear that Mexican gangs and drug wars are spilling over into Arizona. The fear is legitimate—Arizona is the main path for drug and people smuggling, and both the narcotrafficantes and coyotes are pretty terrifying. Lately they have been holding their human cargos prisoner in safe houses to extort more money, only the houses are not so safe and rival gangs sometimes kidnap them, holding them for even more ransom and killing them if it is convenient. But the people who will be hurt by the new immigration law are not these bad guys but their victims, poor people just looking for work tending lawns and minding kids.  What's more, the Mexican drug wars would not be possible if gangsters could not bring in AK37s from Arizona, for Mexico has such strict gun laws that gangsters south of the border have to import their weapons from the land of the free and the NRA. And that's not even to get into the power relations between the two countries, or the way NAFTA has devastated the Mexican economy.

 

 

 

 

For more information about the human rights movement in Arizona go to the following websites, which have lots of pictures and video clips.  Altoarizona also has a letter to President Obama you can sign.

 

             Organizations involved in the Women's Emergency Human Rights Delegation include Jobs with Justice, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.