Just when you begin to think that, with a bit of political soul-searching and a committed re-dedication to our foundational principles, it might yet be possible to get this American “ship of state” back on course after the “perfect storm” of the last decade – something like Arizona happens.

Unless you’re living in a bubble, you will have heard by now of the passage of Arizona’s “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” introduced by state Sen. Russell Pearce, passed by both houses of the state legislature, and signed into law by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, on Saturday. 

Arizona police can now stop and question anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant. If the person cannot confirm their status, they can be arrested. According to the “letter of the law” race or national origin cannot be the sole factor constituting “reasonable suspicion,” but it doesn’t prohibit race or ethnicity from being one factor.  As Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) stated upon reviewing the new law: “it’s just replete with the type of broad descriptions that invite discrimination, that invite racial profiling, that invite violations of constitutional rights and civil rights.”

No matter which side of this issue you find yourself on, you’ll have to admit that no one really expects that Arizona police will be pulling over blond, blue-eyed babes suspected of over-staying their “au pair” visas.

The new law forbids authorities from releasing anyone found guilty until the full sentence is served, forces them to pay court costs and an additional fine of at least $500 for the first offense, and $1,000 for a second or subsequent conviction. Any second violation of the law would be reclassified as a felony.

SB 1070 additionally targets day laborers by making it a Class 1 misdemeanor for anyone to “pick up passengers for work” even if out of public view; making clear it would penalize anyone seeking work at a day labor site, and also those contractors who hire them.  Clearly the geniuses that concocted this law didn’t appreciate the fact that they were inviting powerful opposition from the corporate sector that profits greatly from a steady stream of cheap labor from across the border. 

I suspect that no one involved anticipated the broad-based blow-back that began even ahead of the Gov. Brewer’s signature.  From the Department of Justice, which simply can’t ignore the screams of agony coming from the general direction of the Constitution, to the police forces expected to conduct dragnets to fill up their already bulging jails and prisons, to students withdrawing from Arizona’s universities and all the way down the line to tourists who find the law repugnant and want nothing further to do with the state that enacted it – this single event has unified more diverse groups of Americans, more quickly than any other national event in recent memory.

The response has been so inescapably loud and vehement that even those politicians that might be expected to support Arizona’s position have been running for cover and shamelessly waffling when caught.

“It’s What’s In Our Souls”

As always in America, however, there is a small “Ignorance is Bliss “ contingent who are willing to proudly defend our right to racial profiling. 

One such is Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-CA) who spoke over the weekend at a Tea Party in Ramona, CA, calling Arizona’s new law “a fantastic starting point.”  It’s fearsome to imagine where that “starting point” might lead . . .

When asked if he “backed deporting natural-born American citizens who are the children of illegal immigrants,” Hunter responded:

“’I would have to, yes. And we’re not being mean. We’re just saying it takes more than walking across the border to become an American citizen,’ he said. ‘It’s what’s in our souls.’”

It may well be what’s in Hunter’s “soul,” but, fortunately it’s not what’s in our Constitution.  Since Hunter is being paid by the taxpayers to be a professional legislator, he might want to brush up on the 14th Amendment, and any other important bits he might have missed that day.

The 14th Amendment states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States….” Immigration status of the parents is not a consideration for their children’s right to citizenship. Most of us U.S. citizens came by our citizenship in just this way — by this constitutional right of birth.

Like most political loose cannons, Hunter is fortunate to have an “elitist intellectual” on his staff to “get his back” in such circumstances.  Hunter’s man happens to be spokesman Joe Kasper who said, on Thursday, that “the congressman’s position is that U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants should stay with their parents unless there is a legal guardian who could take care of them.”

Ah, perfect.  That Joe’s a spin-meister extraordinaire.  In just a few words he converted Rep. Hunter from a not-terribly-bright xenophobe to a champion of Family Values.  Obviously, a liberal education can still come in handy.  “It was a short answer to a complex issue,” Kasper said. “His terms have been very specific on this topic and it wasn’t reflected in the answer.”

The only “benefit of the doubt” that I’m willing to extend to Hunter is that it’s possible he was simply pandering to the feverish racist element of his Tea Party audience.  Not likely, though, since the Hunter family has made a name for itself for building walls, ostensibly for making better neighbors.

Hunter’s father, Duncan L., is a fourteen-term Representative of California (one compelling argument for term limits) who was responsible for writing the legislation that built the first border walls between the U.S and Mexico over 15 years ago and supported the recent building of 700 more miles of border walls in 2007 – 2008.

It doesn’t seem to have held Hunter, Sr’s political career back that he was the architect of a complete and utter failure in the realm of Immigration Policy.   Billions of dollars and a huge blot on the beautiful landscape of our country have changed absolutely nothing about any problems associated with illegal immigration.  Except, perhaps that more border-crossers die these days because they are now diverted into dangerous desert and mountain crossings. Latinos are still coming for the jobs we offer . . .  and voters are still voting for the politicians that promise to keep them out. 

As John Carlos Frey wrote recently, in the Huffington Post:

“The U.S border patrol states that 99% of all undocumented immigrants are coming to the U.S. for a job. It is a lie that more fences will deter migrants. It is a lie that they are coming to have children. It is a lie that stripping citizenship rights will stop illegal immigration. If Mr. Hunter really wanted to solve the issues of immigration he would look at the demand for illegal narcotics in the U.S. that funds and fuels smuggling and violence at the border. He would look at the demand for cheap labor on U.S. farms, factories, and service industries. He would look at the tenets of NAFTA, CAFTA and the Peruvian free trade agreements. He would look at poverty, corrupt governments, the visa systems and need for family reunification. It is shameful that the best a U.S. Congressman can do is strip U.S. citizens of their right of birth and tear up the U.S. constitution, a document he is sworn to uphold.”

Aside from the obvious attention-grabbing substance of Hunter-the-Lesser’s position, an easily overlooked bit of his full statement has grabbed my imagination and won’t let go, it is this piece:

“We’re just saying it takes more than walking across the border to become an American citizen. It’s what’s in our souls.”

I’m sure that Rep. Hunter has some sort of clear idea of what is “in our souls” that makes us American citizens.  I’m just as sure that there are as many answers to that question as there are Americans, which is to say, who are we to say that the same “soul stuff” is NOT in the soul of someone who walks across the border.  Are we somehow nobler and more deserving citizens if our great-grandparents crossed the Atlantic in the cargo hold of a ship to escape famine or religious persecution?  Or sought asylum from a murderous regime in their country of origin?  Or were shipped in to build our railroads cheaply?  Can we honestly say that those who are motivated to risk their lives to cross from Mexico into the US are somehow “less than:”

” your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

. . .  the homeless, tempest-tost”

Did we deliberately install that Statue of Liberty “Mother of Exiles” extending “world-wide welcome” “from her beacon-hand,” in New York harbor to encourage only European immigration?

Mixed Bag, Mixed Blessings

And then, of course, there is the bigger question of what, indeed, is in the “soul” of an American.

Are we really among the most fortunate inhabitants of Planet Earth to live in a country that sets the “gold standard” for democracy and tops the World’s most important parameters of success in just about every quantifiable category? Or are we actually stubbornly delusional boosters of a largely unfounded mythos? 

Americans, if you ask them, will unabashedly admit to a sense of superiority.  It has been there since day one; as Howard Zinn once pointed out, Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony described

“establishing a city on a hill, to serve the world as a beacon of liberty.”  Unfortunately, as Zinn sees it, there has always been a related, similarly poetic “assumption of divine agency” in the minds of Americans that puts God’s stamp of approval on anything that our government does — to include the genocide of America’s indigenous people who represented a huge inconvenience in realizing our Manifest Destiny.

As a result, the US government usually considers itself exempt from moral and legal standards adopted by other nations by dint of our belief that we the standard-bearers of all things morally and legally enlightened.  To illustrate that point there are plenty of recent examples that do quite nicely:

•  Our refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty
• Our refusal to strengthen the convention on biological weapons
• Our refusal to join the 100-plus nations that have agreed to ban land mines (one that we’re currently getting an up close experience of)
• Our refusal to ban the use of napalm and cluster bombs
• Our refusal to submit to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court
• Our egregious flouting of the Geneva Conventions in the “War on Terror”

A great illustration of how other nations react to our smug indifference to their (real) efforts to make the world a better place is this, once again, from the late Howard Zinn:

“There is a growing refusal to accept U.S. domination and the idea of American exceptionalism. Recently, when the State Department issued its annual report listing countries guilty of torture and other human-rights abuses, there were indignant responses from around the world commenting on the absence of the United States from that list. A Turkish newspaper said, “There’s not even mention of the incidents in Abu Ghraib prison, no mention of Guantánamo.” A newspaper in Sydney pointed out that the United States sends suspects—people who have not been tried or found guilty of anything—to prisons in Morocco, Egypt, Libya, and Uzbekistan, countries that the State Department itself says use torture.”

As so often happens, we are now showing signs of turning in on ourselves and hacking away at our own Constitution.  We ascribe to a national image of being “the Land of Opportunity” built on the virtues of hard-working, ambitious immigrants, unhampered by oppression or prejudice.  Where anyone, regardless of race or creed, has an equal opportunity to succeed and realize the “American Dream.” Anyone who is less than successful has only herself to blame and simply hasn’t worked hard enough; not getting ahead in the Land of Opportunity is a personal failing.

Our history, of course, from the beginning, belies that pretty picture with a steady string of events in which “equal opportunity” had to be hard fought for and won —  from slavery, to Women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights movement and the ongoing battle for LGBT Equality.  Notions from the Enlightenment might have influenced the crafting of our written Constitution but there is a sizable gap between what was intended and how we construe it in our day-to-day lives.

As Bonnie Honig observed in The Boston Review:

“ In short, although we may . . .  sometimes persecute people because they are foreign, the deeper truth is that we almost always make foreign those whom we persecute. Foreignness is a symbolic marker that the nation attaches to the people we want to disavow, deport, or detain because we experience them as a threat. The distinction between who is part of the nation and who is an outsider is not exhausted nor even finally defined by working papers, skin color, ethnicity, or citizenship. Indeed, it is not an empirical line at all; it is a symbolic one, used for political purposes.”

 The fact of the matter (as well as the heart and soul of it), as David Cole explains is this:

 “As a constitutional matter, basic rights such as due process, equal protection, and the freedoms of speech and association are not limited to citizens, but apply to all “persons” within the United States or subject to U.S. authority. The Constitution does restrict the right to vote to citizens, but that restriction only underscores by contrast that the Constitution’s other rights apply to all ‘persons.’ These are human rights, not privileges of citizenship. At the time of the framing, they were seen as divinely decreed natural rights; in today’s world, they are the core of what we understand as international human rights, owed to all persons by virtue of their personhood, irrespective of their identity or the political character of their government. The Supreme Court has stated that the First and Fifth Amendments acknowledge no distinction between citizens and foreigners residing in the United States, and as recently as 2001 the Court reaffirmed that ‘the Due Process Clause applies to all persons within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent.’ Moreover, the very fact that noncitizens lack the vote only makes it all the more essential that they receive judicial protection, as they cannot rely on the political process to consider their interests. [My emphasis]

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once summed up this problem in American Politics, saying:  “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” 

For all of those reasons, politicians should tread carefully on this issue, because, after all is said and done We — all of us — are “We the People . . . “

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