En Fuego! Oh...

Remember when Arizona was burning down, way back at the start of the summer, and Walnuts went on television to tell the nation it was probably the illegals’ fault?

"We are concerned about, particularly, areas down on the border where there is substantial evidence that some of these fires are caused by people who have crossed our border illegally," McCain said Saturday at a press conference, according to CNN.

Yeah, not so much.

A Tucson man and his cousin have been charged with causing the largest wildfire in Arizona history.

David Wayne Malboeuf, 24, of Tucson, and Caleb Joshua Malboeuf, 26, of Benson, were charged in connection with the Wallow Fire, which started May 29 in the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest.

The blaze scorched more than 538,000 acres in Eastern Arizona and part of Western New Mexico and destroyed 32 homes, four commercial buildings and 36 outbuildings before it was contained July 8.

A Forest Service investigation found the fire started when a campfire, left unattended by the Malboeufs in the Bear Wallow area, spread out of the fire ring and quickly spread in high winds.

Umm, yay Tucson? McCain supporters are rushing to the comments to remind us that the senator didn’t specify the Wallow fire, despite his statement coming when that particular biggest, craziest fire in Arizona history was full-on raging, not just in the woods but in the national news, and everyone was talking about God having finally decided to just torch the place because we’re kinda stupid out here (see: Pearce, Russell; Brewer, Jan; Underpants, Sheriff Pink).

But some illegal immigrant somewhere in Arizona started some fire sometime, probably, which means all fires are ultimately the Mexicans' fault anyway, also. QED. Or something.

True Colors Revealed to be, Unsurprisingly, Blindingly White

I wish I had written this, because it's so well done, but really I wish no one would ever have to write anything even approximating this in America. Racism, xenophobia, sexism, and bullheaded deliberate ignorance of our own laws, all in one tidy package courtesy of Russell Pearce and Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and assorted nutters from the east and west.

Now it's not enough to cluck about illegal immigrants while pretending you're really talking about the Irish and Polish and Russian alongside the Mexicans, er, the Latin Americans, not enough to rage about oprimando el numero ocho para servicio en espanol and insist English is the official national language even though it isn't. Now all the pretense that it isn't really racism is being dropped, and it must come as such as a relief to be able to talk this way, about breeding seasons and dropping young like livestock, and stop pretending they ever thought these people were human in the first place.

"We need to target the mother. Call it sexist, but that's the way nature made it. Men don't drop anchor babies, illegal alien mothers do." That statement was being pushed by the author of Arizona's immigration law. He's not alone.

The neat distillation of current anti-immigrant thinking was in an email spread around by State Senator Russell Pearce, and cited by The Nation's Robin Templeton in a report on the recently revived, anti-immigrant rhetoric on birthright citizenship — the part of the Fourteenth Amendment that stipulates that babies born on American soil are automatically granted citizenship.

"It's invasion by birth canal," the leader of a California anti-immigrant ballot initiative told the Los Angeles Times. The head of an anti-immigrant group in Virginia called for an investigation into "whether or not illegal aliens have a preferred breeding season."

Read the full piece for the full revolting story.

And the Immigration Blowup Continues to, Well, Blow Up

If your attention has been focused elsewhere this week--say, on cut-up and sewn-together joints, as mine has--you may have missed the news that a federal judge put the kibosh on several provisions of Arizona's new immigration law, specifically, the parts requiring cops to double as immigration agents and demand papers from anyone they stop who they think might be here illegally. A lot of people saw some very big red flags snapping in that breeze, and so, too, did judge Susan Bolton.

The overall law will still take effect Thursday, but without the provisions that angered opponents. Sections barred from being enforced include:

• Requiring a police officer to make a reasonable attempt to check the immigration status of those they have stopped;

• Forbidding police from releasing anyone they have arrested until that person's immigration status is determined;

• Making it a violation of Arizona law for anyone not a citizen to fail to carry documentation;

• Creating a new state crime for trying to secure work while not a legal resident;

• Allowing police to make warrantless arrests if there is a belief the person has committed an offense that allows them to be removed from the United States.

"Requiring Arizona law enforcement officials and agencies to determine the immigration status of every person who is arrested burdens lawfully-present aliens because their liberty will be restricted while their status is checked," U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled.

The predictable response reared its head, right on schedule.

The federal judge who halted parts of Arizona's immigration law is getting "thousands" of e-mails and phone calls, many in opposition to her ruling - and a few threatening her life.

A guy I play soccer with did not threaten the judge, but did post a status update on his Facebook asking if Bolton would give him back the $5000 he paid to go through the immigration/citizenship process when he came here from Greece. Another soccer acquaintance, this one from Poland, chimed in and said she'd like her 5k back too. Both said they don't see anything racist about SB1070 as it stands, and don't know why the hispanics think it's just targeting them instead of the Greeks and Poles and Chinese, and the Greek guy said he wouldn't mind carrying his passport and being questioned by a cop every day if that's what it takes to stop illegal immigration.

I try to avoid this kind of discussion on Facebook, so I did not post a response pointing out that (1) SB1070 has absolutely nothing to do with the legal citizenship process and thus isn't handing out fee waivers to every dehydrated Guanajuate who stumbles across the border, (2) the reason the Greek guy and Polish girl had the opportunity to fork over five grand and be welcomed with open arms in the first place is because (a) they came from countries whose quotas aren't filled and oh yeah (b) are, respectively, a software engineer and a cardiac nurse, not the (c) unskilled laborers from Latin America who would find themselves on a citizenship waiting list several generations long, and (3) if the Greek and Polish underclasses could walk here instead of having to pay for a boat or plane ride, it wouldn't just be the Mexicans and Salvadorans feeling like they have a target on their backs.

The Greek guy's wife is having a baby any day now. I wonder if Yorgos would always remember to take his passport and naturalization papers with him on the inevitable 2 a.m. runs to Walgreen's when the baby has a fever and he might not stay under the speed limit or come to a complete stop at every sign before turning. I wonder how excited he would be then to cooperate with a cop who thinks his skintone, beard, and accent mean he's not supposed to be here. I don't know why he doesn't think this could have happened to him, or why he thinks he would welcome the impingement of the freedom he shelled out all that cash to have. It's moot in any case, since Bolton's ruling ensures that he won't be faced with that situation, but I almost wish it wasn't. Because lots of shit sounds like it's a good idea, or would at least be tolerable, until it actually happens to you.

Jan-Jan and R-Pea Explain It All For You

A facet of the immigration debate that tends to be overlooked is the impact on families when half the people in a household are citizens or legal residents and half are not, and the undocumented half get deported--specifically, when the undocumented people are parents, grandparents, or other caregivers and the citizens are minor children who were born here. It's such a problem in Tucson that the Sunnyside Unified School District has joined a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of SB1070, Arizona's "papers please" law that compels municipal law enforcement to determine the immigration status of anyone they stop who they think is Mexican may be in the country illegally.

State Senator Russell Pearce (R-Fuck Mountain) and Governor Jan Brewer (brrrrrrr) floated competing solutions in which they both attempt to be Solomon, but without getting that Solomon wasn't really serious with that whole chop-the-baby-in-half thing. Brewer--who, by the by, has perfected the facial shrug like nuthin' you've ever seen over the past couple of months--says that deported parents should just take their kids with them back to Mexico (cannot embed; go watch) Problem solved!

It is illegal to trespass into our country. It has always been illegal. And people have determined that they want to take that chance, and that responsibility, it's not gonna tear them apart. They can take their children back with them.

We are a nation of laws. That's why we are America.

Of course, this is the same Jan Brewer who explained her refusal to sign a bill banning texting while driving this way:

"You can write all the laws that you want," Brewer said. "But it sometimes doesn't make a whole lot of difference. People don't follow them."

O_o.

Pearce, on the other hand, thinks the best way to alleviate the problems faced by mixed-status families is to eliminate them altogether. What's that you say? 14th Amendment to the what? I do declare, sir; you may force me to brandish my cane in anger! Jesus.

Pearce needs a civics refresher--preferably in any state other than the 50th-ranked for education, of course, so OMG ROAD TRIP TIME--if he really doesn't understand the Constitutional issue in play here.

First of all, that's not the law. It's an unconstitutional declaration of citizenship for those born, uh, in the Wong Kim, uh, decision before the Supreme Court, it made it very clear in the statements from the senators at the time that the 14th Amendment was written, made it clear it did not pertain to aliens and those we did not, who did not have legal domicile in the United States. It's the most irrational and uh, uh, self-defeating provision you can have.

True, the 14th Amendment was written specifically to ensure that the children of freed slaves would be automatically accorded citizenship, without thought to waves of people coming to the US from points south 100 years later, but, just as the 1st Amendment has been interpreted to apply to forms of speech media and the 2nd to high-power firearms that were inconceivable when the amendments were originally penned, the 14th is interpreted to apply to all people born within our borders. In fact, that interpretation comes from the very Wong Kim decision Pearce erroneously cites as proof that anchor babies are really alien babies who should be sent home on the next saucer outta Roswell.

The 14th Amendment's citizenship clause, according to the court's majority, had to be interpreted in light of English common law tradition that had excluded from citizenship at birth only two classes of people: (1) children born to foreign diplomats and (2) children born to enemy forces engaged in hostile occupation of the country's territory. The majority held that the "subject to the jurisdiction" phrase in the 14th Amendment specifically encompassed these conditions (plus a third condition, namely, that Indian tribes were not considered subject to U.S. jurisdiction) - and that since none of these conditions applied to Wong's situation, Wong was a U.S. citizen, regardless of the fact that his parents were not U.S. citizens (and were, in fact, ineligible ever to become U.S. citizens because of the Chinese Exclusion Act).

Pearce appears to be construing "subject to the jurisdiction" as "have a green card in their pocket," which isn't mind-bogglingly narrow and stupid (although it is) so much as it is so incredibly transparently hypocritical as to barely merit a response. Because, in Pearce's book, undocumented people are double-dog subject to every other jurisdiction in the US, especially the ones that are now empowered to dump them on the other side of the fence from the Nogales Burger King if they don't have their birth certificates on them when they're pulled over for a busted taillight.

So there you have it. Pack up your kids and walk away from the better life you came here to give them, or... well, or forget about the better life thing altogether, because the Constitution only applies to people we think it applies to. And there's no point in writing laws, because people ignore them, unless, of course, it's a law that white people don't need to worry about, in which case WE ARE ALL ABOUT THE LAW, PEOPLE. Oh, Arizona. You never fail to disappoint.

Never-ending Nightmare Never Ends

Ever had a nasty 24-hour stomach bug? The kind where you feel increasingly miserable and then puke and feel much better, but then have your blissful, blessed relief cut short by another wave of nausea, and then another, until you are certain that you will be vomiting every 20 minutes for the rest of your life?

Welcome to Arizona, where the legislature and governor have just heaved our collective shoes into the bucket with a prohibition against ethnic-studies curricula that don't meet Tom "the most fun chant for me was 'drill, baby, drill' used by three separate speakers" Horne's approval.

Gov. Jan Brewer signed a bill limiting what kind of courses schools can offer in the name of cultural diversity Tuesday.

Without comment, Brewer signed the controversial legislation, which declares students "should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.''

The law, aimed specifically at the ethnic studies program at Tucson Unified School District, is far more complex than that goal.

It makes it illegal for public schools to have any courses or classes that promote the overthrow of the United States government or promote resentment toward a race or class of people. It also bars any programs "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group."

My 7th grade social studies teacher would be in deep shit on this one, given how his World War II lectures made me resent the hell out of the Nazis. And my son's Native American Literature teacher made the class read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee this semester, which left him feeling not that great about--gasp--the United States government! Well. That's a bit of hyperbole. Tom Horne isn't going to march in and string up teachers who might give white students a moment of pause when they consider the atrocities perpetuated by governments on this continent and in Europe, but if you get the Mexicans riled up, you're toast. Oh, and by the way, if you're trying to teach the Mexicans to speak English, make sure your accent isn't too thick. Because Arizona doesn't like that either.

You'd be perfectly justified, at this point, to ask who the fuck thinks all this is a good idea. There's an obvious and troubling answer, and now, this morning, a less obvious and possibly more troubling answer. First, the no-brainer: the white supremacists, of course, think this is all kinds of awesome. But it's more than just them, and that keeps me from my rest. Large chunks of the country are going nativist now, or at least large chunks of slightly more than a thousand registered voters with landlines who happened to answer their phones and take part in a poll are, and that should give us all pause.

A strong majority of Americans support Arizona's controversial new immigration law and would back similar laws in their own states, a new McClatchy-Ipsos poll found.

A separate Pew Research Center poll on the Arizona law released Wednesday found similar sentiments.

In the McClatchy-Ipsos poll, 61 percent of Americans - and 64 percent of registered voters - said they favored the law in a survey of 1,016 adults conducted May 6-9.

Strikingly, nearly half of Democrats like the law, under which local law enforcement officers are tasked with verifying people's immigration status if they suspect them of being in the country illegally.

Swell. And here's the best part:

In addition, about 69 percent of Americans said they wouldn't mind if police officers stopped them to ask for proof of their citizenship or legal rights to be in the country; about 29 percent would mind, considering it a violation of their rights, and about 3 percent were unsure.

Hell no, I wouldn't mind if a nice police officer stopped me and asked me for proof of citizenship! People who say this are people who have never been hassled by a cop in their entire lives for having the wrong skin color or wrong kind of clothes for the neighborhood they're walking in or the car they're driving. It's very, very easy to hit play and blast out the title track from Unexamined Privilege's Greatest Hits, Vol. 1: If You're Not Doing Anything Wrong (You Don't Have Anything To Worry About), until the day comes when you really aren't doing anything wrong and get busted anyway. If you're white enough and not screaming in Farsi at the top of your lungs, no, you probably don't have to worry about it, and if for some unfathomable reason you were stopped and questioned and didn't have your ID or birth certificate (long form, please) on you, you could talk your way out of it. And hey, if you don't have to worry about it on a personal level, you get a pass from having to worry about it on a conceptual level. It's not just the Arizona way any more. It's the American way, bucko, and don't you forget it.

Pass the pepto, if you please. Every time I think it's got to be over, another wave comes.

Another Kind of Migrant

I can't tell you how many times I've heard anti-immigrant (read: anti-Mexican) people in Arizona complain about the immigrants' refusal to assimilate into mainstream (read: white) America. These people, they come into our country and still speak Spanish and wave their Mexican flags and eat at taco trucks and play their goddamn mariachi music full blast and have fucking picnics in graveyards and this is AMERICA goddammit so why don't they act like Americans?

I'm not from here either. Well, I am from the US, but I'm not from Arizona. I'm from the midwest, Illinois and Indiana, mostly the greater Chicago area. I spent my middle school and high school years in South Bend, Indiana, and grew up with the grandkids of Polish immigrants. When the Poles came over, they built their own parish church a block away from the existing church so they wouldn't have to go to mass with all those annoying Irish people, lived in their own neighborhood, and ran their own grocery stores and butchers, some of which were still operational enough in 1984 that if you went in and asked the butcher in Polish, you could get the quart of duck blood you wanted for soup. Now those folks have retired to Phoenix and brought as much of the midwest with them as they could cram into their Winnebagos, but since they're saying ya hey dere and flying a Packers windsock instead of si se puede and El Tricolor, no one notices a thing.

My midwestern grandparents spend the winters in one of these Phoenix-area giant senior citizens' communities, surrounded by fellow snowbirds from Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin. They frequent the Hoosier Cafe, decorated with Indiana University and Purdue memorabilia, and another cafe that is named Red Mountain but might was well be U.P Michigan Central, this one plastered with Packers, Vikings, and Proud to Be a Yooper flags, and order coffee from waitresses with unmistakable upper midwest accents and look at the Michigan license plates on the wall and wonder why the Mexicans won't just try to fit in.

Meanwhile, fifteen years and counting in the desert and my wardrobe still consists mostly of t-shirts proclaiming my allegiance to various Chicago sports teams and Notre Dame. My license plate and the Cubs magnet on the back of my car scream Chicago. When I go hiking here I seek out running streamcourses that are lined with trees, and in the springtime long to hit the higher elevations of the Catalinas just so I can see some familiar wild geraniums and smell damp rock and feel, for a moment, that I'm back home. The pens on my office desk sit in an ancient beer cup from the Taste of Chicago. Steve Goodman, rest his soul, headlines my iPod; WGN News at Nine is not an infrequent visitor to my living room; about once a week you can find me clutching an Old Style at Rocco's Little Chicago in the booth under the CTA centennial poster.

For good measure, Boltgirl's office ceiling decoration.

In short, I in many ways--unconscious, conscious, sometimes downright gleeful--have stayed within the cultural milieu I grew up in instead of completely assimilating into my new home. My right-wing fellow Arizonans probably just haven't really noticed, or, if they have, haven't taken offense at my Loop-centric tastes because they aren't terribly far afield from their own. I'm allowed my trappings of home because home's on the right side of the Rio Grande. The Mexicans who want to do the same? My stars, what a terrible affront to Arizona sensibilities.

Posting from the Last Bastion of Hope in Southern Pariahstan

Dude, the rest of the country hates us now. Well, at least the parts of the country that have yet to be overrun by racist, anti-government gun nuts, that is, and that hurts me where I live. Fuck. Since I can't go more than a few sentences at a time on the Brown Star Law without completely losing my shit, here is Jon Stewart to lose it for me in a much more controlled and constructive fashion.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Law & Border
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Further required reading is available at the MaddowBlog; to wit:

But if you want to meet the guy who's taking credit for writing the new law, that would be Kris Kobach, a birther who's running for secretary of state in Kansas. His campaign Website brags, "Kobach wins one in Arizona." He's also an attorney for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of an immigration group called FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

FAIR was founded in 1979 by John Tanton, who's still listed as a member of FAIR's board of directors. Seven years after he started FAIR, Tanton wrote this, "To govern is to populate. Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night or will there be an explosion?"

For nine of the first years of FAIR's existence, the group reportedly received more than $1 million in funding from something called the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund describes itself as based "in the Darwinian-Galtonian evolutionary tradition and eugenics movement." For the last 70 years, the Pioneer Fund has funded controversial research about race and intelligence, essentially aimed at proving the racial superiority of white people. The group's original mandate was to promote the genes of those "deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution."

Arizona has turned into the wettest of right-wing dreams. A bona fide problem (drug smugglers--hello, US drug habits and drug laws--and human traffickers--hello, US economy--kidnapping and shooting people) has become prima facie for every nativist, supremacist, exceptionalist fantasy they can cook up. No no no, the tea partiers have protested, it's not racism, we just want to take our country back. Well, hell yes they do. They fucking want to take the country back to April 12, 1861, and the pretenses are fast falling away.

Postcard from South Teabaggeria

Oh, Arizona. Is there no new low to which you just won't sink?

The past week saw the legislature decide--without a single word of debate--that open carry is just too restrictive, and concealed weapons are now fine and dandy without a permit. Are you a grownup? Get down to the gun store, Elmer! Because the governor's set to sign this puppy into law, so cram as many pieces into your pockets, waistband, and asscrack as you can fit, and don't worry about taking a silly class--education is for socialists and Muslims, after all--that will teach you how to handle a gun safely and discern when the use of deadly force is legal.

Now for Act II, the legislature is crowing about having passed the toughest immigration law in the nation, which both empowers local cops to arrest people who are in the country illegally, and compels said cops to investigate the immigration status of anyone they suspect might not be a legitimate Real American. So if you're here on a visa or a green card, you will have to carry those documents on your person at all times, because if Officer Friendly hears your funny accent and surmises that skin tone isn't just from staying out in the sun too long, he has to ask you for your papers. Seriously, he or she has to do that, because the law also allows upstanding Real American citizens to sue law enforcement agencies whose officers do not demonstrate significant rigor in questioning every guy running a leaf blower in the Circle K parking lot.

So not only do we have a genuine police state brought to us courtesy of the same faction that howled about fascist government takeover of the country when healthcare reform was enacted, but we have a police state with heat-packing citizen snitchery built right in! Who says Republicans don't really care about infrastructure?

Meanwhile, the state's budget disaster is claiming victims from the school districts at an alarming rate. Hundreds of teachers and support staff are being axed, programs are disappearing, and the president of the University of Arizona is threatening to cut financial aid if a one-cent sales tax fails on the ballot next month. Of course, even if the temporary sales tax passes, the legislature is casually mulling enacting corporate tax cuts that would offset most of the revenue gains the sales tax would provide. Because nothing lures businesses to a state like the promise of a grossly undereducated labor pool.

But don't worry, Arizona parents who are concerned with the quality of public education here and the amount of cash you'll have to shell out for niceties like having art class, or sports teams, or keeping the school library open--the legislature has you covered! Just keep the brats in school through tenth grade, and if they can pass a standardized test, they get to "graduate" early with something called a "Grand Canyon Diploma," which really ought to be printed with quote marks around the word "diploma" on the parchment too, since its relationship to actual academic achievement will be on par with the relationship of a giant bowl of Cap'n Crunch to "this complete breakfast."

Life will continue here in the Wild Wild West, but it isn't going to be pretty.

Triple Threat Friday!

Goodness me, so much in the paper this morning that needs responding to right now. Because that will fix it. Forthwith, the gays, the immigrants, and the terrorists!

Item the first: Gay Marriage Amendment Dies in Committee.

The House gave preliminary approval Thursday by a 28-27 vote to put the question on the November ballot. But that OK came only after Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Phoenix, lined up enough votes to tack on a provision to grant certain rights to unmarried couples living together, whether gay or straight.

That move effectively tied the two issues together as a single ballot question, meaning voters who want to make same-sex weddings unconstitutional would be voting for some constitutional rights for gay couples. A spokesman for House Speaker Jim Weiers, sponsor of HCR 2065, said that is unacceptable and that the Phoenix Republican will now kill his proposal.

Senate President and Karl Rove fanboy Tim Bee had another version ready to go, this one limited solely to keeping Teh Gayz out of the wedding market, but after HCR 2065's summary execution no longer "sees the point" in bringing it to a floor vote. You might hope that this would be the anti-marriage-equality camp's last gasp on this issue, given their referendum defeat in 2006 and the governor's recent approval of domestic partner benefits (justified in great part by the need to prevent brain drain and make Arizona more attractive to both companies that might relocate here and the young professionals they employ).

You might also reasonably hope that Alfonso Soriano and the rest of the guys at the top of the lineup might quit swinging at the first pitch unless they can actually make contact. Ain't neither one likely to happen anytime soon.

"We're looking at all options," said Ron Johnson who lobbies for the state's three Catholic bishops. And Cathi Herrod of the Center for Arizona Policy said she still believes that there is a way to resurrect the measure.

Ron, Cathi? Tell you what. Take it down and stick it in a hole and come back in three days to see if an angel has rolled back the stone. If there is not an empty tomb but, lo, a stench instead, walk away and turn your considerable energies toward something else. Want it to be biblical? Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me. You can start with that one.

Item the second: Pledge Spoken in Spanish; Flag Threatens to Burst into Flames.

For years, Gale Elementary School teacher Anne Lee has had her students recite the pledge in three languages — English, Spanish and American Sign Language — as a learning exercise. The kids start with English.

Do you see a problem? No one had until the son of a Minuteman Mexican Huntin' Squad Civil Defense Corps loon patriot hit second grade. Dad posted the story on multiple message boards and the e-mail barrage began. TUSD's response has been, quite reasonably, wtf?

"It's really not a story," said Cheryl Hill Lander, the district's spokeswoman. "They recite the pledge in English every morning, and they recite the pledge in Spanish. After they recite it in Spanish, then they sign the Pledge of Allegiance."

And Governing Board President Alex Rodriguez, who served in the military, said "it was clear … there was no patriotic disrespect intended."

It doesn't matter to American Dad.

But to Altherr, a 34-year-old landscaper, the disrespect has been made, and the e-mail campaign will continue.

"It's nothing against Spanish," he said. "I would be just as upset if they were making my son say the Pledge of Allegiance in German."

Uh huh. That's why you set up your lawn chairs at JFK every spring, to make sure the NSA folks are checking the German tourists' passports with the rigor befitting a True Patriot.

Item the third: Daily Star Unwittingly Installs Astroturf, One Letter at a Time. Two letters in two days isn't much, but, well, we have two letters in two days with this lovely reminder:

Remind public why we're in Iraq

Re: the March 29 letter "How to end the Iraq War."

I think the idea has merit.

As a supporter of the war, I think that would be a great service provided that just after the information on the soldier is given the media profiles one of the individuals killed on Sept. 11.

The in-your-face approach to the war is needed to remind everyone why our brave soldiers are required to be placed in harm's way. Maybe we could also remind some of your readers what started the entire situation.

Wow, thank you for this! What with the 9/11 Commission Report and the Joint Forces Command's report and St. Rudy of 9/11 dropping out of the race and all, I had completely forgotten that the Iraq war is necessary retribution for Saddam planning September 11 and flying one of the planes himself by remote control while sitting on a copy of Mein Kampf personally signed by Barack Hussein Obama and getting blown by Osama bin Laden. Who was wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt at the time.

Final score, for those keeping it at home: Arizona 2, Rational Thought 1. Better luck today, Rational Thought! Hope the wind's blowing out!

On Unscrambling the Egg

Two items in the Tucson paper yesterday served as wistful vignettes on the inevitable march of the universe toward increasing entropy. On the local scale:

A historically significant U.S. Magnetic Observatory building that was supposed to be left standing in Udall Park while others around it were demolished was mistakenly taken down [to make room for a new sports field].

The gaffe by a city contractor leaves only four of the original 15 buildings standing.

The mistakenly demolished building dated to the 1920s, a little later than some of the turn-of-the-century buildings on the site. But it was more important for historic research than some of the others that were saved, according to a historian who lobbied to preserve the site.

And at a larger scale:

Construction of two miles of border fencing in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area will resume following Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's decision Monday to invoke a waiver that exempts border fences from any law. ...

Home to hundreds of species of birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles, and the last remaining free-flowing river in Arizona, the San Pedro has earned international recognition as a rare treasure. In 1988, Congress established a 40-mile stretch of the upper river as the nation's first Riparian National Conservation Area.

There's no going back for either situation. People can construct a building and, if it manages to hang around for at least fifty years while remaining a pristine example of a distinctive architectural style and/or housing a significant event or person, we can protect it through historic preservation. But if we demolish it, even inadvertently, we can't rebuild it and have the same significant, historic building. At best we can build a replica incorporating some original materials. But the thing created, once destroyed, cannot be perfectly recreated with its history intact. When the continuity of the timeline is disrupted, history stops.

A bulldozer through an old frame building. A fence through the center of an ecosystem. The San Pedro River will continue to flow, but now it will be around permanent vehicle barriers built of train track. A 12-to-14 foot high fence will cut through two miles of the most important riparian area in the border region, including the ranges of the mountain lion and the jaguar.

Granted, ecosystems are different from historic buildings. We talk about preserving the integrity of historic structures and areas, knowing that true restoration isn't possible after something is destroyed. With nature we have more wiggle room for do-overs--water can be made to flow again, plants to grow--but the disruption to the land mammals whose territories will be impacted by the fence may be a hell of a challenge to overcome. Of course, that's precisely the intent behind the border fence, the disruption of one specific land mammal's migratory route.

Two eggs scrambled, one small and one extra large in the grand scheme of things, both decisions in response to the pressures of an ever-burgeoning population.

Tucson is bursting at the seams and has chronically overcrowded soccer fields. So we shrug apologetically as we erase history to fill an immediate need. We went through this at a larger scale in the 1970s, demolishing acres of historic neighborhoods in order to build an ultra!modern downtown Tucson that promptly turned into a ghost town and has been the subject of attempts at revival for close to thirty years now. Before that, the remains of the Spanish colonial convento built in the 1800s were bulldozed to make room for... a landfill. Now that property is in the process of being restored, albeit with the completely new construction necessitated by the total destruction fifty years ago. And opinion is hotly divided over whether such a reconstruction should even be attempted, given the complete lack of an original structure beyond part of a building foundation. That's how thirsty we are for historical continuity here, having finally recognized the magnitude of what we didn't just lose but what we willfully discarded all those years ago in the interest of what, at the time, seemed like a really good idea for the present.

People are streaming north across the Mexican border, impelled by poverty at home and the promise of jobs in the US. So we shrug apologetically as we disrupt an entire ecosystem for the foreseeable future to fill an immediate need. Maybe the fence will slow the flow of migrants and stem the tide of trash and waste left along the trails trampled in their wake. Will that be the tradeoff for the San Pedro? A fence will stop jaguars and deer in their tracks. I'm not convinced it will stop people who are desperate to get to the other side. Even the Berlin Wall, with its no-man's-land and razor wire and machine gun emplacements, couldn't stop everyone who was desperate to chase the hope of a better life. When that fence came down, the surrounding city eventually flowed back together across the scar it left, but it took several years for the two different environments created by the wall to finally re-mesh. Now Michael Chertoff will build his own fence in defiance of laws and biologists telling him it will have dire long-term consequences. We can't know what the next generations will have to do to repair them, or the lengths they'll want to go to undo something that they may find mind-bogglingly short-sighted.

Human agency does not stop and time is linear; decisions resulting in material change can't be reversed. We need to think very carefully before cracking the shell.

Desert Museum Knuckles Under in Border War

The rampant asshattery swirling around the margins of the US-Mexico border security debate has slammed directly into the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, the crown jewel of natural history here in Tucson. The museum is dedicated to the Sonoran Desert ecosystem, which has the temerity to extend across the international border to encompass portions of the states of Arizona (US) and Sonora (Mexico). Thus the name. The saguaros, cactus wrens, collared lizards, black-tailed deer, coyotes, mountain lions, and pygmy owls don't notice the line on the map--although they may well notice a 700-mile-long fence--and the exhibits at the museum don't distinguish the American Sonoran Desert from the Mexican Sonoran Desert unless actual differences in ecotone dictate.

So when you walk into the entrance you go past flagpoles with the American and Mexican (a gift from the Mexican government, 50 years ago) flags flapping in the breeze. Or at least you did, until yesterday. Yesterday both flagpoles were removed because people complained about Teh Messican flag flying on 'Murcan soil. Actually, some numbnuts went beyond "complaining."

The incendiary border debate not only fueled complaints about flying the Mexican flag, [Trustee Winifred Warden] said, but she had also heard there were death threats against the museum's animals.

Because that's the best way to have a rational debate about immigration: by threatening to kill animals that probably aren't going to cast deciding votes either way (although we can't be too sure about those shifty jaguarundis). And lord knows we can't have Mexican flags within eyesight of Real American patriots, lest they develop the irresistible urge to take low-paying crap jobs and unwind afterwards by watching soccer on Telemundo. The result is that an educational institution that makes its mission to demonstrate to people that the natural world exists independently of political borders feels it's best to remove an innocuous display rather than telling people to grow the fuck up, because those people are taking up more and more of the employees' time with their complaints and are threatening violence against innocent non-actors that have absolutely no bearing on the political issue at hand. What's that called, again? Oh, yeah, terrorism.

"The Mexican flag has not been there for 50 years to symbolize a territorial issue," [US Representative Raul] Grijalva said. "It represents an ecosystem that stretches across both borders and both nations. This is where the whole discussion about everything on the border kind of deteriorates. It's sad."

Grijalva said taking down the flag appears to be an overreaction.

"For the life of me, I can't understand the significance of taking it down and I can't understand who we are satisfying," he said. "This doesn't make the border more secure."

Niiiiiiiiiiiiice...

A stunning letter to the editor in this morning's Daily Star:

Re: the July 10 article "Drivers, take water for border crossers, new coalition urges."

I am still floored by the article asking citizens to carry extra water in our vehicles to help illegal border crossers.

Excuse me, but when did refusing to aid and abet illegal activities become "an indictment on us as a community," to quote Dr. Norma Price?

Why is this issue even news? I've lived here for 19 years, and every summer it's the same story. If illegals continue to try and cross our desert in triple-digit heat, they're going to die. This is a no-brainer. Weren't two people arrested a few years ago for doing just what this new coalition is asking people to do?

I for one will not help these folks. If this sounds cold, so be it. I am a law-abiding citizen of Tucson and plan to keep it that way.

Deborah Hodges

Tucson

Do I even need to say it? Yes-no, yes-no... ::mulls for two seconds:: Well, Law-abiding Deborah, should your car break down on Route 86 west of town this summer, make sure you're carrying your birth certificate and voter registration card with you, because if I don't have proof positive that you're an American citizen, you're not getting any water from me. Actually, I will also need notarized affidavits stating the same from two other American citizens, which means I'll need proof of their citizenship, and their witnesses' citizenship, and...

Because obeying the law always outweighs saving the lives of other human beings. Always.

And Immigrant Oddness in Arizona

The second news item in the Daily Star catching my eye this morning reports an incident being billed as "a fight between human-smugglers" on a farm north of Tucson: [emphases mine]

David Norris Jr., 46, of Eloy, about 50 miles northwest of Tucson, was driving a vehicle containing 12 illegal entrants in a farm field near Sunshine and Ellis roads when four heavily armed men in a white full-size van began firing on them, Michael Minter, a Pinal County Sheriff's Department spokesman, said Wednesday.

None of the shooters has been arrested, Minter said. They were wearing green camouflage pants and shirts and wearing military-style berets — three black and one red. The shooters spoke limited Spanish.

This is curious to me for reasons revolving around the apparent non-Latino identities of the gunmen and the dead driver. Human smugglers around here, at least the ones that make the papers, are usually Mexican coyotes who get caught by the Border Patrol on the highway. An anglo guy from Eloy driving a truckload of illegals in a farm field sounds more like an under-the-table employer than a smuggler to me, but I could be wrong. And four white guys in military getups with big guns sound more like self-styled yahoo Minutemen than a rival smuggling ring to me, but I could be wrong. They managed to kill Norris and wound a 12-year-old kid. I'm not sure who decided this was little more than gang warfare. I hope the Star does a little digging here.

Immigration, Again

W is set to address the nation tonight on the topic of (illegal) immigration, likely including the announcement that the National Guard will be deployed along the Mexican border. This administration is fixin' a veritable spiral-bound church social cookbook of recipes for disaster. At first blush, I'm all for anything that keeps the boys and girls out of Iraq, but a Sasabe-to-Douglas game of Red Rover with guns is not, perhaps, the most healthy alternative.

A few letters to the editor in the Tucson morning paper over the past few weeks have harped on the message that, well, my ancestors came over here legally, without sneaking in, so everybody else should do it that way too, because the illegals are just cutting the line in front of the people doing it the right way. Let's take a look at that. I'm making broad assumptions here that may be unfounded, but I'm guessing that most of the My People Came Through Ellis Island So Why Can't Yours crowd are of European descent. As I've pointed out before, the hordes migrating here from Ireland, Poland, Germany, Hungary, and Russia only had one option when it came to travel--get on a boat whose accomodations they could afford and get off in the port where it docked. Walking to the US was not an alternative, at least not since the Bering land bridge flooded several millenia ago. My immigrant ancestors didn’t have much money—farmers from England on one side, Bohemian miners on the other, a German here, an Irishman there—but most of them had the fortuitous timing to duck the waves of fill-in-the-blank anti-immigration sentiment that rolled through the country beginning in the mid-1800s.

The legal process of immigration those people went through bears little resemblance to The Process so reverentially referenced by modern immigration reformers. Depending on the ship line available to them, 19^th-century immigrants from Europe may have entered the US through any number of ports, and, given enough personal wealth, faced an “immigration process” as simple as signing on the dotted line:

First and second class passengers who arrived in New York Harbor were not required to undergo the inspection process at Ellis Island. Instead, these passengers underwent a cursory inspection aboard ship; the theory being that if a person could afford to purchase a first or second class ticket, they were less likely to become a public charge in America due to medical or legal reasons. The Federal government felt that these more affluent passengers would not end up in institutions, hospitals or become a burden to the state.

Passengers with limited financial means were required to jump through an additional hoop, although for most, the delay in admittance was on the order of half a day or less :

Upon arrival in New York City, ships would dock at the Hudson or East River piers. First and second class passengers would disembark, pass through Customs at the piers and were free to enter the United States. The steerage and third class passengers were transported from the pier by ferry or barge to Ellis Island where everyone would undergo a medical and legal inspection.

If the immigrant's papers were in order and they were in reasonably good health, the Ellis Island inspection process would last approximately three to five hours. The inspections took place in the Registry Room (or Great Hall), where doctors would briefly scan every immigrant for obvious physical ailments. Doctors at Ellis Island soon became very adept at conducting these "six second physicals." By 1916, it was said that a doctor could identify numerous medical conditions (ranging from anemia to goiters to varicose veins) just by glancing at an immigrant. The ship's manifest log (that had been filled out back at the port of embarkation) contained the immigrant's name and his/her answers to twenty-nine questions. This document was used by the legal inspectors at Ellis Island to cross examine the immigrant during the legal (or primary) inspection.

The automatic status accorded the wealthier immigrants and the cursory controls placed on the poorer ones expose the myth of the noble, legal Ellis Island immigrant who allegedly faced the same bureaucratic entanglements modern would-be immigrants face and still managed to build a fortune on the 43 cents he had in his pocket when he walked through the gates. The poorest migrants were delayed less than a day in their quest to enter the country, even if they had no resident relatives or job prospects. Modern migrants—even those with connections in the US—must navigate an extremely complicated, hierarchical system with built-in preferences and national origin quotas, and even then expect to wait six months to several years for a visa.

Because the number of immigrant visa numbers that are available each year is limited, you may not get an immigrant visa number immediately after your immigrant visa petition is approved. In some cases, several years could pass between the time USCIS approves your immigrant visa petition and the State Department gives you an immigrant visa number. Because U.S. law also limits the number of immigrant visas available by country, you may have to wait longer if you come from a country with a high demand for U.S. immigrant visas.

In a very real sense, then, the historical Ellis Island experience is more closely paralleled by the modern illegal immigrant crossing the Mexico-US border than by the “legal” immigrant waiting for official entry. Ease of access to the US was and still is largely conditioned by the financial resources at the immigrant’s disposal; those with little money face the danger of walking across the desert now and faced a long crossing made hazardous by crowded, unsanitary conditions in steerage then, compounded by an increased risk of denied entry due to disease contracted on the voyage or the determination by inspectors that the poor immigrant posed an unacceptable social risk. The better-off illegal migrants now increase their chance of a successful entry by being able to buy forged paperwork and a ride, just as the well-heeled legal immigrant in 1875 bought instant credibility and a free pass through Customs with his first- or second-class ticket stub.

In either scenario, though, comparing the current immigration requirements with the effective turnstiles at Ellis Island and other ports of entry in the late 1800s is dishonest. Why, people ask, don’t the lettuce pickers and construction day laborers do the right thing and get in line at the immigration office with the rest of the upstanding citizens of the world? Read the immigration preference system and see if you can find “unskilled laborer” listed under any of those categories. Actually, I’ll save you the trouble: you can’t. Why do they choose, instead, to risk death by walking across the desert or pay their meager savings to a coyote for the guided tour? Because they are desperate. And desperate people do not have the luxury of waiting for a visa number that will never be issued.

Yes, my ancestors and probably yours did it “the right way,” coming through an official port of entry, spelling their names for the man who wrote them in the ship’s registry, standing in front of a doctor who rubber-stamped their health as acceptable, answering a couple of questions from the form filled out on the ship, and walking directly through the golden door. Given the choice of that kind of “process,” don’t you think the hundred of thousands sneaking across the southern border would opt to do the same? And if today’s immigration restrictions and requirements had existed in 1850, would you or I be sitting here in the US today, or would our ancestors have decided they couldn’t hack it, and either stayed home or found more creative ways into the country?

May Day mayday

Eric Zorn's column in the Chicago Tribune this morning addresses the immingrants' rights marches that were held across the country yesterday. He wandered down to the Chicago rally, looking for some unified message, trying to figure out what, exactly, those thousands of people want anyway. Then he threw the floor open for comments, and I must say it was far more right-leaning than I would have expected. The comments run probably 90% in favor of fuck 'em, they're criminals, send 'em back to Mexico if they don't like the way things are here, where they shouldn't be anyway because my grandparents took the time and effort to come through Ellis Island like everybody should.

My comment, as posted on the Trib website, below:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The people who complain about illegals from Mexico (and other Latin American countries) "cutting the line" and sneaking into this country while legal immigrants wait to do it "the right way" appear to believe that the Mexicans come skipping across the border with ice cream cones, waltzing in droves down a wide paved street. I wonder if the complainers can understand the desperation that will spur people to walk a couple hundred miles across the desert in the middle of the summer, when the air temperature right above the ground pushes 120. Or to scrape together a couple hundred bucks to pay a coyote to cram them into a container truck, which may or may not deliver them to the place they thought they were going, and whose driver may or may not unlock the container and let them out before they asphyxiate or roast.

It's too complex a problem to be addressed by throw-away sound bites of either the "deport 'em all" or "give 'em all amnesty" variety. Did my desperate ancestors walk over here from Ireland and Bohemia? Nope, mainly because they couldn't walk across that ocean. Does that somehow make them--and, by extension, me--better than this generation's crop of desperate people looking for the chance to earn a living for their families? I don't think so.

Sanction the businesses that knowingly hire illegals to take advantage of a cheap labor pool? Absolutely--but don't naively assume there won't be direct effects on the economy. For most businesses, it's simple math, or at least one of those word problems from 8th grade algebra. Business B needs 3 workers in job X, two in job Y, and five in job Z. The available payroll is quantity P. For B to stay afloat, 3x + 2y + 5z better be less than or equal to P.

With gas climbing over $3 in many parts of the country, how happy will people be to see consumer prices rise as well, to the often cited $5 head of lettuce? Maybe a guest worker program would be a solution, but that legislation would effectively create a permanent official underclass of cheap workers who, American laborers could logically argue, actually are being sponsored by the gummint to take American jobs.

Meanwhile, as our knees jerk in both directions, a couple hundred people continue to die every year making that long walk across the desert. Consider them felons if you want, call for them to be deported if you want, but don't shrug at the desperation that drives them to risk their lives to get here and then work their tails off once they do. That may be any number of things, but "lazy" ain't one of them.

Things We Hope For Today

1. cookies in the kitchen at work. Sometimes the receptionist brings cookies. Now that I think about it, she hasn't done that in a long while. That must mean we're just about due, before the annual onslaught of Christmas party leftovers--it's experimentation season. At least two of the guys here are industrious bakers at holiday time. Homer makes wonderful lemondrop cookies. Mike is a more of a chocolate chip man... who also hasn't coughed any up lately. What is wrong with these people?

2. brilliant insight on the current project. I'm having a very hard time teasing meaning out of the latest set of artifacts and associated maps and data. It's still chilly in here, despite a couple of layers and an extra sweatshirt draped over my knees, and it's hard to focus on anything but a cup of coffee and the nonexistant cookies.

3. some action, baby, and quality action at that. 'Nuff said.

Dubya was here yesterday for about an hour and a half. He talked about immigration reform, guest worker plans, ending "catch-and-release" programs... as if entrants are trout. They get screwed by the coyotes, they trash the environment, they're so desperate for work they'll take the lousy odds against making it across hundred of miles of hot stinking desert, they include drug dealers and murderers, they're young families with toddlers, they'll work shit jobs for shit pay, their willingness to work shit jobs for shit pay allows employers to maintain a wage structure that's far too low to attract American workers in the first place, they are an indispensable cog in the US economy, they suck up resources at a greater rate than they pay back in through payroll taxes, they terrorize citizens living in the border zone, they die horrible deaths as their organs slowly cook from the inside.

It's a problem far too complex and economically entrenched for simple sloganeering on either side.

I tend to fall on the side arguing for guest-worker visas and amnesty, provided that such a program doesn't legitimize de facto indentured servitude. How such a result is to be avoided is a mystery to me. Employers can pay illegals far below the market rate as long as the spectre of La Migra is held over the workers' heads. Once those workers are registered and "officially" integrated into the economy, can unlivable wages continue to be justified? Will they continue to be accepted by workers who, to this point, have been content to cram a dozen guys into an apartment intended for two because they had no other choice? Will US workers accept a system that officially sanctions employment for non-citizens at half the minimum pay mandated for citizens? How many of the people who are currently screaming for all illegals to be deported will howl when their consumer prices skyrocket to compensate for dramatically increased labor costs?

Wow. Reading this over, it sounds like I'm advocating institutionalized slavery. I like paying 89 cents for a head of lettuce. I wonder why it's taken me so long to wonder why I can get it for that.