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

Of course, ignorance of the beliefs of the founders is nothing new in Texas, at least if former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey is any indication.  When asked why he was basing opposition to the “government takeover” of health care on the Federalist Papers when their principal author, Alexander Hamilton, “was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government,” Armey replied:  “Widely regarded by whom?  Today’s modern ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case in fact about Hamilton.”

Armey’s comment that “I just doubt that was the case”  is telling, and makes the Texas effort even more disturbing.  The Republican take on the founders isn’t based on an alternate reading of history.  It’s not based on any reading at all, but rather an unwavering faith that our history conforms with their current political aims.

Right-wing nutcase extraordinaire Rep. Steve King of Iowa (even more here!) combined the efforts to lie about the past and present, both exaggerating the implications of the health care bill and downplaying the oppression under Communist regimes by calling for a “Velvet Revolution” to respond to the Democrats’ health care efforts.  This is not the first time that Republicans, apparently unaware that one of the features of democracy is that sometimes your side loses, have compared themselves to victims of totalitarianism.

But perhaps the most disturbing Republican take on history last week came from Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia, who said that if health care reform passes, people’s “free insurance cards” (whatever the hell that means) will be as worthless as Confederate currency after “the Great War of Yankee Aggression.”  Really?!?  Still?

But I suppose that, even in the context of an intense, often race-based hysteria caused by the election of our first black president, I shouldn’t be too concerned about an elected official trying to undermine the legitimacy of the Civil War.  I mean, it’s not like Republican leaders are running ads imploring good God-fearing Americans to take the country back from scary black men.

-AR

And what do you think those lovely folks at the Warren Institute found? Gobs and gobs of racial profiling. Just gobs.

It turns out that when you, the federal government, let them, the Irving cops, call you 24 hours a day to complain about the Mexicans to screen for immigration status, Hispanics start committing a lot of low-level traffic violations. Well, either that, or the Irving police start arresting the heck out of Hispanics for misdemeanor crimes. You know, like crimes where they have lots of discretion choosing who to stop, arrest, and/or harass.

Meanwhile, the federal government can feel good knowing the program they promised would identify those really bad, public-safety-threatening types managed to actually flag some felons for immigration review. Huzzah! Unfortunately, that was only about 2 percent of the time. The other 98 percent of the time they were, you know, getting a real handle on the local broken-taillight problem in Irving.

-AS

By this, Treviño meant, I don’t think we should have to show passports where I live in Texas, because it is inconvenient to me, and this is my ill-phrased way of showing my annoyance. (This understanding of his stance took some time in gathering, as I had to get it via a sequence of 140-or-less-word blurbs.)

Although Mr. T (if I may call him that) has since declined to endorse racial profiling (and by calling for open borders, pissed off some, ahem, racists who immediately came to his e-defense), his statement is very telling. Mr. T is half-Mexican, although he doesn’t look it, and he identifies racially only as “Texan.” (Except when he is defending himself against charges of racism, when he then identifies as half-Mexican. But I digress.) The thing that Mr. T gets at so well is that buzz-words like “security” and “border control” and “fighting terrorism” all sound good until they start affecting you personally, when they suddenly become very annoying – or worse.

What a lot of civil liberties and immigrant rights groups have been saying for some time is that even if your “red hair and pale skin” are protecting you now, if you don’t look around at what is happening to the other Texans without your same “passport,” there will be no good law to protect you from that Border Patrol cavity search down the road, if I may be so blunt. Mr. T is lucky that so far his red hair and pale skin have still functioned as a passport outside the Border Patrol checkpoints. Now that local law enforcement actors are being deputized to enforce immigration laws (thanks to the disastrous 287(g) program), anyone with a name like Treviño would be wise not to count on that passport for too long – especially not if he plans to make any road trips to Arizona any time soon.

-AS

What’s a concerned conservative white Christian to do? One option would be to send a cyborg back in time to eliminate the heroes that paved the way for minority advancement and progressive change in this country. Unfortunately for white dudes, cyborgs and time travel have not yet been invented. But the “panel of experts” reviewing curriculum for the Texas Board of Education have discovered the next best thing: pretend they didn’t exist! Three of the experts have suggested removing Caesar Chavez for the state’s social studies curriculum because he is not a fitting role model for students due to his ties to Saul Alinsky. (If the Texas School Board wants to go all the way with the “Let’s close our eyes and pretend this is all just a bad dream” campaign, President Obama could be eliminated from the curriculum for the same reason.) And while I would certainly disagree with the conclusion that Chavez is not a good role model, in either case it seems like a rather odd standard for whether or not school children should learn about the man. As for Thurgood Marshall, on this one it’s hard to disagree with the experts: I don’t see how anyone could think that the man who argued perhaps the most famous and important Supreme Court decision of all-time and became the first African-American justice on the Supreme Court is an example of “a historical figure of influence.”

-AR