Shared Culture, Shared Burden
It is hard to conceive of a more complicated relationship than the one between Mexican immigrants who only recently arrived in the United States – legally or illegally – and Mexican-Americans whose families have lived here for generations.
It’s a relationship that is center stage now that Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has signed SB 1070, a ghastly piece of legislation intended to get rid of one group by targeting and inconveniencing the other. It is no surprise that, when opponents of the law turned out recently in dozens of U.S. cities to condemn what is a license to racially profile in trolling for illegal immigrants, Mexican-Americans were well represented among the protesters.
They know a bad thing when they see one. The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act is a hypocritical and self-destructive law that is probably – in a legal sense – not long for this world. Hypocritical because Arizona now wants to play the victim of an illegal immigration problem that it helped create by offering illegal immigrants a friendly hiring climate for decades. Self-destructive because Arizona – if it succeeds in ridding the state of illegal immigrants — is sure to suffer from boycotts, diminished productivity, and lost federal revenue tied to Census figures. Not long for this world because it violates the 4th Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the 5th Amendment’s right to due process, and the Necessary and Proper Clause which makes plain that enforcing immigration law is the job of the federal government and not of individual states.
SB 1070 violates all those rules by requiring: “For any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official, where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made when practicable to determine the immigration status of the person.”
In doing so, the law doesn’t just allow for the possibility of racial and ethnic profiling of anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant (read: Latinos). The statute all but requires it. In fact, it includes a provision by which concerned citizens can sue law enforcement agencies that they believe to be non-compliant.
Mexican-Americans who are in the streets protesting this law must understand they’re in the crosshairs along with legal residents, illegal immigrants and anyone who looks Latino. The only way for law enforcement officers to round up scores of illegal immigrants is to sift through even larger pools of Latinos that will necessarily include Mexican-Americans. So it’s clear which group of U.S. citizens will bear the brunt of this law.
Some Americans assume that these groups are natural allies.
Not necessarily. There is built-in tension tied to a shared culture, and the lengths to which some folks will go to escape it. By assimilating into U.S. culture, Mexican-Americans are susceptible to accusations that they’ve strayed from Mexican culture.
Also, each group challenges the other. Mexican-Americans remind Mexican immigrants of the fact that, in the United States, ethnicity and language need not be impediments to success. Mexican immigrants remind Mexican-Americans of, well, the same thing. In fact, there is a lot that each group can teach the other about the American Dream and how to realize it.
Still, this partnership has the makings of a powerful alliance. And ironically, SB 1070 might just do more to forge it than all the cross-border initiatives implemented over the years.
This is the thing nativists have always feared. They would almost certainly prefer to pick on those who have no voice without worrying about pushback from those who do. There is even a paranoid strain in the restrictionist movement that propagates the fantasy that Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants are scheming to retake the Southwest and return it to Mexico.
Yet, given that the territory in question includes Arizona, which is full of Arizonans, is there any evidence that, at this point, Mexico even wants it back?
Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board, a nationally syndicated columnist, and a regular contributor to CNN.COM.
