- AS

I can’t help but be irritated by the coverage of the ruling, however. Even the New York Times says “Calif. Court Backs Illegal Immigrants.” AB-540 was indeed intended to help ease the burden on undocumented students in California, who are ineligible for student loans. But it is misleading to characterize upholding AB-540 as “backing illegal immigrants.”  After all, the vast majority of students benefitting from AB-540 are citizens and permanent residents. (This fact is included in the case itself, which you can see here, and in the yearly reports on AB-540 – see 2009′s here.) This is not surprising, given the rising cost of UC and CSU education in California — made especially crippling without the possibility of student aid — and the stress of being undocumented generally. (If you haven’t heard it already, I highly recommend listening to This American Life’s “Nice Work if You Can Get It” episode – Act Four tells the story of an undocumented student in California.)

In the struggle to come up with a meaningful solution to the problem of millions of people who are  living, working, and studying in this country – with little legal security and few protections – AB-540 is only another stopgap, and not a long-term solution.

I must mention one other source of irritation I have RE: this case. Kris Kobach brought this lawsuit in California (and wasted our money in doing so) as part of a litigation strategy to push anti-immigrant policies at the local level. Kobach recently lost a major immigration case in Hazleton — one which required that small town to pay $2.4 million in legal fees. Enough is enough, Kobach. At a time when California is broke, and California public college students are suffering more than ever, it is unfathomable that you are wasting our time on whether or not a few undocumented students might pay a few thousand less OUT OF THEIR OWN POCKETS for a college education. Good grief.

- AS

-AR

In case you ever wished you were privy to the snarky political chats that regularly occur between your inveterate editors AR and AS, this is your dream come true. What follows is our liveblog of tonight’s debate.

We join our hopefuls halfway through the proceedings:

AR:     So I was listening on the drive home, but I’m confused on a couple things. Was Jerry Brown governor before? How does Meg Whitman feel about public employee unions? They need to be clearer on these things.

AS:      Yes,  he was governor before.  He is so funny.  And yes, she blows.  The nice thing about Jerry Brown is that he actually knows how the government and court systems work.

AR:     Oh, details. Schwarzenegger didn’t know any of that stuff, and, uh. . .

Q:    Ms. Whitman, fact-checking organizations have concluded that your ads are misleading, or even worse.  How can voters trust you to communicate honestly with them about the state’s problems when you’re willing to distort the truth to win a campaign?

AR:    Oh, snap!

MW:    Governor Brown opposed Prop. 13.  He said it was a fraud.

AS:     Proposition 13 was a fraud.

AR:     No, Prop 13 has nothing to do with the crisis in California. It is solely the fault of pensioners.  Who needs tax revenues?

AS:     Yeah, damn unions.

AS:      She keeps calling college students children.

AS:     Ohh,  immigration!!

AR:     I’ll let you handle this one.

AS:     So far, so good.  Secure communities is a disaster and doesn’t actually deport dangerous criminals.

JB:    Any time one of these illegal people*, uh, undocumented workers, commits a crime, they will be     deported.

AS:    Boo.

AR:      I’m guessing Whitman’s softened her “I hate Mexicans more than Poizner” stance since she won the primary.

AS:      We’re about to find out

MW:    I wouldn’t support a path to citizenship.  We have got to get our arms around what is a very large illegal immigrations problem. . . first, we have to secure our borders.

AS:     Meg Whitman: Adios, Hispanic Votes!

MW:    We have not given those border patrol agents the resources that they need.

AR:     Doesn’t she know border patrol agents are public employees?!?

MW:    We have got to get rid of these sanctuary cities, San Francisco being, of course, the worst.

AS:     Adios, San Francisco!  Adios, Los Angeles!

AR:     San Francisco is always the worst.

AS:     Although Silicon Valley is apparently the brainchild of the universe.

MW:    I was not for Prop. 187. . .

AS:     Although … she forgot to vote against it …

MW:    If we can hold employees accountable for hiring documented workers. .  .

AS:     Wait, hiring documented workers?  Woops.

MW:    We have to stop the magnet.  Most illegal immigrants, I believe, come here for the jobs.

AR:     I thought we didn’t have any jobs here?  Pretty weak magnet.

AS:     Yeah, so why are they coming? I’m confused.

Q:    Ms. Whitman, you’ve broken the record for spending by a self-financed candidate.  Please address the criticism that you are trying to buy the office of governor.

AR:     “Beholden to the public sector unions” in 3. . . 2. . .1. . .

MW:    Well, I have invested a lot of money in this campaign, and the reason is I’m up against some very significant forces.  In the last five years, the public employee unions and unions throughout California have spent over $300 million on politics in California.  So I’m up against a pretty big set of entrenched interests.

AR:       Yes!

AS:     And they’re up against … you!

MW:    But you know what, I think Californians are smart.  I don’t think you can buy elections.

AR:     But I’m sure as hell gonna try!

AS:     That’s where she’s wrong. Californians are dumb. We just elected Arnold Schwarzenegger.

MW:    That independence allows me to go to California, break glass, and really change how things are done there.

AS:      Break glass? Is that feminist??

AR:      Jerry Brown is bat shit crazy, and everyone in California knows it.  No one’s going to buy that he ain’t gonna do his own thing, no matter how much money he gets from anyone.

MW:    You can’t go to Sacremento and boil the ocean. . .

AS:     Boil the ocean? That’ll happen once we lift all the environmental restrictions on big business — zing!

AS:    Dude is like a million years old.  He looks like Dr. Zoidberg.

JB:    Now, look, unions, yeah, they have their problems*, but what about business over here? [Recounts how Wall Street/corporations nearly destroyed our country.]

AR:      Yeah! Fuck business! Go unions!

JB:    But I have to say something about our teachers, the people who clean bedpans in hospitals, our policemen, our firefighters, they’re the people who really have embarked on public service as a calling. . . I cherish and appreciate the work that they do.

AR:     Solllllllllidarity forever

JB:    We tried this business of  the inexperienced private sector person with the spine of steel, and they get flummoxed by the shark infested waters of Sacremento.

AR:    Soooo. . . spine of steel. . . good or bad?

AS:     These metaphors are getting confusing.

AR:     Fucking sharks, man

AS:     Flummoxing

MW:    The fact that Jerry Brown is trying to distance himself from the labor unions is amazing to me.

AS:    She has sarcasm DOWN.  May as well be doing a slow clap.

MW:    Putting Jerry Brown in charge of negotiating with the labor unions is like putting Count Dracula in charge of the blood bank.

AS:    Whatever, Dracula doesn’t need a blood bank.  For godssakes, he has teeth.

MW:    I want to empanel a grand jury so that if people are ripping off the state of California, they will go to jail.

AS:    What the hell does she know about grand juries?

AR:    Right, cause California has so much room in its jails.

JB:    I have the spine and the wisdom, and, at my age, the independence to do what’s right.

AR:     Oooh, that’s a good point. Old people are independent.  Also known as, cranky.

AS:     Did you hear that part about the death penalty?  Eerie. She was like, “we gotta start killing people before we have to build another jail to hold ‘em all.”

AR:    Yeah, that was frightening.  But she is for conservative judges who won’t legislate from the bench. That’s an innovative idea.

AS:     Yeah, they’ll follow all parts of the Constitution. That should help.

JB:    When you benefit directly from water, you gotta pay.

AR:    Oh no, is this about riparian rights?

AS:     They’re really ending on a high point.  I’m already confused.

JB:    We have to ensure clean drinking water.  There are kids in the Central Valley with birth defects.

AS:    Wait, there are people in the Central Valley??!!

MW:    Turning our backs on water is turning our backs on jobs.

AS:    Never turn your back on water.

MW:    So, that’s my stand on water.

AR:     Only Jesus can stand on water.

AS:     There are like 5 people who are really invested in this part of the debate.

MW:    If we are going to change the direction of the state, we are going to have to do it very differently.

AR:     Very differently. . . by electing someone with a lot of their own wealth and no political experience who believes government should be run more like a business.

MW:    I am a big believer in the power of many.

AR:    Sounds like a union organizer!

AS:     She sounds like Obama.  She’s just stealing his punchlines but using them for evil.  Eeeevvviiilll!

JB:    In the very neighborhood [in Oakland] where my wife and I lived, there were nine murders within five blocks.  But I didn’t have a guard.  I didn’t have a driver.  I walked the streets.

AR:    Jerry Brown: badass!

JB:    So that’s one major difference, know-how and experience.

AR:    That’s two major differences.

JB:    I’d like to see those with the biggest belts tuck them in first.

AR:     Do you tuck in a belt?  They really are bad with metaphors.

AS:     I can kill a man using only my two hands, a small twig, and a belt. Scratch that, two belts.

-AR & AS

*  While LTMF fully endorses Jerry Brown for governor, we do not endorse every word that comes out of his mouth.

The unanimous decision was decided on federal preemption grounds, which is not as sexy as some of the district court’s holdings (especially the §1981 bit), but it’ll do.

At this point, Arizona’s SB 1070 doesn’t stand a chance. Hopefully Jan “beheadings, beheadings, beheadings” Brewer will be kicked out of office in the meantime.

- AS

This week, Fremont, Nebraska residents passed a local anti-immigrant measure that aims to ban hiring or renting to “illegal immigrants.” Unlike the laws passed in Hazleton, Pennsylvania and Farmers Branch, Texas, this law was enacted by voter referendum. Otherwise, though, the law is pretty similar to its predecessors — it requires local employers to use a federal database to check the status of employees, and bars landlords from renting to any person in the country “illegally.”

The ACLU has already announced they will be filing a lawsuit to challenge the law.

These cases will take years to make their way to the Supreme Court — the Hazleton case has been going on for about 4 years now, and for some reason the Third Circuit has still not issued its decision. So, practically speaking, it was pretty dumb of Fremont to go down this road. Considering the ACLU (not to mention MALDEF, etc.) have aggressively litigated these types of cases elsewhere — and won — Fremont is in way over its Constitutional head.

The reason these local immigration laws get shut down so readily is that our immigration laws are made by the federal government, and they are immensely complicated. I put the term illegal in quotes above because immigration status is rarely that easy to determine. Even if a person enters the country without papers, they will often acquire valid status later – through marriage, or work, or other operation of the laws.

By way of example, the New York Times recently told the incredibly moving story of a deaf man who came to the U.S. illegally in the mid-nineties and was enslaved in New York until federal prosecutors finally discovered the slavery ring. He was allowed to stay in the country, went to a school for the deaf and then a New York City jobs training program, and now has a green card and works — amazingly enough — as a janitor on Ellis Island. The journeys of immigrants are complicated, and the twists and turns of the immigration laws even more so. Suffice it so say that a town like Fremont has no idea which of its non-citizen residents will end up getting a green card if they end up in federal custody and which will be deported.

I think it also bears mentioning, though, that in addition to be misguided for the aforementioned reasons, so-called anti-immigrant measures should more accurately be called anti-Latino measures. Since immigration status is ambiguous and impossible for local officials to determine, the real purpose of laws targeting “illegals” is generally to harass and intimidate Latino residents. The picture above comes from a bar in Hazleton in 2007, and it gets republished often because it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the ubiquitous signage of the Jim Crow era. I doubt the thousands of undocumented Irish have to worry about landlords giving them a hard time.

All I can hope is that the passage of this law will put even more pressure on the Obama administration to work for meaningful immigration reform in this term.

-AS

As has been discussed previously on this blog, no one can really can say what gives rise to a reasonable suspicion that a person is undocumented.  This lack of a non-racial basis for determining what raises reasonable suspicion renders the ban on racial profiling dead letter.  Without articulable standards, an officer has broad leeway to invent whatever reasons he chooses for finding a particular person suspicious, and as long as he avoids saying, “Well, doesn’t she Mexican to you?” it will be nearly impossible to prove that the ban on racial profiling has been violated.  The lack of articulable standards also means that enforcement of the law will be imprecise, and many people will be asked for papers who are American citizens or legal residents.  Because being Latino is a baseline requirement for suspicion of being undocumented in Arizona, whether we admit it or not and regardless of whatever other factors may or may not exist, this burden will be borne solely by the Latino community even if police officers act in good faith and do not target anyone solely for being Latino.

The “the bill doesn’t allow racial profiling because we say it doesn’t allow racial profiling” argument follows similar logic to the infamous John Yoo “what we’re doing isn’t torture because I’m telling you it isn’t torture, and in any case the United States doesn’t torture anyone ’cause that would be illegal” memos.  Given the racial dynamic to this issues, perhaps a better analogy would be the “separate but equal” fiction that American law recognized in the nine decades between the adoption of the 14th Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education.  Much like the Arizona bill’s “no racial profiling, honest” provision, the separate but equal doctrine lent segregation a sheen of neutrality that was completely detached from the reality of what motivated Jim Crow laws and how they were actually experienced.   Sure, blacks can’t go to white schools, but whites can’t go to black schools either, so who really gets to complain?  Fortunately, the Warren Court intervened in Brown, saying, in essence, “Jesus Christ, you fucking assholes!”

In full disclosure, I myself have not read the entirety of the Arizona’s immigration law.  Nor have I read the actual text of, for example, Mississippi’s pre-Brown school segregation laws.  I have no hesitation about condemning either.

-AR

But it’s important to step back, take a deep breath, and remember that this bitter old panderer could be our danged president instead:

-AR

I wholeheartedly support the decisions of state and local governments to boycott Arizona in order to protest that state’s new  anti-immigrant law. Unfortunately, after reviewing Gawker’s helpful guide to the boycott, I realized I have unknowingly been on a lifelong boycott of Arizona and all things Arizonan. The only thing about boycotting Arizona that really gives me pause is the Grand Canyon, but honestly a gorge is a gorge.

-AS

In case you haven’t heard, Brown got caught calling a British woman named Gillian Duffy a bigot when he didn’t realize his microphone was still on.

Several things are funny/infuriating about this story. First, Brown called Duffy a bigot after a conversation on the street in which Duffy made this somewhat remark about immigrants: “You can’t say anything about the immigrants because all these eastern Europeans, where they are flocking from?”

Although Duffy’s question does not literally make much sense – I mean, presumably she knows that “all these eastern Europeans” are flocking from eastern Europe – Brown understood her to be complaining about the same sort of thing the Duffys of America like to complain about, except regarding “the Mexicans.” So let’s see, that type of complaint is generally associated with . . . what is the word I’m looking for here? It means being impartial to your own group, like maybe your own racial or ethnic group, and intolerant of those who differ?

So Brown was pretty justified in referring to this woman as a bigot, especially because he was polite enough not to say it to her face. But now he’s been forced to apologize, which is the second thing that is infuriating/hilarious about this story. The third thing is Brown’s non-apology apology, which AR would just love.

My absolute favorite thing about this story, though, is that when confronted with the news that Brown had called her a bigot, Duffy did not know what the term meant. But then she complained about Brown by implying that calling someone a ‘bigot’ is ignorant: “He’s an educated person. Why is he coming at me with words like that?” Classic.

In honor of “Bigotgate,” then, let’s all have fun justifiably calling someone or something a bigot today. I pick Arizona’s Russell Pierce. You? Remember: it’s even more fun if the person might not know what the term ‘bigot’ means.

-AS