Thread: The Border Dividing Arizona

The Border Dividing Arizona

By JOSEPH LELYVELD
Published: October 15, 2006
When House Republicans calculated that their best bet for saving their majority was to run this fall as if illegal immigration and border security were the most urgent issues facing the country — bigger by far than that great unmentionable, Iraq — they were finally speaking the language of a Republican state legislator from Mesa, Ariz., named Russell Pearce. The Arizonan was there before Tom Tancredo, the Colorado congressman who talks of making a run for the White House on the issue; there before even Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh if not Pat Buchanan. A fast-talking former cop, Pearce went into electoral politics only after it became clear that he wouldn’t soon be able to realize his dream of becoming sheriff of Maricopa County, the area around Phoenix where more than half of Arizona lives. As a lawmaker, Pearce hasn’t just embraced the issue of illegal immigration as a tactic; for him it’s a passion — his opponents say an obsession — “the root cause” of almost any other problem Arizona and the nation face. Talk about terrorists and high crime rates, he’ll say the border is undefended. Are schools failing? They’re being overwhelmed by “a population that don’t put a high value to education.” Are there a million people in Arizona without health care? “Yeah, they broke into the country illegally. They came into the country poor, they’re gonna stay poor. You’ve imported them!”

Russell Pearce’s single-mindedness has proved to be a force in Arizona, setting the political agenda, helping to make illegal immigration the single most important and contested issue in the state. “He’s in the catbird seat,” a Democratic officeholder conceded last spring. Pearce can point to nine bills on illegal aliens that he has helped drive to passage in the State Legislature: to authorize major expenditures of state money on border enforcement, normally a federal responsibility; to deprive “undocumented” residents of social services; to ban Spanish as a language of communication by state agencies and officials; to define being in the state illegally as “trespass,” a misdemeanor on the first offense and a felony on the second; to empower the local police to enforce immigration law. But nine times, the Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, has turned him back with vetoes on crisply asserted fiscal and constitutional grounds, urging him and his Republican supporters to stop playing “political games.”

“Shame, shame, shame on those who continue to ignore the No. 1 issue facing America,” Pearce fumed last month when I visited his office at the State Capitol in Phoenix, which displayed not one but two portraits of John Wayne. The anathema he pronounced was intended not just for his governor but also for the Republican president and the Republican sponsor of the immigration-reform bill the president had backed; in Pearce’s terms, “the treacherous, treasonous bill” the Senate passed in March. It was known as the McCain-Kennedy bill, McCain being, of course, Arizona’s senior senator and, it is presumed, a leading contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. And it contained two provisions Russell Pearce could not abide: a path to citizenship for longtime residents who, after entering illegally, held steady employment, learned English and paid their taxes (plus fines to be levied for entering the country without a visa); and an opening for hundreds of thousands of temporary “guest workers” to come across legally for limited periods of work.

Was he saying that John McCain himself was “treacherous, treasonous?” I asked, interrupting Pearce’s discourse in midflow.

“Yes, I am,” he replied, not pausing for breath as he raced on.

In Arizona, it becomes evident, the battle over illegal immigration is, in one of its dimensions, a battle over the future of the Republican Party in the state and, because of McCain’s ambitions, nationally as well. It also becomes evident that what anti-immigrant zealots call an “invasion” is taking place not in spite of federal policies but, at least in Arizona, partly because of them. For 12 years the Border Patrol has deliberately funneled the immigrant flow away from settled urban areas like El Paso and San Diego (and, later, small Arizona border communities like Douglas and Nogales) into the Arizona deserts, where intruders can be more easily spotted, tracked and apprehended by its officers, using everything at their disposal, from high-tech sensors and drones to helicopters, jeeps, floodlights and horses. The number of arrests in Arizona alone has been running at more than half a million a year (slightly more than California, Texas and New Mexico combined for three years running). The number of arrests is larger than the number of individuals who get caught, since many are stopped two or three times. By the same token, it is almost certainly smaller than the number who eventually make it past the patrols — by a factor of two, three or four, depending on who’s doing the extrapolating in order to score what point. The average number of arrests on Arizona’s 376-mile border works out to more than 1,400 a day over the last two years. An Arizona politician running on the border crisis can therefore safely assert, since no one really knows, that 5,000 or 6,000 illegal aliens cross into the state every night.

What cannot be disputed is that year after year, hundreds die in the desert, usually from hyperthermia (267 by the official count in fiscal year 2005, and 199 for almost the same period in 2006). Among the people who make themselves heard on radio talk shows and in Internet postings, there are some who argue that the intruders get what is coming to them. “Break the law, pay the price. And another one bites the dust!” said a posting by a reader reacting to another report of a death in the desert. After crosses were displayed at a small pro-immigrant rally in Phoenix on Labor Day to commemorate the dead, a talk-show host named Bruce Jacobs, who speaks about little besides the “invasion” on his drive-time program on the Phoenix station KFYI, objected furiously to the display, in an accent that betrayed his own distant origins, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island. “Whites didn’t kill these people, America didn’t kill these people,” he said, his voice rising. “They killed themselves!” He meant that they’d be alive if they had stayed where they belonged, instead of giving in to the siren call of gainful employment in the globalized economy promoted by the United States.

So there’s enough raw feeling out there and enough raw reality — or so you’d think — to make a state that has become the main thoroughfare for illegal border traffic responsive to the electoral line of House Republicans. While there were probably enough votes in the House last spring to enact some version of McCain-Kennedy had it been brought to the floor, that would have taken an ad hoc bipartisan coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans — something the current House leadership forbids, allowing bills to come to a vote only when “a majority of the majority” supports them. The majority of the majority, responding to what’s called its “base,” wants to seal the border and deny permanent residence — which they say would amount to “amnesty” — to the uncounted millions of “illegals” already in the country; estimates run from 8 million to 11 million to more than 20 million (roughly half of whom happen not to have crossed the border on foot but simply overstayed visas).

Surely a red state that has supported a Democrat only once in the last 14 presidential elections might rally to such a program. But then how come Governor Napolitano, who’s up for re-election next month, was so obviously unfazed by a showy visit by the House Republican leadership, including Speaker Dennis Hastert, to the border last summer and two hearings that were staged in her state as a way of whipping up support for the caucus’s position? “If they don’t know about the border by now, they don’t want to know,” she told me dismissively, spreading out her hands with the palms up and mugging a humorous look that said something like, “Who do they think they’re kidding?” Then, realizing that my recording device could not capture her look, she filled in the blank with a sound culminating in a loud laugh. “Pshaw,” she said. “That’s how I’d describe it. Pshaw!” What was needed from Congress was a workable reform, she said, not more posturing.

A former U.S. attorney and state attorney general — described by her opponents as well as her supporters as “smart” and “tough” — Napolitano has been dealing with immigration issues for a dozen years. Political photo ops by newcomers to the border don’t impress her. For all the Republican efforts to nail her on immigration, it will be a huge upset if she’s beaten. Does she know something the majority of the majority in Washington has yet to figure out?

And how come, if the issue of illegal immigration is the House majority’s ticket to remaining in power, its own creature, the National Republican Campaign Committee, was spending money in the Republican primary held last month to defeat one of Russell Pearce’s most conspicuous allies, a down-the-line, seal-the-border, anti-immigrant crusader named Randy Graf, in the one House race in Arizona in which a seat was clearly up for grabs? A self-proclaimed Minuteman, running in the Eighth Congressional District — a border district in the southeastern corner of the state, the very one that gave rise to the volunteer militia known as the Minuteman Project — Graf was leading in polls of likely primary voters. Yet the smart money in both parties seemed to be betting that a Graf victory would guarantee that the seat, Republican for the last 22 years, would swing Democratic. So while national parties normally steer clear of local primaries — and virtually never intervene in the other party’s — out-of-state Republican money was flowing in the Eighth to a moderate with a “common sense” approach to immigration issues not unlike John McCain’s, while national Democratic money, in a peculiar twist, was paying for ads portraying that same moderate as a wimp on illegals, in hopes of putting the supposedly beatable Randy Graf over the top in the other party’s primary.

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MN,

What is wrong with this Pence Guy!

Dixie