Arizona - It's not about immigration!

Commentary By Ron Beasley

John McCain:

Although McCain had sounded a note of support for the bill, calling it a "good tool" for law enforcement, he stopped short of fully endorsing the measure. "I haven't had a chance to look at all the aspects, but I do understand why the Legislature would act," he said. Even though it wasn't clear to him "whether all of it is legal or not," he said state lawmakers "acted out of frustration because the federal government didn't do its job."

Don't be fooled, the new Arizona immigration law has little to do with immigration.  The Republican lawmakers are frustrated alright but it's the growing Hispanic population not immigration that frustrates them.  Greg Palast explains:

Don't be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of
racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a
sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state
to carry papers proving they are US citizens.

I don't buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a
part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.

What's new here is not the politicians' fear of a xenophobic "Teabag"
uprising.

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style
show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US
citizens all, who are daring to vote -- and daring to vote Democratic by
more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted,
Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or,
if you like, tortillas.

And this is just the latest chapter.

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby
Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an
electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded
purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush.
Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than
100,000 voters, overwhelming Hispanics, were blocked from registering to
vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three
Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.



That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if
you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And
arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their
names and addresses.

So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these
thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name
to the feds for prosecution?

No, not one.

Which raises the question: were these disenfranchised voters the
criminal, non-citizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white
voters given the Jos�row treatment, entrapped in document-chase
trickery?

The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a
crazy hunt all over the Western mesas looking for these illegal voters.
"We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost 2 years, I
didn�t find one prosecutable voter fraud case."

This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he
refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his
firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States,
George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.

Iglesias' jurisdiction was next door, in New Mexico, but he told me
that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip
up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even
though there were none.

So what we have here is typical Republican/Rovian politics.  The demographics are shifting away from the Republicans.  So what do they do?  Intimidate and disenfranchise voters who aren't likely to vote Republican.  The Republicans are the ones who hate democracy.