The Hunt for American Decency in the Arizona Quicksand
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
The federal judge who struck down most of Arizona’s new immigration law last week wasn’t trying to strike a blow for immigrants’ rights, about which her ruling said little. She wasn’t dictating what immigration laws should look like or how strict they should be. She was making a much more fundamental argument, one that has regularly emerged in America’s long and often ugly history in dealing with noncitizens and other vulnerable minorities.
The message was that Arizona cannot have its own immigration or foreign policy. It cannot tell the federal government how to enforce its laws. It is not up to any state to seize the power to upend federal priorities, particularly to wield a blunt enforcement tool that will do harm to Hispanics, citizens or not, who live in certain neighborhoods, wear certain clothes, drive certain vehicles and speak Spanish or accented English.
One excuse offered up for Arizona’s mindless new law was that it is just trying to do a job the federal government refused to do. But the law, SB1070, is far more pernicious than that. It begins with a grandiose statement of its purpose: “to make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona.” “Attrition through enforcement” is a theory cooked up in right-wing think tanks — that mass deportation is unnecessary, because with enough hostile laws and harsh enforcement, illegal immigrants will all decide to go home.
That’s a product of delusion and cruelty. But it’s also an article of faith among the Arizonans who have yanked the white-hot center of the national immigration debate to Phoenix, like the law’s author, State Senator Russell Pearce; Gov. Jan Brewer, who has surfed the law to high poll ratings and a meeting with President Obama; and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who marches immigrant prisoners through the streets of Phoenix and vows to keep raiding Hispanic neighborhoods, law or no law.
District Judge Susan Bolton said it wasn’t up to these people to determine America’s immigration policy.
Professor Hiroshi Motomura of U.C.L.A. Law School, who has written often about America’s immigration history, said the Obama administration had a compelling justification for bringing the case, and Judge Bolton was exactly right to rule in the administration’s favor.
“It has been one of the essential roles of the federal government in U.S. history since the Civil War to make sure that states don’t act in ways that exclude or marginalize certain individuals — often by race and ethnicity,” he said. “By acting in this case, the Justice Department is asserting its historical role that states and localities aren’t given the power that might enable them to harm individuals and communities in those ways. By bringing this lawsuit, the federal government has done something essential for national cohesion.”
Right now, in Phoenix anyway, things seem to be coming apart, with marches and peaceful protests coming face to face with simmering rage.
Last Friday, Sheriff Arpaio’s deputies arrested Salvador Reza, a leader of immigrant-rights protests, for reasons that a prosecutor later could not explain. Video shows Mr. Reza standing quietly in a parking lot, a good distance from a protest across the street, when a cordon of armed officers surrounds, handcuffs and hauls him off. It was a scene from another decade or country.
Thomas Saenz, the president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, links Arizona’s struggle to the civil rights era. He calls the state’s politicians the new nullifiers, descendants of the southern segregationists who fought for Jim Crow with the debased theory that states had the power to invalidate federal law. It took federal action and protesters stirring the nation’s conscience to make the point: You cannot treat people this way.
Mr. Saenz notes the strangeness of Arizona’s politicians denouncing immigrants’ lawlessness while baring their own contempt for the Constitution. Is he exaggerating? Here’s Ms. Brewer on Fox News: “It’s unfortunate that it takes a little city or a little state like Arizona to fight the United States federal government, but that’s what we’re up to.”
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