Arizona: The state where liberty goes to die*

Not confident yet with their ranking as the country’s number one laughing-stock on immigration issues (no small feat, that, when Texas is among your competition), Arizona next plans to turn its attention to the most vulnerable people of the wrong skin color, babies.

I used to joke about illegals having the temerity to have been born in the wrong place, now even that well-worn punchline is in jeopardy.

Seeking to go where no state has gone before—since before Reconstruction—a law proposed by Arizona GOP Representative John Kavanagh would deny birth certificates to children born in the United States to illegal immigrant parents.

Arizona—it’s the Old South of the new west.

(Full disclosure: I barely survived my own teenage years in that awful state so I have first-hand knowledge of that which I am criticizing. If not for one sister’s assistance, I probably would have been the fat, greasy doofus scooping up your French Fries at McDonald’s today, still sporting a 30-year-old ON PROBATION nametag. Or like my other sister, still in Tucson—a barnacle on the ass of society, getting by on government handouts and the occasional proceeds of scurrilous lawsuits.)

Anyhow, it already doesn’t look like this trial balloon is gonna go anywhere. But just the fact that it was raised is a snapshot of the mindset of the bill’s supporters. And the fact is, as out of control as illegal immigration admittedly is at our borders, so far it’s not terrorists sneaking over the state line, it’s maids and leaf-blowers and cherry-pickers. Women who will go on to raise to raise rich white peoples’ babies for them.

They are not exactly coming over here and stealing the cream of the crop, jobs-wise. Is the real problem the common belief that so many are receiving subsidies from the U.S. government in the form of E.R. visits and the like? Because their no-goodnik American employers pay them shit and don’t provide any benefits? If that was the case, you’d think the fiscal hawks would be trying to cut off all the poor people, not just the brown ones.

The fact that Kavanagh’s bill seeks to deny citizenship to persons actually born here, regardless of their parents’ immigration status, runs contrary to the U.S. Constitution and popular sensibility on every ground, from moral to tactical to legal.

Ever since we became a desirable destination for people fleeing poverty and persecution in their native lands, your basic immigrants’ main goal has been to have their children born in America. Because then they would be Americans! We were like the church the world’s persecuted fled to to receive sanctuary. If you crossed the goal line and popped your kid out on American soil, that kid is—it’s a squeeze play at the plate, it’s gonna be close, holy cow!—safe!

That invisible goal line—U.S. citizenship via being born here—has always been sacred ground. The fact that so many still consider it their Holy Grail is testament to that. If we were to change that, it would change our image of who we are as a people, which could prove to be the last straw for our little experiment in democracy. I would categorize us as “teetering” already.

The fact that the 14th Amendment, which the Arizona “anchor baby” bill is designed to negate, was enacted to rectify the injustices of slavery only adds another layer of juicy irony. Having definitively lost the battle to keep the Black man under its thumb (that’s President Obama to you, Mr. Tea-partier!), the angry white man and woman have refocused their inchoate indignation on the brown man.

There seems to be a common denominator here, but I’m not quite clever enough to put my finger on it …

Ironically, if we begin willingly discarding our rights in an imagined attempt to shore up our security, we will become a less desirable place for foreigners to seek refuge by doing so.

We will basically kill one bird with two stones, which might not be efficient, but it would promise to be effective.

* Thanks, and a tip of the hat to Hamlet 2, which coined the phrase, “Tucson, Arizona: where dreams go to die.”