Archive for the ‘Immigration’ Category

Adding Insult to Injury

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

It is hard to imagine a policy more Un-American that Arizona’s new policy of mandating police to stop anyone who looks “illegal”.

But Arizona is trying desperately to double down on the racism

Under the ban, sent to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer by the state legislature Thursday, schools will lose state funding if they offer any courses that “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

As ThinkProgress notes, the Tucson Unified School District’s popular Mexican-American studies department is the target here. The state superintendent charges that the program exhibits “ethnic chauvinism.”

So teaching brown students about their history is equivalent to treason? Who knew?

Meanwhile, in a move that was more covert until the Wall Street Journal uncovered it, the Arizona Department of Education has told schools that teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes.

I’m not sure what an “ungrammatical accent” is. But for kids trying to learn English so they can, you know, assimilate into society, you wouldn’t want them learning from someone they can actually understand.

Your Papers Please

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Linda Greenhouse, The NY Times Pulitzer Prize-winning Supreme Court correspondent doesn’t like the new immigration law that permits police to roust anyone who isn’t white.

…I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?

It is reasonable to expect that any person of color will be subject to police harassment because of this legislation.

You know it’s funny. I haven’t heard any of the tea partiers, who are constantly complaining about big government, say anything about giving police the power to demand papers just  person looks suspicious. It is as if tea-partiers only complain about abuse of power when it issues from the fever swamp of conservative paranoid delusions. Remember the “death panels” in the health-care debate. When it comes to real abuse of power, the kind perpetrated daily by authoritarian governments, its OK as long as its brown or black people on the wrong end of the abuse.

Even some conservatives don’t like the smell of this.

Former GOP congressmans Joe Scarborough criticized the immigration law:

“…It does offend me when one out of every three citizens in the state of Arizona are Hispanics, and you have now put a target on the back of one out of three citizens, who, if they’re walking their dog around a neighborhood, if they’re walking their child to school, and they’re an American citizen, or a legal, legal immigrant — to now put a target on their back, and make them think that every time they walk out of their door they may have to prove something. I will tell you, that is un-American. It is unacceptable and it is un-American.”

But as far as I know, given research from ThinkProgress, only one sitting Republican member of Congress, Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, has explicitly opposed the Arizona law.

Might this odious law be the catalyst behind a new civil rights movement?