Stephen Jones: Stand Up for Human Rights in Arizona

This is a post by contributing writer, Stephen Jones, who is a progressive political activist and a resident of Las Cruces, New Mexico.

On Friday, April 23, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law one of the most brazen assaults on civil rights and civil liberties in more than a generation. The law was passed by the Republican-dominated state legislature of Arizona last week, and threatens not just the human rights of Hispanics, but all of us.

Arizona’s S.B. 1070 directs state and local law enforcement officials to challenge an individuals’ right to move freely in the Grand Canyon State. The law directs police and other local officials to ask for proof of citizenship of anyone within its borders and criminalizes undocumented persons in Arizona. Presumably this creates a requirement for anyone living or traveling through Arizona to carry a passport, birth certificate or other legal proof of citizenship or face jail. It will also target any individual traveling with, or in the company of, anyone law enforcement perceives to be in the state "illegally." In fact, Arizona’s law will primarily be targeted at Hispanics, or anyone perceived to be Hispanic, and directs law enforcement and other public officials to racially and ethnically profile any such individuals in Arizona. It will also form the pretext to resurrect a system of ethnic and racial segregation.

Beyond this, the law forces local police into an untenable and adversarial position with the very communities they need most to fight crime, and creates an obligation on the part of neighborhood police officers to enforce immigration laws that are best enforced by the border patrol and others who are trained to protect our borders and enforce national immigration codes.

Similar Shameful Chapters
This onerous legislation echoes some of the most shameful chapters in American history, and in supporting the bill Arizona’s Republicans have dusted off some of the same arguments that their predecessors once used in defense of their support for this historically racist legislation.

For example, prior to the Civil War, citing "safety" and local "job protection" several northern states prohibited transit of African Americans within their states, except those who possessed “papers” authorizing access. Immediately following the American Civil War, the states of the former Confederacy enacted black codes that commanded local law enforcement to round up and detain newly freed African Americans, criminalizing those without “documents” and impelling them to work as forced bond-workers. In passing the black codes, white southerners claimed they were protecting the "safety" of themselves from those “non-working” ex-slaves who were freely wandering the countryside in search of work or attempting to find lost loved ones, sold off under slavery.

Asian Americans were also compelled to carry “papers” in the latter half of the 19th Century or face expulsion from the western states. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 excluded immigration of “undesirable” persons of Asian origin. African Americans in the Jim Crow south faced renewed black codes that criminalized anyone local law enforcement deemed a “vagrant” and incarcerated anyone convicted of vagrancy and forced them to work, without pay, in prison chain gangs. During the Great Depression thousands of Hispanics were forcibly expelled from the United States to "protect jobs," and 110,000 Japanese-Americans were forced from their homes and interred in prison camps during World War II.

The black codes passed by the southern states after the Civil War helped propel passage of the 14th Amendment, which constitutionally guarantees free and equal citizenship to anyone “born or naturalized” in the United States, and which also protects the human rights, universally, of anyone resident in the United States. Section 1 reads, “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 14th Amendment means what it says.

Taking a Stand Against Bigotry
On Saturday, a day after passage of the Arizona law, New Mexico Democrats responded appropriately and unanimously by passing a resolution denouncing our western neighbor’s assault on civil rights and civil liberties. Citing our "proud tradition of diversity," the New Mexico Democratic Party resolution urged support for President Barack Obama and Governor Bill Richardson’s appeal to “to protect the civil rights of all people within our Nation's borders.”

"New Mexico Democrats are to be commended for their immediate, principled response. The Democratic Party resolution is a good start, but we all need to do more. We need to ask our fellow citizens, our religious organizations, our local community groups, our families and our friends to stand up to legalized bigotry in Arizona and elsewhere. We should also contact our state and local elected officials and demand they speak out as well.

We also need to join economic boycott efforts, already underway, and ask our leaders to place sanctions on Arizona. If any of us has travel plans that include Arizona, we need to change them. We can also ask our friends from other parts of the country who are interested in seeing the southwest to come spend their vacation dollars here in New Mexico instead of visiting and economically supporting our wayward neighbor to the west.

Arizona’s attack on civil rights represents one of the ugliest attempts at curtailing human dignity in the United States in decades. We must not let its action to go unanswered. We need to stand up for the human rights enshrined in our Constitution.

For anyone in New Mexico or elsewhere who is wondering what electing Republican leadership in the coming election cycles will mean, the answer is clear. It will mean a return to some of the darkest chapters of our past, and establishment, by law, of second class citizenship for many of us.

To read more posts by Stephen Jones, visit our archive.