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Arizona’s SB 1070 and the Legalization of Racial Profiling
Posted by: | CommentsIn 2010, the Arizona state legislature passed a blatantly racist law, SB 1070.
One of its most notorious provisions (Section B) is particularly loathsome. It requires officers of the law who have “lawful contact” with an individual to make a “reasonable attempt” to ascertain the individual’s immigrant status “where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States.” Two questions arise. First, what motivates the officer to initiate the “lawful contact”? Second, how does the officer arrive at a “reasonable suspicion”? The tool used in both cases is racial profiling.
photo credit: Daquella manera
The Obama administration challenged SB 1070 in court. Judge Susan Bolton of the Federal District Court issued a preliminary injunction against sections of the law, including Section B. The State of Arizona appealed Judge Bolton’s ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals which upheld Bolton’s decision. Subsequently the State of Arizona appealed to the Supreme Court, which heard the case on April 25. There was some discussion of Section B during the hearing. Astonishingly, some Justices made comments that suggested support for this provision.
If the Supreme Court rules in Arizona’s favor, racial profiling will be legalized in Arizona for years. What’s next?
Anti-Immigrant Legislation and Private Prison Labor: A Modern Day Slavery
Posted by: | Comments~ This is the last post of our three-part blog series on the criminalization of people of color and the private prison industry.
“The prison is like a rather disciplined barracks, a strict school, a dark workshop, but not qualitatively different” – Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (p. 233)
photo credit: Toni Kaarttinen
Prisons have long served to keep individuals labeled “deviant” in America under constant surveillance. It is no secret that those labeled “deviant” are those that society keeps at the bottom: racial minorities. Today, that “deviant” label has increasingly been applied to immigrants from Central and South America. Thus, we can see that these groups are especially vulnerable to the detainment and abuse by private prisons in the US today. How have private prisons capitalized on the criminalization of immigrants?
First, the passage and enforcement of anti-immigration laws (such as Operation Streamline [pdf]) have correlated with the expansion of private prisons. These results can especially be seen in the state of Texas. According to the Grassroots Leadership report, “Operation Streamline: Drowning Justice and Draining Dollars along the Rio Grande,” the number of immigrants sentenced to prison for crossing the Mexico/Texas border without authorization in two districts grew from 2,770 in 2002 to 44,517 in 2009.
photo credit: i like jade plants
“The expanded criminal and civil immigration detention system has been a huge financial boon to private prison corporations, such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) and Management and Training Corporation (MTC)” according to the report. Texas is not alone in criminalizing and incarcerating immigrants, the state of Arizona (on the heels of its controversial SB1070 anti-immigrant legislation) announced in early 2011 a request for proposals for a 5000-bed private prison. It should come then as no surprise that CCA was a key architect and proponent of SB1070, as NPR and Racism Review reported on earlier this year. Private prison corporations stand to gain hundreds of millions of dollars from laws such as this.
A private prison serves as a third party contracted by government agencies to detain prisoners. Private prison corporations enter contractual agreements with governments that commit prisoners and pay private prison corporations a per diem or monthly rate for each prisoner confined in the facility. Private prison corporations profit from mass incarceration that targets racial and ethnic minorities, and increasingly, undocumented immigrants. In addition to being paid by the state to hold prisoners, private prisons profit from using those prisoners in turn as laborers.
While work is not a mandatory discipline within all private prisons, it is a discipline that is highly incentivized. Private prisons use discipline to control, manipulate and subject their prisoners and turning them into machines or “docile bodies” that will give them cheap labor. Every day, these prisoners work to process food, produce brooms, sew clothing, wire technical items, etc. Prisoners are paid between $0.23 and $4.73 per day while at the same time, it costs these inmates $5 A MINUTE to make a phone call in private prisons (see also, Think Progress article on this).
photo credit: Melody Kramer
Labor within private prisons is clearly not used for the transformation and rehabilitation of these inmates into constructive members of society. Mass incarceration, that has expanded with the passing of anti-immigrant laws, increased with the development of private prisons has resulted in the incarceration of over 2.3 million people, who are now working for a twisted and corrupt economy. Those familiar with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow book can certainly help argue that these inmates are essentially modern-day slaves of the 21st century; they are being exploited and used by a system that not only refuses to help them, but aims to keep them incarcerated for the purpose of creating a profit.
Discussion
- How has anti-immigrant legislation helped shape the face of state-sanctioned private prison “modern” slavery or indentured servitude?
- How can we work to end private prisons’ ability to exploit anti-immigration sentiment and legislation for profit?
~ *We are a group of four sociology students studying critical theories of race and racism in Danielle Dirks’ “Contemporary Sociological Theory” undergraduate course at Occidental College. Please read and feel free to comment or ask questions. Thank you for your time!
Targeting Latino Children is Not the Answer
Posted by: | CommentsA recent article published in the New York Times by Kirk Semple reports that federal officials have had to send a memo to various states and school districts informing them that asking for citizenship status before enrolling children is illegal. It seems not only are many school districts (139 in New York State alone) are asking for documentation of students, but certain states such as Oklahoma are considering state bills requiring it. This should not surprise us considering the fact that Congress could not pass the Dream Act, that we have witnessed record number of deportations in recent years which have separated families and placed children in the foster-care maze, and that states have passed discriminatory laws like Arizona’s SB1070. These examples all point to a dark shadow side of America, this land of immigrants.
Xenophobia is nothing new in America, especially during economic hard times. Politicians and other civic leaders historically have succeeded in redirecting the public’s attention to symbolic policy issues that target the most vulnerable, the voiceless, and those who are marginalized. To an American of Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Jewish, Irish, or Southern or Eastern European ancestry, this isn’t news. Immigrants from these groups know all too well what it is like to be needed for one’s labor, but despised for one’s presence. We’ve been down this road before. Recall the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, halting new Japanese immigration in exchange for non-discrimination against those of Japanese descent already in the U.S., as examples of racist immigration practices in America’s past. Arizona’s SB1070 is not unique in our history. What is different now is that this treatment is now being directed to children too.
The current immigration debate focusing on Latinos is no different from our past. Whether one is a proponent of earned citizenship through some time of amnesty, tougher border enforcement either by building fences or militarizing the border, a proponent of another guest worker program, or is engaged in the on-going debate about whether immigrants cost or benefit society, Latinos in America are experiencing prejudice, discrimination, cruelty and mistreatment from this latest round of scapegoating. The bottom line is that the 50 million Latinos in this country—16.3 percent of the population according to a new Pew Hispanic Report, are not accepted or seen as real Americans, regardless of our legal or professional status as discussed in a forthcoming book on Latino professionals. The current debate on immigration underscores this fact.
People need to remember some fundamental American values, such as the Golden Rule and what it means to walk in the footsteps of another. If we can honestly put ourselves in immigrants shoes, we may see that most of us would make the same decisions that undocumented workers have made. Regardless of the law, we would make the sacrifices necessary to do the best we can for our families. For example, try to sincerely imagine living in an agricultural community that, since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, has suffered tremendous financial hardship. Local corn, grown there for generations, can no longer compete against the corn imports from the United States, which are heavily subsidized by the U.S. government. To clothe your children, your wife has taken to sewing their underwear out of old flour sacks. Your children lack shoes. Your family eats little protein, maybe once a week. Meals mostly consist of “chicken” soup, without the chicken — a watery broth of tortillas or rice and beans. The only hope seems to be to go work in the U.S. While it breaks your heart to leave your children behind, knowing your youngest may not even remember who you are upon your return and knowing your older ones need you to learn life’s lessons, you make the only rational decision a family-centered person can. You give up everything and join the countless numbers of people who have left their communities empty of working-aged men.
Not many of us could sit back and watch our children or elderly parents suffer hunger and destitution without doing something to ease their suffering and improve their lives. Missing from so much of the immigration debate is the humanity of the undocumented immigrants who are making sacrifices such as being separated from their children often for years, or being away and unable to return if a parent dies. These are sacrifices most of us cannot even imagine.
It is only through an understanding of the complex circumstances that lead people to migrate that we can create a much-needed constructive, humane, realistic, and just immigration policy. Blaming undocumented immigrants is not the answer. As Michele Wucker states in her book Lockout, “The population of immigrants who are in this country without legal papers did not grow to more than 10 million people without America’s full participation in the legal charade.”
Instead of focusing on the unjust immigration laws, politicians, political pundits, and anti-immigrant advocates have hypocritically taken the stance that undocumented workers are “lawbreakers” who need to learn to “follow the rules” and “do it the right way.”
They should take note that laws can be, and are often, wrong. When half the American population could not vote until 1920, were women wrong to demand the law changed?
Instead of hiding behind the façade of law, we should remember the humanity of undocumented immigrants. We all lose when we discriminate against one another. We are a better country than to require children to prove residency status in order for them to go to school. Targeting children is not the answer.
Latino Population Growth and the Arizona Nativism
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Texas A&M University social demographer and sociologist Rogelio Saenz has some revealing statistical data in his recent Population Reference Bureau piece titled “Latinos, Whites, and the Shifting Demography of Arizona”: He first notes the dramatic growth in the population of Arizona, bringing the state up to near seven million people today as now the 14th-largest U.S. state. Among these
Latinos accounted for two-fifths of the nearly 3.8 million people added to the state’s population between 1980 and 2008…. The share of Arizona’s growth due to Latinos has grown significantly across the last three decades while the growth due to whites has declined…. The percentage of Arizonans who are Latino increased from 16 percent in 1980 to 30 percent in 2008. In contrast, the share of the state’s population that is white declined from 75 percent in 1980 to 58 percent in 2008.
He also provides this striking chart, which has major political-economic implications:
As he points out about this chart,
Whites account for over half of the state’s population ages 35 and older and make up at least 80 percent of those in elderly age categories. . . . In contrast, Latinos outnumber whites in the two youngest age groups (0 to 4 and 5 to 9). While the median age of the white population is 43, it is only 26 among Latinos.
This racial-age polarization has significant implications. A majority of active voters and political activists now are still white, while the population that will eventually be that majority of voters and activists is not white, indeed is very substantially Latino. Many Arizona whites have also been the ones so aggressively seeking SB1070-type legislation to reduce the (already significantly declining because of the Bush depression) number of Latinos in the state, with some of them supporting violence against these immigrants in the form of armed groups patrolling the border.
One of the sad ironies in all this is that most of the Mexican immigrants, especially the undocumented, in Arizona actually do much work for whites, to make their middle class lives (houses, restaurants, etc) more affordable and thus to buttress white middle-class affluence. One has to wonder who will do much of this hard and dirty work in Arizona if the immigrants are driven out.
Saenz also notes certain critical larger national and international “boxes” within which the Mexican immigration has taken place:
The families of many Latinos in the state have been there for generations. Furthermore, globalization, the expansion of economies across international borders, and the aging of the populations of developed countries all stimulate the movement of people into places such as Arizona.
A Matter of Technicality, Not Racial Contestation: The Coming SB 1070 Challenge
Posted by: | CommentsIt appears the Obama Administration and Justice Department will be challenging Arizona’s immigration law, otherwise known as SB 1070, although no lawsuit has been filed yet.
If recent events are any indication, the forthcoming lawsuit will frame immigration as a national issue that requires a federal, not state, response. In a recent interview, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented, “[Obama] thinks that the federal government should be determining immigration policy.” These comments were further corroborated by President Barack Obama, himself, when he first openly criticized the law. He said, “If we continue to fail to act at a federal level, we will continue to see misguided efforts [like Arizona] opening up around the country.” Further preview of the lawsuit to come was offered by Randal Archibold and Mark Landler of The New York Times. According to them, legal scholars say the Obama Administration and Justice Department have a stronger case if they argue that Arizona intruded upon what ought to be federally regulated.
As these accounts foreshadow, the merits of the pending challenge will likely be on grounds of federal versus states’ rights. At face value, this is certainly good news to those who oppose SB 1070. However, the grounds in which this case will likely be built has complicated implications for racial/ethnic issues. If such a challenge is solely built on the notion that immigration is a federal issue, then it will ignore the proverbial elephant in the room that made this law controversial in the first place: racial profiling.
Under SB 1070, Arizona lawmakers have enabled local police enforcement to approach anyone who they “reasonably suspect” to be of illegal status and verify their citizenship. Furthermore, this law enables local police enforcement to detain anyone they reasonably suspect to be in the U.S. illegally. Because reasonable suspicion remains undefined, this broadens what tactics can be employed to enforce the new law. As critics argue, this not only encourages police to rely upon racial and ethnic markers such as skin tone and language to enforce immigration law, but it gives them legal justification to racially profile.
If the Obama Administration and Justice Department file suit against SB 1070 on grounds of federal versus state authority, they virtually leave racial profiling unchallenged. 1
This is problematic because racial profiling is discriminatory as it targets individuals on the basis of group assumptions. And these group assumptions often times are faulty generalizations that depend upon stereotypes. All Latina/os or “Latina-looking” people are not illegal migrants, but SB 1070 enables law enforcement to presume such individuals as guilty until proven innocent. Instead of condemning racial profiling, the Obama Administration and Justice Department will likely change the subject and frame this law as an issue of how government authority should be delegated.
A failure to openly contest racial profiling reinforces a central feature of color-blind racism: the minimization of racial discrimination. When people buy into this post-racial fantasyland, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva contends, they understand racial discrimination as more of a historical fact than a contemporary living nightmare for folks of color. Rather than address mountains of evidence (see Karen Glover and Katheryn Russell-Brown) that detail the persistence – and limits – of racial profiling, it remains unaddressed and thus the racial status quo is maintained. By remaining silent, the Obama Administration and Justice Department implicitly dismiss the enduring presence of such racial discrimination within the criminal justice system.
If the Justice Department wins its forthcoming lawsuit on grounds that immigration is a federal issue, then SB 1070 will have been defeated by technicality. Though this would successfully nullify this racist law, it’s premature to bring out the champagne glasses just yet. Turning your back on a problem does not make that problem go away. The merits of racial profiling must be openly contested for SB 1070 to be genuinely defeated in the name of racial progress. Such a task is cumbersome, but it is necessary if America is to become closer to the ideal that many have dreamed. In the hopeful words of Langston Hughes, let America be the land it could be:
“O, let America be America again
The land that never has been yet
And yet must be
the land where every man is free….
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—America will be!”
–
1 Though I have critical reservations about this legal strategy due to its racial implications, it may very well prove to be most effective. If the Obama Administration and the Justice Department squarely tackled the unconstitutionality of racial profiling, they run the risk of a conservative U.S. Supreme Court dismissing their claim on grounds of precedent: the 1975 ruling of the United States v. Brignoni-Ponce. For this case, the Court essentially legalized racial profiling by enabling police to use someone’s racial appearance as grounds for stopping and searching motorists. Michelle Alexander points this out in her new book: “In that case the Court concluded that the police could take a person’s Mexican appearance into account when developing reasonable suspicion that a vehicle may contain undocumented immigrants.”
Kasey Henricks, Master’s Student, Sociology Department, Loyola University Chicago
The Many Costs of Racism
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We have all heard the story that America is a nation of active citizens and joiners (Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840) — resulting in a citizenry that joins together for the common good. However, according to Harvard professor Robert Putnam, social capital—which is about connections, reciprocity, and trust—is on the decline and consequently, American civil society is on the decline. Putnam lists many reasons for this decline in our modern lifestyles, but I believe that nothing decreases connections and trust among Americans more than racist public policies such as Arizona’s SB 1070 law.
We need to consider the costs that this policy will have on the overall American story of connectedness. Not surprisingly social capital among blacks and Latinos is already significantly lower than among whites (See link here.) However, it is important to consider that Latino citizens are a huge part of the population in Arizona. Pretending that Latino citizens aren’t a huge part of the population in Arizona and that these Latino citizens won’t incur gigantic costs in terms of civil liberties violations and sense of personal security is ridiculous. Despite Governor Brewer’s assurances that there will be no racial profiling against Latino citizens, anyone who reads the bill, which, “Requires officials and agencies to reasonably attempt to determine the immigration status of a person involved in a lawful contact where reasonable suspicion exists regarding the immigration status of the person…,” knows that it is patently obvious that long-time Latino citizens are indistinguishable from undocumented Latinos. “Reasonable suspicion” amounts to being Latino in Arizona. My father, a Latino living in Tucson, now feels uncomfortable around his white friends because they disagree about SB 1070. This is beyond a political or ideological disagreement.
For a Latino, this is about acceptance, respect, equality, and yes, trust. So, there are more than civil liberties violations and personal security at stake—it is about the ending of relationships between Latinos and whites, it is about separating life-long friends, maybe for good.
The story of Latinos living in Arizona after SB 1070 now is sadness, and at best for those Latinos who are citizens an increased fear–and hiding at worst for those who aren’t documented. It is about decreased community connectedness along racial lines on all counts. I know if I was an undocumented Latina about to give birth I would risk giving birth at home rather than going to the hospital and possibly being deported. Why can’t whites see the social and personal costs of this policy? Perhaps it is because most whites are between four to ten generations removed from their immigrant parents; immigration for them is some distant thing. Maybe this is why they do not realize we are all in the same boat. Maybe that is why they don’t see the costs of this type of racism on America.
De Tocqueville had it wrong. We are not a nation of active citizens and joiners. We are a nation of exclusion by race. If strong social capital is an important component of our nation’s civic health, then America will pay a huge cost for generations to come if we keep targeting Latinos.
Professor Soto’s Speech, from a Listener: More on Arizona Whites Hostility to Immigrants
Posted by: | CommentsJosé Cobas encountered the internet uproar over the graduation speech by Prof. Sandra Soto at the University of Arizona on May 14, and asked me what I thought. Here is my response, with a few clarifying notes.
The clarifying notes: The occasion was the graduation ceremony held by the college of social and behavioral sciences, held separately from the main commencement so that all the SBS students can get individual recognition. The ceremony is held in a huge arena at the Tucson convention center. Students are seated on the floor of the arena, and family members and other guests are in the tiers of seats all around this floor. Faculty, department heads, and deans who are participating in honoring the graduates attend in academic regalia and are seated on a platform at the front of the floor of the arena. I was there to “hood” a new Ph.D. whose thesis I had directed, and the dean’s office asked me to join Sandy Soto and two other faculty members as a “name reader,” reading out the names of the graduates as they crossed the platform. Sandy and I were seated right behind the podium so we could change places quickly. Sandy was selected as graduation speaker. I’m not sure how the selection process works (I’m actually retired from the university), but I’m sure it was partly because she is a very well-regarded teacher. My email to José Cobas:
Hi, José
As it happens, I was sitting right next to Sandy on the podium and so right behind her when she made her speech. The booing was frightening. It was NOT coming from the students, seated on the floor of the arena. It was coming from families in the seats all around us. People tried to applaud to counter it but the booing just got louder. Sandy had to stop a couple of times because it was clear her words would not be heard if she continued. The booing finally died down when Dean Jones stepped to the microphone and urged the crowd to permit a “civil discourse”. After her talk Sandy was a “name reader” as each of the graduates came to the podium to be acknowledged, and she got warm smiles from students and at least one took a second (this was all very choreographed and went very fast since on the order of 1000 names were read) to thank her for the speech.
There were many, many Spanish-language surnames and first names in the list of those graduating (I was the reader who followed Sandy). If you read her talk you will observe that it is very carefully worded and very honest. She urges the graduates to use their education to think critically about these issues, and she inserts the “human” side, her own feelings, and those of the Tucson High School students she had met with earlier that week who are under attack for their support of Mexican-American studies courses. I do not think that she expected the kind of response she got, the talk was very judicious, in my view — nothing but facts and her thoughts about what the recent burst of anti-Hispanic legislation felt like to her as a person, no name calling at all. However, people were not listening.
I had the very strong sense from the booing that the tone was not just, “We disagree with you”, but something like, “Who does that greaser bitch think she is?” (I hope you will forgive me the vulgar language). I was surprised that even a couple of my own colleagues that I spoke to after the ceremony, while agreeing with the message, felt that it was an “inappropriate topic” for a graduation speech, which I guess is supposed to be nothing but the blandest platitudes for fear a “captive audience” would be offended. So much for the highest goals of the university … It does seem clear to me that many, many White people in Arizona are not ready to engage in dialogue of any kind. Their minds are made up, they dread the slightest loss of power, they utterly reject even the most thoughtful challenges to their ideas, they give lip service to “critical thinking” and “honest dialogue” but are not ready to in fact participate in that. It was not a happy experience. Since I was obviously a very senior person, all robed and draped in several kinds of medals, I made a conspicuous show of shaking Sandy’s hand as she sat down. I’ve realized watching the video clips that we were behind the banners and the podium so that probably didn’t make any difference at all. Anyway obviously Sandy should be very proud of what she said and the way she comported herself at the time and since, with great dignity.
I’ll also take this moment to share my own feelings about SB1070 (obviously the attack on Mexican-American studies is completely racist and ridiculous. Paolo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is some kind of threat to the United States? It’s had 50 years to do its evil work (;-)) and somehow I don’t find among the many things that are wrong with my world much that can be traced to poor Paolo Freire). Anyway, back to SB1070 — I think there has been too little attention to how spectacularly counter-productive SB1070 is in the face of a real fear, that human smuggling is coming under the control of the Mexican drug cartels and their criminal allies in the U.S. Law enforcement people (except for that grandstanding idiot Sheriff Joe) have always, always taken the position that they do NOT want to be involved in enforcement of immigration law, the responsibility of the Border Patrol and ICE, because they want people to feel that they can come to the police to report crimes and to be witnesses. SB1070 absolutely ignores decades of that policy. Immigrants who are the victims of crime under SB1070 cannot go to the police.
The only place they can (and will) go is to counter-mafias. I don’t think SB1070 will survive a constitutional challenge, but if it does, Arizona is going to be like 19th-century Sicily. My own “policy position” is that the US, Canada, Mexico, etc. — whoever the “NAFTA’ countries are, must have something like the European Schengen agreements that permit the free flow of labor. After all, if Brits can handle Polish plumbers, we can surely cope with a handy flow of Mexican roofers, brick-layers, and who knows what else — maybe some rocket scientists or some of their entrepreneurial talent too. I don’t think this is going to happen and I think the reason it’s not going to happen is racism.
White Attacks on Anti-Racist Academic in Arizona
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InsideHigherEducation describes the hostile comments and threats a Latina faculty member got for giving a short 10-minute faculty speech at the graduation convocation recently at the University of Arizona’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
The deterioration of this society’s ability to have a sensible discussion of issues, such as on immigration, has been aggressively accelerated in recent years by the right-wing propaganda machines of prominent radio talk show hosts and Fox news, where information is often less important than a far-right agenda. We are on a downhill slide in this post-post-racial America.
Professor Sandra Soto, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, turned down higher ranked universities to go where there are large Latino populations and numbers of students. She did not realize that criticizing the new authoritarian racial profiling law in Arizona and critiquing the banning of ethnic (Mexican American) studies programs in Arizona schools would get her many verbal threats, including death threats:
She was booed, jeered and heckled, with a few shouting personal comments …. Soto held her ground, and while pausing at times, finished her talk — with many applauding. Soto related her critiques of these state actions to graduation by talking about how their education should prepare them to be “better public citizens.” Since the talk, Soto said she has received a barrage of e-mail messages, many of them hateful and some of them potentially threatening. Many such messages have also been posted on YouTube and on local Web sites that covered the speech. (See links here)
She describes her feelings thus:
“My work is in Chicana cultural studies, so it’s my obligation, if I am going to be up on a stage, I feel it is my absolute responsibility to address these issues.” She said that no one who knows her could have doubted that she would speak out, and that she was prepared for some booing, but was surprised by “how vitriolic” the e-mail messages have been since the talk. She said that she will turn over to authorities those that might be threatening, such as an e-mail suggesting that the sender “hopes you don’t look both ways” while crossing the street. . . . several viewers suggested that Soto “return to El Salvador.” (She’s actually from Texas, where her family has lived since Texas was Mexico, she said, and she’s not sure why she’s been identified as being from El Salvador.)
Marisol LeBron, a Latino Ph.D. student in American studies at New York University, put it this way in a blog commentary:
Queer Chicana Professor (and all-around awesome academic) Sandra K. Soto got booed at the University of Arizona’s Social and Behavioral Sciences commencement. Professor Soto was attempting to discuss the ways that the anti-immigrant measures known as SB1070 would marginalize Latinos/as. Before she could get a sentence out the crowd jeered her. Twitter drama ensued. Most people said it was inappropriate for Professor Soto to use the event as a “political soap box” further highlighting the success of the conservative right in advancing the idea that Universities and institutions of higher education should be depoliticized places where one goes to learn objective truths. … what happened to Professor Soto is just another example of what so often occurs to queers, women, and people of color (or people who inhabit all of those identities) within the academy, they get shouted down and told that they’re advancing a narrow agenda or only telling half the story. … I applaud the stand that Soto and other educators in Arizona are taking despite the attempts to silence them.
Sociologists without Borders Petitions Governor Jan Brewer in Arizona
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Sociologists without Borders has prepared this statement on behalf of the human rights of immigrants of color, and other people of color, in the state of Arizona:
To: Arizona Governor Jan Brewer
Sociologists without Borders (SSF) strongly condemns Arizona Law SB1070 which requires police officers to request documentation from persons who they believe may be undocumented immigrants. SSF calls on state and federal authorities to prevent the law from going into effect. In addition, SSF will refrain from holding any meetings or soliciting the services of any entity, public or private, located in the state of Arizona. We call on SSF members and Sociologists to boycott travel to or soliciting the services of entities located in the state of Arizona unless absolutely necessary until the law is repealed or deemed unconstitutional.
SSF believes that Arizona Law SB1070 is a form of racial profiling and discrimination because officers will likely rely on appearance, phenotypes, language and accents to make judgments that will lead to the unnecessary harassment or detention of US citizens and residents, including SSF members and other Sociologists. SSF does not tolerate racial profiling or discrimination in the United States or elsewhere.
SSF recognizes that this law is part of a larger trend of discrimination against immigrants in the state of Arizona. We regret this trend and encourage local, national and international efforts to intervene through the use of non-violent tactics such as political organizing and economic boycotts. Matters of enforcement for immigration law is best handled by authorities that are specifically trained for this purpose and should remain that way in the state of Arizona. We regret that SB1070 was signed into law and hope that it is quickly repealed or deemed unconstitutional.
The SSF petition is here.
