ABQJOURNAL OPINION/GUEST_COLUMNS: Arizona Law Not Answer to Immigration

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Arizona Law Not Answer to Immigration

By Paige Grant
Santa Fe resident
          Dennis Moroney has ranched in Arizona since the 1970s, the last nine years in Cochise County a few miles from the Mexican border. He has plenty of experience with footsore migrants seeking work in El Norte.
        In the old days, he says, "We used to save jobs for when migrant workers would show up. They built fence or corrals, sometimes helped put in a waterline, or maybe repair the roof on the barn."
        Nowadays, to hire an "illegal" or give them a lift is to risk prosecution or even the loss of a rancher's BLM grazing allotment.
        The Moroneys still provide water and food and what aid and comfort they can to the desperate people who cross their land on foot, who were dropped in the desert and vaguely pointed north. They ask the border crossers, "What made you think you could get through the desert with no water or food?"
        Over and over, the reply is: "The coyote told us Tucson was three hours walk from the border."
        These economic migrants are victims of callous human traffickers as they seek the work that Americans are eager to hire them to do. But they leave more than footprints on the land they cross.
        Unfamiliar with the operation of a float valve on a water tank, they will tear the mechanism apart to get a drink, draining a remote water source on which Moroney's cattle and much wildlife depend. They litter. Cows eat the plastic bags they discard, and die — Dennis loses four or five a year.
        "Dead cows that had the potential to live 10 or 12 more years and have a calf every year represent the value of the cow, plus the value of every one of the calves she would have had, had she lived. That's about $500-$600 per cow per year," he said.
        Yet worse than the migrants' impacts, in Dennis' opinion, are the impacts of law enforcement targeting them.
        Border Patrol vehicles careen by the ranch house, tearing tracks across the fragile arid grassland. Dennis once came upon a Border Control officer on his ranch, asleep in his truck with an automatic weapon across his lap.
        He went away quietly, concerned at what an alarmed, armed, minimally trained 20-year-old might do if he were surprised awake.
        "These days, we are not seeing very many migrants," he writes — an observation that is corroborated by White House reports that numbers of border crossers have declined by 20 percent in the past year. "We are fairly overrun with Border Patrol, however, sitting in their trucks at all the crossroads, waiting and hoping, I guess, for something to do."
        You would think that the rancher with his dead cows and sabotaged water tanks would support Arizona's law SB1070, aimed at identifying illegal immigrants and forcing the federal government's hand to deport them. You would be wrong.
        "No question there's a terrible problem," said Moroney at a "teach-in" this fall at Prescott College. "But SB1070 is not the solution. It blames the victim and does nothing about root causes."
        In a class action lawsuit against SB1070, the American Civil Liberties Union calls the law unconstitutional: "It violates the Supremacy Clause and core civil rights and civil liberties secured by the United States Constitution, including the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expressive activity, the Fourth Amendment right to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the ... guarantee of equal protection under the law."
        SB1070 instructs law enforcement officers to determine the immigration status of people they have encountered during a lawful "stop, detention or arrest."
        The Immigration Code is the equivalent of the Tax Code for complexity: there are numerous categories and conditions of immigration status, far from the simple notion of legal/illegal embodied in the law.
        A U.S. citizen or legal immigrant could be detained for hours or days while their status was investigated. People who resemble those crossing the Moroney ranch seeking work would be singled out for a status review. Fair-skinned people who speak English with an American accent would not.
        That's not equal protection under the law, and that's not fair.
        A friend once described a relationship in sign language: One palm held up indicating "halt!", while the other gestured "come hither."
        Those conflicting, simultaneous signals perfectly describe the U.S. attitude toward immigrants.
        We need to resolve that dichotomy, partnering with Mexico to support the people of both nations in leading creative, fulfilled lives, with a balanced exchange of goods, services and cultural experiences across our beautiful desert border.
        Ya basta with the trails of tears sign-posted with plastic trash.
        Paige Grant was directed to immigration issues at a recent teach-in on the topic at Prescott College, Ariz.

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