Arizona's immigration law: aimed at criminals or at workers?

[alp227]

by Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times
July 30, 2010

Some people look at an impoverished immigrant laborer and immediately think "illegal," with all the stigma that word carries.

Others see that same person and think: There goes a worker.

Betty Madden, a 65-year-old costume designer, told me that when she thinks of immigrants, she thinks about their labor — the folding of linens, the cleaning of bathrooms. Once she was arrested in a Los Angeles protest supporting mostly immigrant hotel workers who perform those tasks. She stood up for them because she's a member of the stage crafts union and loyal to the labor movement.

"In a union, any time you feel you're being attacked or singled out in some way, you have a community to stand up for you," she said.

Along with nearly 600 other union workers and leaders, Madden planned to travel to Phoenix on Thursday, the day SB 1070 was scheduled to take effect.

A federal judge this week blocked most of the law's provisions. But Madden and the activists went anyway, symbolically carrying no documents.

To some, it might seem odd that union workers would protest a law designed to speed the removal of undocumented immigrants. After all, those immigrants are supposedly lowering our wages and busting our state and local budgets.

But the bus riders didn't see it that way. They were more worried about the potential of the law to intimidate legal immigrants, who happen to make up a big chunk of the union workforce in L.A., Phoenix and other cities of the Southwest.

"It's important for white folks like myself who have a little bit of privilege to stand up and say this is wrong," said Dan Barnhart, an L.A. teacher and native of Tempe, Ariz., who also went on the ride.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-tobar-20100730,0,2014099.column

Also, Tobar debunks bigoted rumors about illegal immigration (the usual "they steal jobs, they drain budgets, they kill good Americans") on his September 7 column "E-mails on illegal immigration are eye-opening".

The comments on Tobar's column from today are from the usual steel-headed immigrant bashers who troll on news site comment boards all the time, usually linked from Free Republic/other right-wing sources.

[customerserviceguy]

1. Isn't working in the US without proper authorization already a crime?

The question at the title is a false distinction.

[billh58]

3. Perhaps you need

to re-read the question in the title. The Arizona law assumes that all Hispanics are "criminals" before they are proven to be undocumented aliens. The term "workers" includes anyone who works for a living, the large majority of whom are neither illegal, nor criminals.

You have just shown the inherent fallacy in Arizona's proposed racial profiling law, by assuming that all Hispanic "workers" are illegal until they can prove that they are not.

[TlalocW]

2. It's aimed at intimidating legal Hispanics from voting

Crime was down in Arizona. Illegal immigration is down and continues to drop. What is up is legal Hispanics registering to vote and preferring democrats to republicans at a 2 to 1 margin. What better way to stop that than to pass a law that makes anyone slightly brown have to carry their identification papers at all times?

TlalocW