Despite all the negative press Arizona has received for the GOP “Show me your papers” law, and despite the financial cost to the state from the swelling Boycott Arizona movement, other states seem poised to jump on the bigotry bandwagon.
I found this table at Think Progress:
|
STATE |
BILL |
STATUS |
|
Utah |
Require immigrants to carry proof of status, require law enforcement officers to question anyone they believe is in the country illegally, and target employers who hire or transport undocumented immigrants. |
Legislation still has to be drafted, but Rep. Stephen Sandstorm (R) claims he “has the support to do it.” |
|
Georgia |
Nathan Deal (R), who is running for Governor, wants to propose legislation that mirrors Arizona’s. |
Tentatively pending Deal’s election. |
|
Colorado |
Today, Colorado gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis (R) said that if he were governor, he would seek to pass something “very similar” to what Arizona enacted. |
Tentatively pending McInnis’ election. |
|
Maryland |
State Delegate Pat McDonough (R) “plans to start sending a survey to every candidate for the General Assembly — along with the candidates for governor — asking them whether they agree with Arizona’s approach.” |
McDounough’s survey will start being circulated this week as he hopes to “know who is in favor of the Arizona bill and who is not” by this summer. |
|
Ohio |
Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones and Ohio Rep. Courtney Combs (R) sent a letter to Gov. Ted Strickland asking him “to employ” his “leadership role” “to assure legislation is passed that will mirror” Arizona’s. |
Strickland’s press person says he “hasn’t had an opportunity to review Arizona law” and is concerned it might be unconstitutional. |
|
North Carolina |
Local anti-immigrant groups claim that lawmakers have told them that “the chances similar legislation will be filed here is over 95%.” |
The same groups also concede that such legislation wouldn’t “get far” in their state. |
|
Texas |
Republican state Rep. Debbie Riddle of Tomball says she plans to push for a law similar to Arizona’s. |
Riddle says she will introduce the measure in the January legislative session. |
|
Texas |
Farmers Branch, a Dallas suburb of 30,000 people, passed an ordinance written by IRLI lawyer Kris Kobach which would prevent landlords from renting houses or apartments to undocumented immigrants. |
Last month, a U.S. District judge ruled the ordinance unconstitutional. IRLI is helping Farmers Branch repeal the District judge decision. |
|
Missouri |
The state legislature is considering a law, likely written by Kobach, that would make it unlawful for any person to conceal, harbor, transport, or shelter “illegal aliens” and would also make it a crime for undocumented immigrants to transport themselves. |
The bill has been referred to the Missouri House International Trade and Immigration Committee. |
|
Oklahoma |
Restrict the ability of undocumented immigrants to obtain IDs or public assistance, give police authority to check the status of anyone arrested, and make it a felony to knowingly provide shelter, transportation or employment to the undocumented. |
After IRLI filed an amicus brief in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in support of HB 1804, the court refused to reconsider its decision that prohibits Oklahoma from enforcing two of the main parts of HB 1804. |
|
Nebraska |
Residents in Fremont Nebraska likely will vote in July on a proposed ordinance to ban the “harboring,” hiring and renting to undocumented immigrants. |
Last Friday, the Nebraska Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that there was no authority to stop an election on the ordinance following a petition filed by Kobach. |
Is that spooky, or what?
One thing has been troubling me. Is the GOP that racist? I think so. But the GOP usually goes to extreme ends to hide their from view. Otherwise, a complete incompetent like Michael Steel could never have become head of the RNC, and certainly could never have survived his many ‘heckuva job, Brownie’ moments. Yet the bigotry in this law is so obvious that I wondered at what they are up to. Then I read this, and it fell into place.
Don’t be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.
I don’t buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.
What’s new here is not the politicians’ fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.
What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote – and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.
In 2008, working for "Rolling Stone" with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters . . . directed by one Jan Brewer.
Brewer, then secretary of state, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer’s command, no fewer than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanic, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.
That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you’re not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: After all, they give their names and addresses.
So I asked Brewer’s office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?
No, not one.
Which raises the question: Were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens that Brewer tagged them to be, or just not-quite-white voters given the Jose Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?
The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western mesas looking for these illegal voters. "We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost two years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case."
This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the president of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.
Iglesias’ jurisdiction was next door, in New Mexico, but he told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.
"They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments," Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.
But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as "Prop 200," which required proof of citizenship to register. It is important to see the Republicans’ latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party’s desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Alternet>
With the GOP, the lowest common denominator is always power. They have a long history of keeping poor and minority voters from exercising their voting rights. The bill will serve to marginalize millions of Hispanic voters. Marginalized people tend to disenfranchise themselves. Feeling that they have no part in this nation, they tend not to vote. There is nothing that the GOP will not do to take away the voting rights of opposition voters.
20 Responses to “The Reason for GOP Racism”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
We shouldn’t be too shocked about GOP racism. After all, they haven’t been the liberal “party of Lincoln” since he was assassinated. They became, and have been for many decades since, a curious blend of the wealthy, people who aspire to wealth and suck up to the wealthy in the naive hope that they will someday share or attain that wealth, the nationalistic, the religious fundamentalists, the selfish, and the paranoid. They are an insecure and hateful lot. They feel threatened by any and all social or economic change. And if you don’t like or understand yourself, you won’t care about or understand anyone else. That is why they have become so divorced from the mainstream AND from reality, and won’t accept anyone different than they are. As I have said for many years now: these conservative Republicans are insane.
Jack, and excellent rant. True on all counts. I would add one term: pseudopatriotic.
Your reason for GOP Racism has a lot of Merit. The way Politicians have been talking, you would think Arizona was a War Zone. It’s been told to me,Crime Stats in Arizona have gone DOWN since 2005. While not great they have gone down.
The Win at all cost of the GOP is their Mantra
We’ve seen it with the Ginning up of fear and out right lies.
The Governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer has been a leader in squelching Hispanic votes.
Thanks, Tim. I know the GOP loves their sheets, but they try to hide them in election years.
If this was in the days of LBJ, federal prosecutors would be sent in to investigate these highly illegal shenanigans. And they should be now. It’s crooked and illegal as hell and smacks of fascist tactics. It goes way beyond hypocrisy. Excellent post – will share it on my FB even though my family is only interested in games and pictures of sunsets.
Thanks, Leslie. I confess to a slight addiction to Farmville myself. A few of the reiders here are neighnors in that game. I we get some response from it. IF LBJ could see Texas today, he would sheeeeyit!
I love the way the right wingers scram “fascist”, “communist”, “round up us all us”, “big government take over” and then smile smugly when they do it themselves. Hypocrisy at it’s finest. Let’s take something that’s been an ongoing FEDERAL problem and stir it up for the MIDTERM elections and beyond. (Yes, the immigration problem has been kicked down the road by several administrations, but let’s make it Obama’s mess this time.) And Ohio follows suit: the people in this state aren’t the brightest bulbs in the pack.
My last blog was about this same topic, too. This country is going biserk.
Sadly, it is Judi. But in a way, that’s a good thing. Who ever thought that electing a centrist black man would evoke the GOP’s revelation of their true colors so completely.
I agree with all the smart people here. This law won’t pass the constitutional test and will be thrown out. Once those other states see what this law has done to AZ’s tourism and convention business, they wouldn’t dare follow suit. People are cancelling shit in droves in that state, which very well may bankrupt them. Serves them right for this heinous law.
I agree, Lisa. It might even turn Arizona blue.
This is certainly the theory I came to when I posted a similar claim a few days ago. The GOP has given up any hopes of getting the Latino vote, and so now is about the business of trying to make them unwelcome. Course the legal, Hispanic citizenry is already too large for them to contend with so its now about purity I think in the GOP. I suspect that rational Republicans will form a third party since they have been effectively cast out of their own.
Sherry, are there enough rational republicans left to do so? When you come right down to it, today’s Democrats are to the right of the Republicans of the sixties. If there is to be another party, I’d like the GOP to become defunct and a progressive party form to the left of the Democrats.
Left of todays dems? There is no farther left to go! What the heck are you talking about? You are an idiot!
Brian, I strongly suggest you read the rules page. Calling anyone here an idiot is not permitted. If you cannot disagree courteously, you are not welcome here.
In Canada, the racism was more subtle.
In Canada, blacks had it pretty bad in Nova Scotia till new scapegoats arrived on the scene. Pakistanis.
Now that most Pakistanis have become middleclass, we’ll probably go after our own Mexicans in Windsor, where they are accused of waiting for the right time to swim to Detroit.
I never saw Canada that way, Ivan. Is that a development that has transpired since Harper took control?
Yeah we’re all racists. It has nothing to do with the fact that we disagree with you or that our country should have secure borders and enforce our laws. Nice try libs, the alinsky play book to a tee! People are sick of that BS race card you play against anyone that dares disagree with you. Your losing support while we are gaining!
Brian, I’m not trying to say that all Republicans are racist. I know that isn’t true. As a democrat, I believe our nation needs secure borders. However, this bill was written by an organization whose founder is a self-avowed white eugenicist who publicly expressed that whites cannot surrended our majority without a fight. He is still on the board. The current President is also an advisor for a white supremacy magazine. The policy is racist. If you think the GOP is gaining, you might want to check your sources.
Arizona’s new law grants local police officers the authority to check an individual’s immigration status if there is a reasonable suspicion that the person may be an undocumented immigrant.
The police officer may only check the immigration status if that a person is stopped for a different offense, such as speeding or driving while intoxicated.
See if the moderator allows disagreement.
Brian, I suggest that you read the law. It does not limit status checks to stops for other offenses. Also, Arizona police officers already had the authority to check status when an individual is stopped for some other offense, which they have been doing routinely.
The moderator welcomes disagreement, but personal insults against me or any people commenting here, including you, are not allowed.