The Truth About Arizona’s Immigration Law
With the Supreme Court poised this week to hear arguments in the legal challenge to Arizona’s immigration law, it’s a good time to explain what this law and the ruckus surrounding it are really about.
The left says it’s about racism and political extremism; the right claims the issues are border security and public safety.
Wrong. In the two years since Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law, it’s become clear that this law, and the debate over it, are really about three things: fear, power, and freedom.
It’s about fear. As someone who lived in Phoenix and wrote for the Arizona Republic in the late 1990s, I can tell you that Arizonans only recently reached the conclusion that they wanted to get rid of illegal immigrants. The ‘Zonies I knew couldn’t live without them.
Not a lot of U.S. citizens were lining up to do the hard and dirty jobs that the undocumented were doing. That includes landscaping or other jobs that require you to work outdoors in 115-degree weather.
In 1994, when Californians passed Proposition 187 — an anti-illegal immigration ballot initiative that intended to deny public services to illegal immigrants but was ultimately struck down by the courts — and when President Bill Clinton launched “Operation Gatekeeper” to beef up enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico border south of San Diego, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who had been headed to California took a detour through Arizona.