Arizona moves the boundaries

Arizona moves the boundaries
By Christopher Caldwell
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: April 30 2010 21:51 | Last updated: April 30 2010 21:51
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c92dde86-5482-11df-8bef-00144feab49a.html


The passage of a law in the state of Arizona that would stiffen enforcement of US immigration laws is a turning point. Like the Immigration Act of 1924, which halted the flow of newcomers from Europe, it will end decades of laxly regulated migration and begin a process of cultural consolidation. There are 35m foreign-born people in the US, roughly a third without papers. Opponents of the law promise to resist it through boycotts and court challenges. It may indeed be overturned. But such action is unlikely to be decisive. Challenges to its constitutionality focus only on a handful of policing elements that could easily be purged in replacement legislation. The bill is long, detailed, carefully crafted and extremely popular.

The law treats illegal entry into the US as a state crime. It authorises police officers who have made “lawful contact” with a suspect – through an arrest, for example – to determine whether he is legally in the US or not. The measure is mild compared with policing laws routinely applied to immigrants in other countries – the stop-and-search provisions of the UK Terrorism Act 2000, for example, which were ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights earlier this year. It does, however, cut against long-standing American expectations that a person be allowed to circulate unmolested by the authorities. Doubtless, some US citizens will be stopped and questioned. If poorly implemented, the bill could lead to “racial profiling” – the use of physical appearance to decide whether a person is “suspicious” – which is illegal in Arizona and many other states.

The nub of the constitutional questions surrounding the bill is that the federal government, not the states, sets immigration policy. Does this bill usurp federal authority? At the most basic level it does not – it leaves to Washington the determination of who is and is not legally in the country. On the other hand, it makes Arizona an inconvenient place to be an illegal immigrant. It does so by establishing “attrition through enforcement” as its policy.

The law makes it unlawful for illegal immigrants to solicit work, and for citizens knowingly to hire them or transport them to jobs. Transporting 10 of them constitutes a felony. The law permits Arizona to transfer illegal immigrants convicted of crimes to US immigration authorities after they finish their jail sentences. It allows agencies to share with one another the immigration status of residents. Under the law, an illegal immigrant can be found guilty of trespassing if found on public or private land.

The first lawsuits against the Arizona law were filed on Thursday. The Colombian singer Shakira has vowed to fight it. Mexican authorities issued a travel alert to their citizens. The Cardinal of Los Angeles compared Arizona legislators to Nazis. Activists are pressuring major league baseball to move the 2012 All-Star Game out of Arizona. Washington DC, Los Angeles and San Francisco have all called for boycotts of Arizona products. Supporters of the bill counter that those cities – as so-called “sanctuary cities”, which have a policy of not co-operating with federal authorities on immigration violations – are in wilful defiance of the very statutes they claim to be defending.

Even in Arizona, many politicians have expressed fury. Phil Gordon, the mayor of Phoenix, described those who favoured the bill as “bitter, small-minded and full of hate”. He has threatened to sue the state, although it is doubtful he has the authority. Democratic congressman Raúl Grijalva has backed an economic boycott of his own state. His district has a Hispanic majority. Only 34 per cent of his constituents are non-Hispanic whites. (Which makes it hard to see how singling out Hispanics for racial profiling would be possible even in theory.)

Attitudes about immigration are changing. For decades, businessmen, immigrants and consumers who wanted fresh fruit and tidy offices formed a coalition that favoured irregular immigration de facto, even while it remained illegal de jure. The financial crisis (which has hit Arizona hard) and the increasing violence of Mexican drug cartels along the US border (which may have led to the grisly murder in March of a rancher in Cochise County known for aiding migrants) have broken that coalition and led people to demand change. Politicians have until now failed to provide it.

Sixty-four per cent of Arizonans back the bill. The elements that survive legal challenge are likely to be imitated in neighbouring states, to prevent a spillover of migrants. Arizona governor Jan Brewer, who was on 40 per cent in job-approval polls two weeks ago, is now on 56 per cent. The number of those who “strongly approve” of her conduct has risen from 5 per cent to 22 per cent. Gallup has found that a majority of US voters who have heard of the law back it – even in states far from the border.

Immigration policy has taken a populist turn in the US for the same reason it has done so elsewhere: because politicians have tried to intimidate the public out of even reasonable discussion of immigration. The political dynamics that made Arizonans deem a new law necessary were not much different from those that led the Swiss to vote for a ban on minarets last autumn. The episode in Rochdale, England on Wednesday, in which UK prime minister Gordon Brown referred privately to the widow Gillian Duffy as a “bigoted woman” for raising questions about immigration, was front-page news across the US. That is because Mr Brown mirrored American politicians’ views of when it is proper for the public to talk about immigration and what it is permissible to say. The answers, apparently, are “never” and “nothing”.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

More columns at www.ft.com/caldwell