THE NEW YORK TIMES: PHOENIX — Arizona is well accustomed to the derision of its countrymen.
The state resisted adopting Martin Luther King’s birthday as a holiday years after most other states embraced it. The sheriff in its largest county forces inmates to wear pink underwear, apparently to assault their masculinity. Residents may take guns almost anywhere, but they may not cut down a cactus. The rest of the nation may scoff or grumble, but Arizona, one of the last truly independent Western outposts, carries on.
Now, after passing the nation’s toughest immigration law, one that gives the police broad power to stop people on suspicion of being here illegally, the state finds itself in perhaps the harshest spotlight in a decade.
The law drew not only the threat of a challenge by the Justice Department and a rebuke from the president, but the snickers of late-night comedians. City councils elsewhere have called for a boycott of the resort-driven state; one trade group of immigration lawyers has canceled a conference planned for Scottsdale at a time when the state is broke and desperate for business. Meanwhile, a continuous protest is taking place at the State Capitol. >>> Randal C. Archibold and Jennifer Steinhauer | Wednesday, April 28, 2010
ARIZONA DAILY STAR: The newly signed immigration law is not about immigration; it is about division. It is a blatant attempt to create an identifiable sub-class made up of the politically dispossessed: The undocumented.
But it went too far; its scope is overbroad. In their zeal, the proponents of the law crossed the line. The law affects not only the undocumented but also everyone in the state of Arizona. As a lawyer friend told me, "Hell, I could be from Lithuania."
Because of its overbreadth, the struggle against its enforcement won't be confined to the people who, in the eyes of the proponents, can arouse reasonable suspicion of being here illegally. It will be between those who want to restrict civil liberties and oppress the defenseless - and the rest of us who will not stand for it.
There are about 7 million of us in Arizona; we are about 30 percent Hispanic (in some counties that number is as high as 80 percent); 5 percent Native American, and 4 percent black; 2.5 percent are Asian, and another 2 percent or so are persons with two or more races; that leaves about 57 percent as white, non-Hispanic, as identified by the census. >>> Jesús Romo Special To The Arizona Daily Star | Thursday, April 29, 2010
