Iowans are Reading Arizona's Immigration Bill

“While there is an urgent need for
immigration reform in the United States, Arizona’s new law is
regressive.”

Blog for Iowa recently posted about the Arizona Immigration Law SB1070. A reader responded saying, “Why are you picking on Arizona when you probably did not even read the law!” He was correct, I had not read the law, but if the reader had read the post he would have understood why I took exception. I have now read the law, and my view remains the same.

Section One of SB1070 reads, “The legislature finds that there is a compelling interest in the cooperative enforcement of federal immigration laws throughout all of Arizona.  The legislature declares that the intent of this act is to make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona.  The provisions of this act are intended to work together to discourage and deter the unlawful entry and presence of aliens and economic activity by persons unlawfully present in the United States.”

As I mentioned in my post, “The author believes that as long as we maintain borders, we create a form of apartheid where the haves (in the US) will use the have-nots (in Mexico, China, India and Africa) to do their menial work here or in their countries, largely without social justice. The borders serve to keep them out, when we should be letting them in. America will grow stronger with open borders, even if most Americans and some Arizonans don’t believe it.” Our reader failed to notice that enacting laws whose intent is “to deter the unlawful entry and presence of aliens and economic activity by persons unlawfully present…” stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from what I believe is a better path, which is open borders.

While there is an urgent need for immigration reform in the United States, Arizona’s new law is regressive. In Arizona, the cities of Phoenix, Tucson, Chandler and Mesa are considered to be “sanctuary cities.” What this means is that city employees are not required to ask the immigration status of clients when rendering public services. The intent of this approach is the encourage people to seek law enforcement when there is crime and to create a welcoming environment for people regardless of citizenship status. SB1070 would suppress the sanctuary city movement and create a law enforcement environment more inclined to comply with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It seems ironic that the home of the late Barry Goldwater, John McCain and J.D. Hayworth would forgo state’s rights to seek “cooperative enforcement” of federal law in Arizona.

As Blog for Iowa previously noted, “according to Department of Homeland Security the unauthorized immigrant population living in the United States decreased to 10.8 million in January 2009 due to the downturn in the United States economy.” As Bill Clinton famously said during his presidential campaign, “it’s the economy stupid.” It seems to this Iowan that law enforcement, related directly to the undocumented immigrants, is an unlikely mechanism to achieve the stated intent of SB1070. A better path would be for ICE to work to reduce the number of businesses that knowingly violate the eligibility to work rules. If there are fewer economic opportunities for undocumented immigrants in the United States, there will be less reason for people to cross the border to come here and Arizona might better mitigate the unlawful entry referenced in SB1070.

To the extent that Arizona is a gateway for undocumented immigrants working in Iowa, we have a stake in what happens there. As long as Arizonans demonstrate disrespect towards people by referring to them as “aliens,” they will run against the grain of Iowans who believe that mutual respect and tolerance should be part of our everyday lives. Reading the bill reaffirmed my belief that Arizona is on a path that many Iowans find repugnant.

~Paul
Deaton is a native Iowan living in rural Johnson County and weekend
editor of Blog for Iowa. He is also a member of Iowa Physicians for
Social Responsibility and Veterans for Peace. With the advent of spring
he is also planting and blogging about his garden which you can check
out here. E-mail Paul
Deaton