SUBMITTED BY: Vasu Sunkara
Immigration reform gets people mad no matter what side you’re on. To the right, the immigrant is an illegal, taking jobs away from Americans and stealing this country away from those who rightly live here. To the left, the immigrant is undocumented, has lived in the shadows for too long and is the butt of cheap jokes and the easy victim of the unscrupulous.
The Arizona Law, SB 1070, is a dramatic departure from the previous practice of states voluntarily partnering up with the Feds to arrest undocumenteds who have committed a crime. Still, proponents celebrate this law as common sense legislation that is way overdue. Critics, however, argue that the floodgates to racial profiling have been opened. The Obama administration has asked Attorney General Eric Holder to critically review the law to ensure that civil rights are not being infringed under the current language.
The most powerful argument on the right is that the critics are naive. The argument goes that a tough policy requires decisions that have an impact. Follow that up with a stronger wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, and you might actually get some results. The proponents assert that no longer will there be the empty flailing that has characterized how the politically correct left wing has tried to deal with this hot-button issue.
I wonder who is being naive. The Arizona law presumes that every single uniformed officer will only stop a person with the highest amount of suspicion; that they will do so without really wanting to, because true neutrality only comes when not wanting something to happen. None of these officers will feel a swell of power in stopping a person. Not a one will have the temptation to intimidate someone with jail. There will be no concern that, since nobody is looking over their shoulder, the officer might say or do something that crosses the lines of decency.
All in all, it assumes that every single police officer in the state of Arizona is an upstanding, rule-abiding citizen. After all, as Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio states in his defense of arresting undocumenteds: “Illegal immigration is against the law. I am the head of a law enforcement agency that enforces the laws of the land. I am doing my job as sheriff of this county when my deputies arrest illegal immigrants.”
Sheriff Arpaio is now under sanctions from his supervisors for not following the same rules he holds so dear. He has refused to provide the financial and operational records of his department, despite a subpoena and repeated requests. The Board of Supervisors has unanimously restricted the spending of his department. It seems that the rules for at least one law enforcement official are moot. That this person has a budget of $269 million and oversees policing of a county that includes Phoenix makes the following question even more alarming: If this is how he is with the county Board of Supervisors, his bosses, how is he with undocumented workers?
People say that times are too tough for Americans to be generous. The mistake these people make is that the greatness of our country is not in the occasions we were generous, but rather it is in our consistent effort to be generous despite our failings. We lose our compass when we forget who we are ““ a generous country born from ideals of justice and equality. To Arizona, don’t forget your roots. It’s time to move forward on guest worker permits, finding the undocumenteds and giving them citizenship, and getting on with the work of this country.
Sunkara is a graduate student in health policy.