Arizona Goddam

During the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Nina Simone wrote a song entitled "Mississippi Goddam" that listed southern states whose racism and violence had riled up the high priestess-

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Simone described the situation on the ground-

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day's gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don't belong here
I don't belong there
I've even stopped believing in prayer

But her "show tune" wasn't just a rip on the most egregious bigots, but an indictment of moderates as well-

Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie

Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
I don't trust you any more
You keep on saying "Go slow!"
"Go slow!"

But that's just the trouble
"do it slow"
Desegregation
"do it slow"
Mass participation
"do it slow"
Reunification
"do it slow"
Do things gradually
"do it slow"
But bring more tragedy
"do it slow"
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know

Until finally, Simone makes a simple demand-

You don't have to live next to me
Just give me my equality

I was reminded of "Mississippi Goddam" this week as the news was replete with reports of the new immigration law passed and signed in Arizona. And while "Mississippi Goddamn" was not Nina's best song, or even her best take on civil rights and racism (see "I hold no grudge," "Go Limp," "Brown Baby," or "To be young, gifted, and black."), the song provides an interesting polemic through which to see the present flare-up over immigration policy.

First, some background. The contemporary immigration era began with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which replaced strict quotas on all non-European immigrants with a policy that allowed greater numbers of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to legally immigrate to the US. The 1965 law paralleled other reforms, on civil rights, voting rights, housing, resulting from the pressure placed on the federal government by the Civil Rights movement to supersede state laws in many southern states officially sanctioning racist behavior and discrimination. The next significant law, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, provided a carrot and stick approach to immigration policy. Offering amnesty to undocumented residents of the US, it also laid out a policy of strict enforcement that had been bubbling up since the Nixon Administration. IRCA sped up the process of militarization along the US-Mexico border (described in Timothy Dunn's book of the same name), and set the legal stage for the deportation of large numbers of Latinos during the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The next legal step, the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, came in the midst of the debate over welfare reform and the clamor over California's Proposition 187 (hence the "immigrant responsibility" part). IIRIRA beefed up the border security trend, while further criminalizing the act of immigrating to the US without proper papers. It also included a now infamous section, 287(g), which authorized local police to be trained in immigration law enforcement. Since 1996, except for parts of the PATROIT Act, no new federal laws have been passed dealing with immigration policy. Not for trying, for in 2006-7 Congress attempted to but did not pass any of several proposed laws.

Which brings me to Arizona- or rather Arizona is the tip of an iceberg of a growing trend, beginning perhaps with Proposition 187 in California (1994), where states pass laws that address immigration by denying immigrants access to driver's licenses, social services, etc. Many commentators have remarked that states are merely legislating policies in the absence of federal leadership. Obviously, this is true, 14 years is a long time to go without changes in immigration law, especially in the midst of the largest wave of immigration since the "Great Wave" of European immigration from 1880-1920. But the bigger question is what kind of federal immigration law would we see if it occurred- would it provide amnesty and an eased path to citizenship, mirroring some provisions of IRCA? Or would it continue to ratchet up the criminalization of undocumented immigration and harsh enforcement strategies of IRCA and IIRIRA?

What the state laws provide are models, particularly since the bills are often written by the same anti-immigrant groups, of the second option above. In effect, these laws at the state level are attempting to preclude movement toward amnesty, while establishing an already functioning structure of immigration policy to draw from in drafting future federal policy.

Or perhaps no federal immigration law will be passed at all, which could provide an even more frightening result. In the past few days, I've read and viewed the news reports on the Arizona law, and noticed how many compare this moment to the Civil Rights movement, or to 1990s California. I would draw a different historical comparison. Today reminds me of a prior turning point in America, the end of Reconstruction in the South and the beginning of what southerners of the time called "Redemption." In 1876, a federal government weary of the political and armed struggles over the civil rights of freed slaves in the South, effectively abandoned the policies put into effect by Radical Republicans at the end of the Civil War, pulling armed forces out of southern states as part of the Hayes-Tilden compromise determining a highly contested presidential election. While African-American and populist white farmers banded together and attempted to grasp power, ultimately failing in the face of the economic and political power of a new generation of southern elites allied with northern capitalists, by the 1880s, Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation and legitimizing discrimination, racism ,and terror against blacks were passed. The accommodation realized in 1876 precluded any federal legislation that would have mitigated Jim Crow laws, while the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision by the US Supreme Court showed that in the absence of federal Civil Rights law, the state policies of Jim Crow would work just fine, as long as on paper they didn't violate the 13th and 14th amendments to the US Constitution.

So could the Arizona law and others like it be the beginning of another dark period in American history, this time where non-citizens are treated like second-class human beings ? Will immigrants to Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania live in a state of limbo, like Nina sang, not belonging here, not belonging there?

Will the children of immigrants and immigrants who came here as young children, face dismay when the opportunities of America are unavailable to them? Like Sister Sadie, will they be unable to attend college even though they "washed and cleaned [their] ears?"

And what of moderation? In the face of such a future, should we really take a 'go-slow' approach? Is there a moderate way to live in the shadows? To move to the back of the bus? To be killed when teenagers go "beaner-hopping?"

I'm not sure if a way forward to Nina's equality is presently visible; as she says,

This is a show tune
But the show hasn't been written for it, yet

The name of this blog is Arizona Goddam
And I mean every word of it.