Arizona’s legislature has passed a sweeping immigration bill that will reinstitute Jim Crow-style laws and codify the xenophobia of the bigots who make up the state’s Minutemen militia. The bill as passed will give law enforcement the ability to ascertain the immigration status of anyone they deem suspect, regardless of whether they have committed any other crime. Let’s be clear: this measure wasn’t passed as a blanket anti-immigration law; it was passed as an anti-Latino law. The implications of racial profiling are obvious to any sane person, but we are not dealing with ration and logic. We are dealing with hatred and racism, fueled by politicians who willfully spread lies, and buffeted by groups so blinded by xenophobia that they lack even the most basic compassion for their fellow man.
For starters, the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants are not criminals; they are men and women struggling to better their lives and the lives of their children. Making the decision to leave behind one’s homeland to live in a foreign country widely acknowledged outside its borders as racist and anti-foreignor takes more courage and more resolve than any of these yellow-bellied legislators and their callous supporters could ever muster. They always forget that immigrants who work here also pay rent here, buy gas here, shop here, and thus pay taxes here. Study after study shows that the myth of immigrants draining the coffers of our social welfare systems is simply that– a myth. Far more is put into the system than is taken out, including not only taxes but also cheap labor, which provides a necessary if unacknowledged chunk of our national economic well-being. Many immigrants have false documents, which means that their wages have all the state and federal taxes withheld after every paycheck. Those who send money back home to Mexico or elsewhere finds its way back into the U.S. economy, either through purchases at Wal-Mart (Mexico’s largest retailer,) chain stores and restaurants like McDonalds, KFC, Blockbuster, and Applebees, ticket sales for Hollywood movies, or even gas from Mexico’s only gas company, the state-run monopoly Pemex, which sends its petroleum to the United States for refining.
Another myth spread
by xenophobic politicians and fear-mongers is the idea of “securing our borders.” This Conservative squawking point is an absurd impossibility. Including both land and sea, the United States of America has over 19,857 miles of border, including the world’s longest with Canada, and the world’s busiest crossing, at San Ysidro between San Diego and Tijuana. Border fences and other nominal protective measures are little more than a show for paranoid Americans and machista security hawks.
Immigrants are not here illegally because they want to subvert the well-being of our nation, but rather because our system of legal immigration is a monstrosity of injustice and inefficiency, often run by fat-cat bureaucrats whose snide contempt for foreignors is palpable. They scowl as they stamp “Rejected” on visa requests for seniors to travel to the U.S. for life-saving medical procedures, condemning someone’s mother, grandmother, wife, and neighbor to certain death. And yet the lines at U.S. embassies and consulates stretch several blocks every single day, with hopeful families who have often spent more than a month’s wage in the application process for a slim chance to legally migrate here. The requirements for survival, and the desire to build a better future for themselves and their progeny, often necessitate the less-preferred method of coming here illegally, with the hope that in the future, sanity and justice might prevail.
Last Saturday morning, at a pro-immigrant rally in Los Angeles, a group of approximately 50 neo-Nazi white 
supremacists showed up to harass the protestors, waving Nazi and American flags and shouting racial and anti-Semitic epithets. I do not doubt that they are a fringe group, as most rational, enlightened people who have read a scrap of history and who have a shred of decency would never idolize Hitler or his movement. And yet it cannot be denied that they are merely a small, vocal portion of a much larger group with similar xenophobic sentiments, who may refrain from cursing and distasteful language, but instead clothe their bias in words like “secure borders” and “illegal aliens.” When the goals of the Republican party in Arizona are in sync with the desires of neo-Nazis, something is gravely wrong. It is not hard to peer beneath their rhetoric and see the ugly face of hatred looming large.
And finally, when you look past the talking points, the propaganda, the sterile terminology, you find that this is an issue dealing with human beings and their well-being. It is about families who are our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and lovers. They are our brothers and sisters. How is it that Americans can justify hundreds of billions of dollars for the machines of war, hundreds of billions of dollar for infrastructure in far-flung regions of the world, yet cannot extend their sympathies to those living amongst us? How can we deny them the ability to provide for their children, deny them safety and security for their children, deny them the basic respect that all humanity deserves? How can we claim to be a Christian nation yet refuse to share our bounty with those who, regardless of whether they hold a piece of paper, are members of our community and are deserving of the justice and decency of which we all claim to be so proud?
Latinos have surpassed African-Americans as the largest minority group in this country. Have me made so much progress in reversing racial profiling towards blacks only to replace it with the same evil propagated against the new biggest minority? In the year 2010, we are about to subjugate over 45 million people, many of them citizens, to second-class status. The law will require immigrants to always carry their papers with them, or face the consequences. Are the parallels with Nazi armbands completely lost on these people?
Wake up America! Cutting off a group of people, shutting them out of civic participation, and removing the protection and success that comes with social integration is what turns people to other methods for survival, and is what destroys their will to preserve a system that completely disregards, and actively subverts, their well-being. For those with Latino friends, family members, collegues, neighbors, confidantes and lovers, it is time to stand up against hatred, time to reach out to one another, and time to speak out against the archaic xenophobia of the “Hell no you can’t” Republican party and their Conservative supporters, who would shackle the lot of us if we let them have their way.
(From CNN and Blogdowntown.com)
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