Tweet
Maybe there’s a soft bigotry of low expectations at work here, or maybe it’s the difference in the number of immigrants in the state, but nobody seems to be as outraged about what happened this week in Utah. And the mix of bills is interesting:
Utah’s governor on Tuesday signed a package of immigration laws including one that would allow a police crackdown on illegal immigrants similar to Arizona’s attempt last year.
The laws, approved by Utah’s Republican-controlled legislature earlier this month, also would attempt to create a guest worker program.
Opponents of the bills rallied last week in downtown Salt Lake City in an effort to prevent their passage. Chanting and carrying signs that read “Don’t Let Utah Become Another Arizona” and “Keep Families Together” the protesters urged lawmakers and the governor to stop the legislation.
“Utah did the right thing. We did the hard thing,” Governor Gary Herbert said in signing the laws, which he called “the Utah solution.”
The Obama Administration sued Arizona over SB 1070, and presumably they’ll do the same with Utah. But this shows how crucial Arizona was to the fight. They took all the national attention away from states like Utah, who quietly followed up. While a number of states have seen their attempts to penalize undocumented immigrants falter, Utah did not. And I suspect other states with a Republican-heavy legislature will follow suit eventually.
It’s worth noting that the bill sponsor in Utah believes that his law is different from the Arizona law, in that it does not require law enforcement to ask about immigration status when picking up people on anything less than a serious misdemeanor. Meanwhile, the guest worker program, which would need a federal waiver that currently does not exist, is certainly novel; the bill sponsor of the law enforcement measure opposed it vociferously. A third law creates a pact with Nuevo León State in Mexico to funnel Mexicans into the guest worker program. Because a state can’t really create a guest worker program, the latter two bills have been dismissed by immigrant’s rights advocates (and frankly, any bill that invites workers to be employed under dubious grants of rights should be seen as immediately suspect). Therefore, you end up with a law that is in many respects a mirror of the Arizona law, with some of the most controversial pieces softened.
6 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About FDL News Desk
One thing to note is that these bills had bipartisan support and they contain some elements that would be part of any federal comprehensive reform. This shows Republicans can do this job if they want to.
They laws don’t take effect until 2013 so it’s more of a political statement at this point.
A similar bill just today passed by the Oklahoma Senate:
IIRC, the House is even more dominated by Republicans than the Senate. it will passed and Gov. Fallin (R) will sign it.
In the absence of a national policy the states will do what they can with their very limited power. Why no immigration reform from Washington? The U.S. Chamber likes the current policy and owns the whores in both parties.
Similar SB 1070 bills have also just been introduced in Florida; check out this petition to fight back against them:
http://www.economicrefugee.net/legislative-session-early-hurricane-season/
And there is a strong view afloat that we have no coherent plan/coalition to get any significant immigration reform. We need a huge push back for something meaningful. There is a fairly old article “Getting Immigration Right” (online) that sets out a framework. We need to all be louder for something meaningful.
It was suggested by our founding fathers that America avoid undue foreign influence. For Mexico’s part, they are doing everything they can to insert themselves in America’s policy debates “to defend the fundamental rights of their citizens against state and local initiatives that are contrary to their rights and interests,” (Read more: http://www.allheadlinenews.com/briefs/articles/90040446?Mexico%20reconsiders%20strategy%20to%20oppose%20state%20illegal%20immigration%20laws#ixzz1GpAP6aNB)
This might be all well and good except that the “rights” they are most interested in are to ignore US Immigration Laws and live in the USA without permission.
The problem with that is that they don’t and never have had that right. The US does not owe Mexico or the Mexican people anything. Yet Mexico has made it a point to insert themselves into our national debates.
It is not “racist” or “xenophobic” for police to ask anyone, citizen or not, for their identification.
In most states of the union it is illegal not to carry some form of identification and federal law says ALL immigrants MUST carry their papers with them. Just because someone ignored the law and entered the US without obtaining the proper paperwork does not exempt them from the requirement.
More and more Mexico is openly admitting that they are trying to interfere with the American legal system because they are the senders of almost all of the twelve million Hispanic illegal immigrants in the US.
It is not at all hard to say that asking the US to support 10% of the entire population of Mexico is asking too much.
Activist talk of “poor” Mexicans and others who pay thousands of dollars to obtain passage into the US without thinking that most people in the US consider someone who can raise several thousand dollars that they don’t have to immediately live on to be rather well off.
That is one reason they can’t raise much sympathy outside the Latino community.
If they can get that kind of money there, why in the world would they want to come here? It leads many to believe that the main reason these people come is to take advantage of benefits that are not rightfully theirs.
The real bottom line is people who come here disregarding American laws don’t belong and the states want to send them home.
They don’t have any more rights than any other immigrant just because they came here without permission. They actually should have much less regardless of what their home country would like.
Utah is wrong in only one thing; In giving any legal status to unregistered foreigners all they will do is invite millions more who believe they too can get a reward instead of a punishment for violating the law. States don’t even have the right to grant such status and it would serve the foreigners who take advantage of it right to be deported under Federal instead of state law.