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News Release Archive | immigration | Accuracy.Org

“Show Me Your Papers”-Based Immigration Policy

June 26, 2012

MARGARET HU, mhu at law.duke.edu
Hu is an assistant professor at Duke Law School. She just wrote a piece titled “Arizona v. U.S. & SB 1070: Baking Discrimination Into Immigration Policy” on the American Constitution Society blog, which states: “In Arizona v. U.S., the Supreme Court only upheld Section 2(B) of the highly controversial Arizona immigration law, also known as SB 1070 (Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070). Three other provisions of SB 1070 were struck down. Upholding Section 2(B), however, is problematic because it preserves the provision of the bill that invites state and local law enforcement to engage in racial profiling.

“Section 2(B) is known as the ‘your papers please’ or ‘show me your papers’ provision of the highly controversial law. Some are reassured that the Court recognized that the constitutionality of the ‘show me your papers’ provision of SB 1070 might be reconsidered at some point. The Court suggested the question is now whether Section 2(B) might create a problem of racial discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and other constitutional problems. In other words, Section 2(B) is not going to be thrown out now, before the law is implemented. But, if the law results in racial profiling, the Court said that this question could be dealt with in the future, when the evidence surfaces.

“Unfortunately, 25 years of immigration law experimentation with ‘show me your papers’ policies have demonstrated that the future consequences of this provision can already be predicted: Section 2(B) will likely lead to widespread discrimination.

“Those U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants who may ‘look or sound foreign’ are likely to be the target of scrutiny, simply based upon their appearance. And because states may now perceive that they have the green light to bake ‘show me your papers’ requirements into state immigration law, the racial profiling problems stemming from a ‘show me your papers’-based immigration policy will likely worsen.”

MAEGAN ORTIZ, mamitamala at gmail.com, @mamitamala
Maegan Ortiz is publisher of VivirLatino. She just wrote the piece “The Mixed Bag S.B. 1070 SCOTUS Decision and the White House Response,” which states: “I am not surprised by the decision and I question if there is as large an impact because of the decision. Federal policy, specifically Secure Communities and 287(g) have basically empowered law enforcement to stop those they suspect of being undocumented. This, contrary to what many like to say, was not about civil or human rights. It was about asserting Federal power and we have seen federal power under President Obama help create record-breaking deportation numbers. The precedent for racial profiling of Latinos, the precedent for amping up criminalization of immigrant communities has its roots in federal policy.”

JEFF BIGGERS, jrbiggers at gmail.com
Biggers’s next book is State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream. He wrote the piece “SB1070 backlash isn’t over: The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down most of Arizona’s immigration law won’t slow the movement it provoked.”

Filed Under: Tagged With: immigration, Jeff Biggers, Maegan la Mala, Margaret Hu, SB1070,

U.S.-Mexican Border: A New Front of the War on Terror?

June 7, 2012

TODD MILLER, toddmiller70 at hotmail.com
Todd Miller has researched and written about U.S.-Mexican border issues for more than 10 years. He just wrote the article, “Bringing the Battlefield to the Border, The Wild World of Border Security and Boundary Building in Arizona,” which states: “William ‘Drew’ Dodds, the salesperson for StrongWatch, a Tucson-based company, is at the top of his game when he describes developments on the southern border of the United States in football terms. In his telling, that boundary is the line of scrimmage, and the technology his company is trying to sell — a mobile surveillance system named Freedom-On-The-Move, a camera set atop a retractable mast outfitted in the bed of a truck and maneuvered with an Xbox controller — acts like a ‘roving linebacker.’

“As Dodds describes it, unauthorized migrants and drug traffickers often cross the line of scrimmage undetected. At best, they are seldom caught until the “last mile,” far from the boundary line. His surveillance system, he claims, will cover a lot more of that ground in very little time and from multiple angles. It will become the border-enforcement equivalent of New York Giants’ linebacking great, Lawrence Taylor.

“To listen to Dodds, an ex-Marine — Afghanistan and Iraq, 2001-2004 — with the hulking physique of a linebacker himself, is to experience a new worldview being constructed on the run. Even a decade or so ago, it might have seemed like a mad dream from the American fringe. These days, his all-the-world’s-a-football-field vision seemed perfectly mainstream inside the brightly-lit convention hall in Phoenix, Arizona, where the seventh annual Border Security Expo took place this March. Dodds was just one of hundreds of salespeople peddling their border-enforcement products and national security wares, …[and] one of more than a hundred companies scrambling for a profitable edge in an exploding market.

“As that buzzing convention floor made clear, the anything-goes approach to immigration enforcement found in Arizona — home to SB1070, the infamous anti-immigrant law now before the Supreme Court — has generated interest from boundary-militarizers elsewhere in the country and the world. An urge for zero-tolerance-style Arizona borders is spreading fast, as evidenced by the convention’s clientele. In addition to U.S. Border Patrol types, attendees came from law enforcement outfits and agencies nationwide, and from 18 countries around the world, including Israel and Russia. …

“More than one million migrants have been deported from the country over the last three and a half years under the Obama administration, numbers that surpass those of the Bush years. This should be a reminder that a significant, if overlooked, part of this country’s post 9/11 security iron fist has been aimed not at al-Qaeda but at the undocumented migrant. Indeed, as writer Roberto Lovato points out, there has been an ‘al-Qaedization of immigrants and immigration policy.’ And as in the Global War on Terror, military-industrial companies like Boeing and Halliburton are cashing in on this version of for-profit war.”

Filed Under: Tagged With: immigration, Todd Miller, war,

Arizona Immigration Case and “Reverse-Commandeering”

April 25, 2012

Protesters in front of the Supreme Court

MARGARET HU, mhu at law.duke.edu
Hu is an assistant professor at Duke Law School and is the author of a forthcoming article in the U.C. Davis Law Review titled “Reverse-Commandeering.” She just wrote on the American Constitution Society blog: “As the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Arizona v. U.S., one of the main legal questions it considered is this: Whether Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070) is preempted by federal immigration law under the Supremacy Clause. This is a statutory-driven inquiry that misses the constitutional mark. The more relevant question is this: Whether SB 1070 poses a threat to the vertical separation of powers. …

“The recent tidal wave of thousands of immigration control efforts proposed by state and local governments can best be characterized as ‘reverse-commandeering’ laws. Setting migration policy at the national level, like establishing a national currency, falls within the sole power of the federal government. Reverse-commandeering by the states is an effort to usurp the federal government’s sole prerogative. This growing movement represents an attempt to control the terms of what federal resources and officers must be appropriated to accommodate a myriad of state immigration enforcement programs. It is a deliberate attempt to skew the immigration enforcement power in favor of the states. …

“Given the impact of immigration policy on foreign and interstate commerce, international treaties, and foreign relations, the Court has concluded that controlling migration patterns is strictly the prerogative of the federal government. Consequently, the growing proliferation of thousands of proposed state and local immigration laws should be examined doctrinally within a commandeering jurisprudential frame. To fail to do so — to continue to accept mirror image theory carte blanche as a favored method of statutory interpretation under the existing preemption doctrine — threatens federal sovereignty. Put another way, it eviscerates the federal government’s ability to develop and implement a coherent, efficacious, and uniform immigration policy at the national level.”

Filed Under: Tagged With: civil rights, constitution, immigration, Margaret Hu,

Arizona Shooting

January 10, 2011

Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for ComfortCHIP BERLET
Berlet is senior analyst at Political Research Associates and co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. He has written a series of pieces about the Arizona shooting spree: “Possible Racist and Anti-Immigrant Tie to Alleged Arizona Assassin,” “The Becking of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords” and “Alleged Giffords Shooter Shares Currency Plot Obsession with Anti-Abortion Killer.”

FREDERICK CLARKSON
Author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and DemocracyDemocracy, Clarkson is editor of the book Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America. He is founder of the interactive blog “Talk to Action” about the religious right. He said today: “Jared Loughner may be many things. If police and news reports are accurate, he may be mentally ill. He may have harbored far right-wing conspiracy theories and held hateful views towards government. This volatile mix may have led to his decision to plan to buy a gun and attempt to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. It would be tempting to dismiss the young man with a plan as a lone nut. But Loughner is much more than that. He is the canary in the coal mine of our times. We ignore the warning of his ideas and his actions at our peril.”

Clarkson recently wrote the piece “Hate, Violence, and the Religious Right.”

SARA ROBINSON
Senior fellow at Campaign for America’s Future, Robinson said today: “The facts are still coming in, but there’s no question we need to address the climate that’s been created by the right-wing media. Some suggest that the left and right are no different in their rhetoric, but they are radically different: there are no major figures on the left calling for the deaths of conservatives, no shootings of right-wing leaders. This is the result of 20 years of conservative media propagating violent rhetoric against liberal Americans. Gifford got caught in the crossfire. Her district covers Cochise County, which has been the center of Minuteman and other anti-immigrant activity for years. Things are strained down there, but not vastly more strained than they are in much of the rest of America. This is what domestic terrorism looks like, and we’d be much faster to call it that if only the shooter had been Muslim.” [Read more...]

Tagged With: Arizona, assasination, immigration, rightwing, violence,