Arizona: Ground Zero in Immigration's New Race Wars

Much has been eclipsed in the post-election euphoria, not least of which is the continuity of racist violence in the United States. The election of Barack Obama notwithstanding, the black population still bears the overwhelming brunt of this violence, in its systematic and informal guises in prisons and on the streets, and with the far right gearing up, we can expect more of the same. But with new dynamics, political and geopolitical, come new violences, and we have seen in recent years a steady increase in anti-Latino or anti-immigrant violence alongside a notable spike after Sept. 11, 2001, in anti-"Arab" violence.

Recently released statistics show violence against Latino immigrants to be the fastest growing of all hate crimes, fueled by an atmosphere of linguistic-racial hatred and permissiveness to violence against all those deemed to be from "elsewhere." In a recent report, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted the shocking growth in anti-Latino hate crime, and in early November, an Ecuadorian man was beaten and stabbed to death on Long Island, N.Y., by a lynch mob of young, mostly white teens looking for some racist fun "hunting beaners," a game they claim to have played weekly. Less than a month later, yet another Ecuadorean was beaten until brain-dead in Brooklyn, this time allegedly by black men who shouted ethnic and homophobic slurs.

Such informal violence has always gone hand-in-hand with the structural violence of the state: informal and legal lynching are but a single, Janus-faced phenomenon. In this vein, alongside a rise in informal hate crimes, we have seen a marked increase in the destructive intervention of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and local law enforcement vigilantes like Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Ariz., permissiveness toward racist Minutemen-type militia organizations and the direct result of these policies in skyrocketing deaths along the border. And the ties between this formal anti-immigrant racism and the prison-industrial complex are increasingly clear. INCITE! recently revealed that the U.S. government’s anti-immigration enforcement budget had increased nearly tenfold since 1993, to $13.6 billion in 2008, and that immigrant detention "is now the fastest-growing incarceration program in the country."

"Free to Live, Love and Work…"

In this rising tide of state and informal violence, Arizona has come to be ground zero. There, Lou Dobbs darling "Sheriff Joe" has institutionalized a "Posse" program, deputizing civilians to enforce anti-immigration laws. After Arizona passed a 2005 law extending felony immigrant-smuggling charges to state jurisdiction (the so-called Coyote Law), anti-immigrant Maricopa County Attorney Andrew P. Thomas handed down a decision that would charge smuggled immigrants as felonious co-conspirators of their smugglers, and Arpaio (who once claimed to be honored to be compared to the KKK) has proceeded to enforce this controversial decision obsessively, empowering his 3,000 Posse volunteers (some armed) to apprehend "illegal immigrants" for criminal prosecution. Deaths on the Arizona border regularly account for half of all border deaths, and 2008 is on pace to be a record-setting year.

But this rabidly racist anti-immigrant movement has not gone uncontested, meeting instead with popular resistance in the Latino community (both undocumented and documented), and to a lesser degree in the progressive white community. Recently, these sectors have coalesced in Repeal Coalition (Coalición de Cambio), a Flagstaff, Ariz., organization that has brought together members of groups like No More Deaths/No Más Muertes and Bring the Ruckus, and which "demands the repeal of all laws -- federal, state and local -- that degrade and discriminate against undocumented individuals and that deny U.S. citizens their lawful rights."