Hispanic Fanatic

As always, I appreciate the comments, so let me thank Steven, Ike, and everyone else who posts here.

Now, let me tell you about one evening when I was in college. After a particularly egregious party, I accidently laced up a friend’s shoes, thinking they were mine. She had big feet, and they were the same brand as my own. In any case, I walked around for a day or so before she pointed out that we had unintentionally switched footwear.

“But now we truly know each other,” I said. “Because we have walked many miles in each other’s shoes.”

She was just annoyed that I had stretched out her Nikes.

Of course, my literal embrace of the ancient saying didn’t help me to see the world from her perspective. All of us process events and concepts through our own cultural filters, and even the most open-minded individual has occasional trouble understanding someone else’s point of view.

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All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The Fourteenth Amendment

U.S. Constitution

It’s probably not a shocker that I’m a liberal person. Still, I always had a healthy respect for the libertarian viewpoint. I thought it was based on principles (e.g., less government, fewer regulations, control of one’s reproductive choices, etc) rather than the virulent fear and hatred that fuels so much of the modern Republican Party.

I even tried to give Senate candidate Rand Paul the benefit of the doubt for his truly idiotic and potentially dangerous statement that private businesses can discriminate based on race.

“He’s just being a hardcore libertarian,” I thought. “He can’t be that racist.”

Then Paul let loose with his latest conservative broadside. He said that the children of illegal immigrants who are born in the United States should not be granted citizenship.

With that comment, it’s difficult to ignore Paul’s implication that, in his opinion, the United States has way too many Latinos. There is no principle here.

Paul, and anyone who agrees with him, has to be willing to ignore the Constitution’s unambiguous statement that everyone born here is a citizen. They also have to be eager to overturn decades of court precedents, an action that would require a decision from a monumentally activist judge (one of those guys I thought conservatives hated).

Still, plenty of conservatives have championed the anti-birthright position in recent years, despite the right wing’s oft-stated love of the U.S. Constitution.

By the way, here’s a study question for all social conservatives: If forced to chose, do you revere the words of the Constitution or the Bible more? As a follow-up, have you read either one?

But back to the topic at hand, which is anchor babies.

Randy Terrill, a Republican state representative in Oklahoma who is trying to get an anti-birthright bill passed, says that in a worst-case scenario, “Children of invading armies would be considered citizens of the U.S.”

I must admit that I had never thought of this. In Terrill’s grim assessment of our future, invading armies (from some unknown or unnamed country) send brigade after brigade of pregnant soldiers to charge our front lines. Hesitant to fire upon the rampaging moms-to-be, our soldiers let them overrun the nation. Support troops, perhaps infantrywomen in their second trimester, manage to crawl under the barb wire or hop the fence without putting pressure on their swollen bellies.

Mere months later, the soldiers start giving birth. These pseudo-citizens are then granted citizenship, and the United States falls to the invading hordes. It’s truly evil genius.

Now, I’ve written before about the concept of revoking citizenship upon birth, and I expressed my support for amending the Constitution … as long as we really go for it. That is, let’s reject citizenship for everyone born here, whether the parent is an undocumented worker or a ninth-generation American. Every child is a legal resident, but can’t become a citizen until he or she passes a basic test – the way naturalized citizens do.

For some reason, this idea has never caught on.

The truth is that we just don’t want Maria from Mexico to give birth to a kid inside the California border, then have to call the offspring a citizen. So by all means, let’s ignore those sections of the Constitution that we don’t like.

But could we try not to pretend that there’s anything like principles or consistency on display? They are simply not present in this debate.

Embracing my god-given Second Amendment rights, I plan to buy an armful of automatic weapons and stuff the closets in my house with every manner of shotgun, pistol, and blunderbuss if I have to.

You see, crime nationwide has skyrocketed due to the influx of illegal immigrants, and…

What’s that you say? Just about every statistic has shown that violent crime is actually down in America? Well, that’s not what I’ve heard on cable news networks, but ok.

Still, it must be true that crime is way up in places where illegal immigrants congregate. Just look at our friends in Arizona, where stories of murder, rape, carjacking, kidnapping, assault, and arson are plentiful – all at the hands of the undocumented.

Senator John McCain says crossover crime from Mexico has led to “violence—the worst I have ever seen” (and that guy was in the Vietnam War!). Meanwhile, Governor Jan Brewer insists that her state has “been inundated with criminal activity.”

But in truth, as I’ve written before, violent crime is down in Arizona. For that matter, violence is also down in such immigrant-heavy cities as Phoenix, El Paso, and New York City.

In fact, a new study implies that cities with lots of immigrants may actually be (wait for it)… safer than other places in America. How can this be?

Well, we’d have to listen to a Harvard professor who is, no doubt, a typical elitist with fancy book learnin’ on his resume. But let’s indulge him.

Professor Robert J. Sampson, in an interview with writer Christopher Dickey, says that “immigrants move into neighborhoods abandoned by locals and help prevent them from turning into urban wastelands. They often have tighter family structures and mutual support networks, all of which actually serve to stabilize urban environments.” Sampson adds that “if you want to be safe, move to an immigrant city.”

Could this be why several police chiefs from around the country recently met with Attorney General Eric Holder? The chiefs stated that Arizona’s new law, if enacted elsewhere, could backfire.

“We will be unable to do our jobs,” said Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck. “Laws like this will actually increase crime, not decrease crime.”

The primary reason, of course, is because the new law erodes any trust between immigrant communities and the police. Also, cops would be spending less time chasing down the truly bad guys and more time booking Latinos who tried to pick up a gig outside Home Depot.

These real-world problems with the law are in addition to such minor qualms as a potential increase in racial profiling and the fact the law may violate the U.S. Constitution. But let’s not quibble.

The funny thing is that there are plenty of legitimate concerns about illegal immigration that conservatives can bring up. But they have insisted on exaggerating fears of violence. Now that they’ve committed to this path, they don’t want to hear that passing laws such as SB 1070 could actually increase crime.

But then we hear about Abel Moreno, of Charlotte, North Carolina. He called 911 when he saw a man assaulting a woman in public. The guy was arrested and faces multiple charges.

But Moreno, who is an undocumented worker, is now in line to be deported. His attorney hopes he can get Moreno a temporary visa. In the meantime, Moreno has lost his job.

I’m sure the next immigrant who witnesses a crime will be only too happy to be thrust into a similar situation by calling the cops. He’ll feel a great surge of civic pride, even after the police slap the cuffs on him.

But that’s not my concern. I’ll just buy more guns.

A friend of mine really wants to get married. He’s at the stage of life where he feels like he has to settle down, have children, and do the whole domestic thing.

The reasons that people feel this societal pressure could fill up blog posts for years, but I’m going to sidestep that rich vein to concentrate on something he said that is more relevant to this blog.

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I’m hoping that my fellow blogger Macon D doesn’t sue me, but he had such an interesting post recently that I’m just going to steal his topic outright and run with it.

At his site, Stuff White People Do, Macon D asks if many whites believe that improvements for ethnic minorities come only at their expense.

Well, as a partial answer, let me say that as far as I can tell, America is the only country in the world where the most economically powerful take to the streets to protest that they are being oppressed.

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I’ve learned a lot of things by following the debate over illegal immigration. For example, I’ve found out that illegal immigrants routinely break into people’s homes and carjack Americans with impunity. I mean, there are scores of horror stories on internet message boards and cable tv news programs about what happened to good, God-loving (or do I mean God-fearing?) communities once a day-laborer moved in next door.

Apparently, it’s not a small percentage of troublemakers who commit these crimes either, but each and every undocumented worker. Therefore, we cannot consider a pathway to citizenship for any of them. They are all guilty. So let’s raze their neighborhoods to the ground.

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Thanks, as always, to Macon D and Ankhesen Mie for their support. And thanks to all of you who checked out my new gig at Change.org (although, as Ankhesen can attest to, there is more serious crazy among readers of that site than I assumed there would be).

In any case, let’s talk about our favorite people: the architects of Arizona’s anti-immigration law.

The law’s backers believed that their get-tough approach to illegal immigration would garner them nationwide praise and respect. Indeed, many states have proposed enacting a similar version of the law, proof of its effectiveness at riling up conservatives.

However, the law’s supporters must have thought that the only individuals who would object were illegal immigrants themselves and a few bleeding hearts. That hasn’t been the case.

First, the initial public outcry has already been effective in changing the most odious portion of the law. Under the revision, police cannot stop people for the sole reason of questioning their immigration status (in theory at least). The fact that the law’s backers thought everybody would be fine with a cop frisking people at random shows how invincible they believed their position to be.

However, that revision hasn’t prevented further protest. We’ve seen tens of thousands gather from Los Angeles to New York to demonstrate against the law.

More important, talk of boycotting Arizona and/or its corporations has intensified and cannot be dismissed as empty threats. About thirty organizations, and untold thousands of individuals, have pledged to avoid the state. In addition, more than twenty conventions, conferences, and meetings have relocated out of Arizona because of the law.

To get that many people to flee the area, one usually has to announce something truly horrific, like “We start filming Battlefield Earth 2 here tomorrow.” But all that it’s taken is one misguided law.

Recently, St. Paul jumped to the front of what might prove to be a long line of cities banning official travel to the state of Arizona.” Those crazy lefty towns of Los Angeles and San Francisco have also decided to skip sending anyone to Arizona for the foreseeable future.

The cities of Tucson and Flagstaff won’t be on that list (considering its rather difficult to boycott their own state) but their respective city councils plan to sue to get the law changed. Elsewhere in Arizona, people are starting to worry that Major League Baseball will pull the 2011 All-Star Game from Phoenix, as pressure increases on MLB to hold the game somewhere else. Commissioner Bud Selig has insisted that the game will take place in Arizona.

But speaking of the sports world, the Phoenix Suns recently played some games in jerseys altered to read Los Suns to, as player Amare Stoudemire put it, “let the Latin community know that we’re behind them 100 percent.”

Multiple MVP Steve Nash has endorsed the idea, as has former basketball great Charles Barkley. In fact, Barkley says that pro sports teams should actively boycott Arizona (and he lives there).

The funny thing is that Barkley is a well-known Republican. In rethinking his allegence to conservatives, Barkley is not alone. Apparently, even some Republicans don’t think the law is such a great idea.

This feeling is especially strong among conservative Latinos “who have become an increasingly important Republican constituency in a number of Southwestern states [and] are considering bucking their party.” It’s as if Republicans actively wanted to drive Latinos out of the GOP, and thereby verify the allegation that they care only about the well-being of Southern white people.

To be sure, most Americans – and certainly most Arizonians – favor the law. But if the law’s backers thought that only meek objections would greet their decision, they were seriously mistaken.

When you’ve managed to anger the country’s largest minority group, entire municipalities, members of your own political party, and a major sports franchise, you’ve really underestimated the opposition.

I’m working on a book about race and ethnicity right now. Mind you, the publishing house hasn’t accepted my proposal yet, but waiting for them to say ok means that I can’t write impressive sentences like “I’m working on a book right now.” So I’m just going to act like it’s a done deal.

In any case, I realize that to discuss race and ethnicity, I better have a clear definition of what I’m talking about. I’m concerned that this isn’t happening anytime soon.

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With oil slicks spreading across the Gulf of Mexico and Tennessee going underwater and moronic terrorists continuing their obsession with New York City, it’s understandable if the whole shriek-fest over Arizona’s new law has passed from your conscious thoughts.

As you may recall, the law targets illegal immigrants, but many people (including me) are concerned that it will just lead to Hispanics being pressured for nineteen forms of ID whenever they walk down the street.

In any case, one thing that advocates on both side of the debate agree upon is the need for strong federal action. Of course, that doesn’t look like it’s happening anytime soon. Neither political party wants to move quickly on this.

Perhaps we should blame Republicans for wanting this issue to continue festering in order to keep their base riled up. Maybe we should blame Democrats for displaying, once more, their well-honed cowardice. Or perhaps we should just be honest and blame ourselves for profiting from the hard work of the undocumented and then getting self-righteous about their presence.

Still, at some point, immigration reform will happen. But it will be ugly, and everyone will be at least a little disappointed, so don’t get your hopes up. This is because, while we all agree that illegal immigration is a problem, we have contrasting solutions to the problem.

Hell, we can’t even agree on the severity of the crime. Conservatives view the act of illegally immigrating to a country as one notch below murder. In their opinion, the behavior of the undocumented is so egregious that no penalty short of permanent deportation can make up for it.

In contrast, liberals see illegal immigrating as one notch below shoplifting. Surely, they say, we can work something out.

This is, to put it mildly, a discrepancy. Perhaps it cannot be bridged.

So we continue to demonize each other as, respectively, ignorant racists or softheaded appeasers. We also engage in dicey behavior. As Hector Tobar put it, “Opponents of legalization draw crude caricatures of the undocumented, while supporters aren’t fully honest about the challenges to U.S. society.” In such an atmosphere, simplistic answers are what we will continue to hear.

Regardless of what immigration reform ultimately looks like, I hope it will benefit people like Ekaterine Bautista, an Iraq War veteran who served honorably for six years. An illegal immigrant, she faces deportation rather than a citizenship ceremony.

What should we do with her? Should we kick her out or acknowledge her service? Can we even debate it, or are we too far gone for that?

A great thing about writing a blog is that one can just check the events of the day and respond with a quick post immediately. A bad thing about writing a blog is that those same events rarely behave and adhere to your schedule, and you end up writing from behind, so to speak.

Such is the nature of the evolving debate over the Arizona anti-immigrant law. I have started and abandoned many posts on this topic because its ever-changing nature and unending cascade of loony behavior have made my points obsolete before I could slap punctuation at the end of a given sentence.

The Arizona law, which makes it unlawful to so much as resemble an illegal immigrant, has offered America even more ludicrous moments and bizarre antics than we’ve come to expect from our political theater.

I thought the absurdity had reached its nadir when Senator John McCain insisted, on national television, that illegal immigrants were intentionally ramming unsuspecting citizens on the freeway. But the best was yet to come.

First the GOP, in the true spirit of leadership, announced that it was picking up its loose marbles and going home. Republicans screamed and yelled about how illegal immigration was out of control, but when pressed on how to resolve the problem, they demurred, en masse.

Sounding almost apologetic, Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia said,  “We’ve got a lot of work left on our plate between now and the end of the summer. And we’re starting on financial regulatory reform…. I’m not sure where you find the time to deal with these other major issues.”

Chambliss sounded like a teenager complaining about how much homework he received over winter break. But at least he was more rational than Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, who said “moving forward on immigration” in a “hurried, panicked manner” had offended him so much that he was walking out of talks on climate change legislation. It was as if conservatives had said, “Don’t even ask us to even think about this whole immigration mess. I mean it. We’re willing to destroy the environment over this… if we believed in global warming, that is. So there.”

This caused the rest of us to ask, “Who dragged climate change into this?” But we had no time to ponder because the all-American sport of baseball became the next collateral damage.

With a certain amount of glee, Keith Olbermann stated that the Arizona Diamondbacks are arguably the only MLB team without a prominent Latino player. In addition, many commentators pointed out that Hispanics and Latin American immigrants make up a large percentage of today’s top players. So we should have been unsurprised when protests erupted at Wrigley Field and fans started threatening to boycott next year’s All-Star game, which is being held in (gulp) Chase Field in Phoenix. But at least that shrinking violet, Ozzie Guillen, spoke his mind, for once in his life.

Of course, as we know, nothing really exists in America unless a celebrity is involved. So we were all relieved when our first pop star entered the fray. The beautiful and talented Shakira announced that she is opposed to the Arizona law. I can only hope that if she is pulled over in Tucson, she gives the cops one of those icy glares she utilizes before launching into an especially violent hip shimmy. It will be out of context but even more intense.

By the way, it’s odd that few American-born Latino celebrities are speaking out on the issue. One would think that Jennifer Lopez, for example, could take a brief break from peddling her latest cinematic disaster to at least appear socially conscious. But that’s ok – keep shaking it, J Lo, we still love you!

However, things have now come around again to the world of politics. No, I’m not talking about Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s superficial change to the law, which she announced yesterday. I’m talking about the once-obscure Pat Bertroche, who is trying to gain the GOP nomination in Iowa to run for a House seat. His recent comments top the list of offensive, perplexing, and just plain oddball statements about Arizona’s efforts.

Bertroche said, when referring to illegal immigrants, that “We should catch ’em, we should document ’em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going. I actually support microchipping them. I can microchip my dog so I can find it. Why can’t I microchip an illegal?”

Before anyone could answer this most unanswerable of questions, Bertroche  said of his own proposal, “That’s not a popular thing to say.”

Perhaps he’s a master of understatement, but Bertroche could have added, “And it’s not sane, coherent, respectful, or in any way related to the real world. In fact, it’s just batshit crazy and wildly racist.”

But he didn’t, so we’ll just have to imagine it. Fear not, however, I’m sure before all this is over, somebody or something else will top the insanity we’ve seen so far.

Perhaps we should start praying now.