Arizona's "He Don't Look Right To Me" Law

There's one in the spotlight, he don't look right to me,

Get him up against the wall!

- "In The Flesh", Pink Floyd

Arizona's Senate Bill (SB) 1070, the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act", was scheduled to go into effect tomorrow, July 29. Although a federal judge issued a last-minute temporary injunction blocking key portions of the bill, including those requiring police to check the U.S. citizenship status of anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally, other portions of the bill will still become law tomorrow, and further judicial action could lift the injunction. Moreover, the judge apparently didn't question the constitutionality, let alone the morality, of asking some people, but not others, for ID based on their appearance; the judicial proceedings appear to be more of a pissing contest between state and federal governments than a real debate about human rights.

SB 1070 is usually referred to as an "immigration law", but that's misleading. It's really an identification law, intended to permit authorities to categorize people based on their nationality or ethnic background. While allegedly passed out of frustration and alarm over "illegal immigration", in practice the law would most certainly have been used more against some immigrants than others. For example, chances are that the au pair from Ireland or the college student from Sweden who overstayed their visas would not have been forced to produce their identification papers. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of neighboring California, whose still-thick accent from his native Austria ought to make passing police officers wonder about his citizenship status, would also probably be spared from producing ID on the spot. The Arizona law was clearly targeted against the brown-skinned Hispanics who are imagined to be pouring over Arizona's southern border from Mexico, Central America, and South America. What's more disturbing than the specific mechanics of the law is the motivation behind it.

Is it merely coincidence that this law was drafted and passed during the term of this country's first non-white President? The news is frequently full of all-white protest groups who clearly hate the fact that Barack Obama is President, question whether he was actually born in the United States ("papers please, Mr. President"), and insist that they want "their" country back, presumably taking it back from those people in Washington who don't look the same as they do.

It's also interesting to note that this law was passed in Arizona, which as a territory during the Civil War requested, and was granted, membership in the Confederate States of America and swore their allegiance to CSA President Jefferson Davis. Back in the good ole days of the Confederacy, you didn't need to rely on papers to determine a person's status, other than to find out which white person legally owned a particular black slave.

Going even further back in history, the Arizona territory was originally formed out of land taken by the U.S. military from Mexico by force, in the Mexican-American War (which, interestingly, Abraham Lincoln opposed as a member of Congress). Arizona is also home to many native Americans, who might have been better off if they had taken the SB 1070 approach to illegal immigration when the first ships arrived from Europe.

When I was in the 12th grade, my high school German class took a trip to Munich, in what was then called West Germany. We took a train to Salzburg, Austria, and as we approached the border between the two countries, the porters walked up and down the train cars saying "Papiere bitte" (papers please). We all froze at the sound of that phrase, which immediately conjured up images from countless movies about World War II in which Jews and other refugees from the Nazi German authorities got caught without proper identification. On that same trip, we also visited the museum on the site of the Dachau concentration camp, where many of those people without the right papers ended up. Is this where we want to end up as a country?

My two daughters were both born in Peru, and adopted by me and my wife when they were infants. They are now naturalized U.S. citizens, but those official certificates from the federal government which prove that status are not among the items carried in their pocketbooks on a daily basis. If our family decided to take a vacation in Arizona, and SB 1070 were allowed to be fully implemented as originally planned, would my daughters be stopped and questioned, and perhaps taken away from us, because their brown skin makes them look like they don't belong?

A judge may have temporarily blocked this specific law, but not the underlying racism behind it. SB 1070 wasn't really the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act". It should have more properly been named the "Support Our White Neighborhoods Act."