June 2010
Arizona's New Law: The Old America vs. The New America
By Chilton Williamson, Jr.
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he passage last April of Arizona SB 1070 has accomplished two things, both of them important. It has stated with crystal clarity what the state’s restrictionists want concerning immigration, and it has demonstrated just as clearly what the immigrationists do not want. The second category of persons, which includes the U.S. government, had never really done that before.
If SB1070 is really, as its critics--including the President and Vice-President of the United States and the U.S. Secretary of State--a piece of fascist legislation, then so is the federal law it reflects and underwrites. SB1070 is nothing more than a “me too” bill by which Prescott endorses the policies of Washington, D.C. Both the Arizona state and the U.S. federal governments assume the reality of the international border between the United States and Mexico, the legality of that border, and the legal necessity that it be respected. They assume the sovereignty of independent nations, and the legal status these nations confer on their own citizens, and deny to those of other nations. On the basis of these assumptions, they require that citizens belonging to nations other than the American nation, while on American soil, carry documents identifying themselves and the countries of which they are citizens, documents that they are required by law to present when requested by officials entrusted with the authority to do so. By SB1070, Arizona has authorized its own officials to act in concert with, or in place of, when necessary, such federal officials as are authorized to carry out federal law, and stated the conditions according to which they are entitled—indeed required—to act. This, moreover, at the expense of the taxpayers of the Sunshine State, who do not expect to be reimbursed for their effort out of U.S. Treasury funds. And that is all that SB1070 is about. If Governor Brewer is a fortress-footed storm trooper, then so is Secretary Janet Napolitano at the Department of Homeland Security.
As I say, the legislators who passed SB1070 into law wanted a few very simple and very direct things. They wanted the Arizona-Mexico border to mean something, and the laws that defend that border respected. They wanted those border jumpers living illegally in Arizona to be identified, apprehended, and deported back across that border. And they wanted these things done in a tidy legal manner, and with full public recognition. And that is all that they wanted.
Now, what do their semi-hysterical detractors in the media and government not want? They have told us that they don’t want any of the things SB1070 provides for, without specifying what they do want—without, that is, putting forward an alternative means of illegal immigration control. That can mean only one thing: They do not want illegal immigration to be controlled because they want illegal immigration, to Arizona and every other one of the 50 states, and they do not want that immigration to be controlled (meaning curtailed) in any way, by anyone. What they want, they say, is “comprehensive immigration reform,” but there is no reason to think that the reform they have in mind would include reducing or stopping illegal immigration, whether by the State of Arizona or by Homeland Security. Why would it be more acceptable, morally speaking, for a federal official to request “papers” from anybody than for a state man to do so? The answer, of course, is that it wouldn’t be, and the immigrationist revilers of SB1070 and Arizona know that, except perhaps for those idolaters of the federal government who believe that all moral authority flows from Capitol Hill, as the River of Life is said to flow from the Temple in the New Jerusalem. All too obviously, what the liberal critics, from President Obama down to a wetback demonstrator carrying a green-white-and-red sign, mean by “reform” is amnesty for all illegal aliens in this country and for their extended families remaining outside of it: an amnesty, that is, of future illegal immigrants as well as those 20 million-plus ones presently here, and no control over American borders at all. In short, they want open borders, open to everyone coming to the United States from everywhere.
In order to conceal their true goal, the raisers of the current ruckus have focused on a single word in SB1070: that little word “sole,” as in, race or ethnicity may not be the “sole” criteria for a law officer’s demand for papers following the original contact between the officer and the person he has stopped for questioning. “Sole” suggests that skin color may be a factor in such an instance, a possibility abhorrent to the morally perfectionist liberal mind, which demands that every rule of procedure (or any other rule) must be certifiably simon-pure and infinitely generalizable in order to win recognition as having moral validity. Anything short of such purity amounts, in the present circumstances, to “racial profiling,” a practice so heinous, in liberal eyes, that everything—including , if necessary, the security of the United States and that of the Western world—deserves to be sacrificed in order to satisfy the prohibition against the Horror. This one word alone has given the liberal media and the political class the opening they needed to perceive “racist” intent in SB1070, and thus to condemn the bill outright. Seizing on that word, they have been able to sniff along the track of “intent” as far as the discovery that 31 of the 35 Republicans in the Arizona House of Representatives also voted for a “birther” bill demanding that President Obama produce his birth certificate. (Well, where is that certificate? Doesn’t the president hold a U.S. passport? It’s a constitutional issue, after all, and if the throne is indeed occupied by a usurper, the country has a right to know it.) Since Obama is black, and the allegedly whitebirthers are challenging his right to be President, liberals infer from this that they, like the Tea Party, are racists. But prejudice, like intent, is hard to prove; indeed, unless admitted outright, it can only be inferred. But for a newspaper columnist to infer racism in any white person who opposes a black politician suggests a good deal more prejudice than for a policeman to interrogate a brown man with crispy hair in Arizona does. The human interrogative mind proceeds from observation to suspicion (based on prejudgment), from suspicion to the gathering and assembly of facts, and from thence to the formation of a tentative conclusion. By way of the same process, I can easily conclude—and do conclude—that the large majority of nonwhite commentators on the subject of immigration dislike and resent white people, and that a significant number of white ones, perhaps even a majority of them, do also. Honi soit qui mal y pense, as the French say: Evil to him who thinks it. There’s a lot of that going on right now, mostly in liberal circles. Then again, there always has been, since liberalism first began.
What am I—what is anyone—to make of this? Only, so far as I can see, that immigration “reform” is a deliberate plot—I use the word advisably—by people who hate the United States, and the people and the culture that created it, to destroy the country and turn the original American people into outcasts and strangers in their own land. True, I concluded as much forty years ago. But in venting their fury over SB1070 and Arizona, they have showed their hand for everyone with eyes to see. It was their own hate that tricked them into doing it—hate, and the abject, mentally destabilizing realization that the Old America has winded the enemy and, after these many decades, is organizing and positioning itself to fight back. According to a recent (early May) New York Times/CBS poll, 60 percent of the American public either believes that SB1070 did what needs to be done, or that it does not go far enough. We, the Old Americans—the new revolutionary mob. ###
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