The latest to join the damn-before-reading chorus are a pair of worthies at the State Department. The first of these is Assistant Secretary of State, Micheal Posner, who took it upon himself to apologize for Arizona's xenophobic exercise in racial profiling and related icky-poo manifestations of caviler indifference for human rights to--of all people--the delegation from the Peoples Republic of China, which was here to discuss human rights. The second was the Designated Flack From Foggy Bottom, P.J. Crowley.
China may hold all too much of Uncle Sam's indebtedness and may be a key player in the ongoing drama, Will Iran Get the Bomb? Neither of these, however, puts a high gloss on China's abysmal record in the area of human rights. At the same time the new Arizona law is scarcely in the same league with such infamous measures as the Chinese and Japanese Exclusion Acts passed in California early in the Twentieth Century.
The various exclusion acts were flatly racist. So also was the badly misnamed "Gentlemen's Agreement" entered into by the administration of Theodore Roosevelt and its Japanese counterpart. On the face these measures were driven by racial hatred and fear prevalent in the populations of California and other western states. To put it bluntly and accurately, citizens from the Pacific coast eastward into the Rocky Mountain states had long feared the presence of both Chinese and Japanese in their midst. The cultural differences--to say nothing of the capacity and willingness of these Asians to engage in hard work for long hours and low pay--had rankled the American nativists ever since gangs of Chinese laborers had been imported to build the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s.
The same racism hit in the months after the attack on Pearl Harbor with the result that thousands of Japanese including Americans of Japanese ancestry born in the US were rounded up and put in concentration camps deep in the desert interior of our country. This gross wrong was later admitted to by the US government, but at the time it was approved of not only by the administration of Franklin Roosevelt but Congress and the US Supreme Court.
These various actions involving members and leaders of both parties and extending over more than fifty years constituted a grave violation of human rights by any reasonable standard. Most importantly they can be compared to the Arizona law by no stretch of even the most fevered, partisan imagination. Any attempt to do so--like attempts to equate Arizona with Hitler's Germany--are both a violent perversion of history and a cheapening of past evils.
For Mr Posner to bring up the Arizona law as a sign of current American problems in the human rights field is to equate the law and its effects with the gross and widespread abuses of civil and political rights of Tibetans and other ethnic minorities by the Beijing regime. Any such equation, even by implication, even by allowing the Chinese to draw the inference, is not only as wrong as a soup sandwich, it diminishes the culpability of Beijing.
As such it constitutes a disservice to the citizens of Arizona and their elected representatives as well as the large majority of Americans generally who support the new law. Worse, it serves to trivialize and marginalize the victims of systematic human rights violations in China.
Mr Crowley's defense of the Posner Distortion makes even less sense. One can only assume that his action was approved by the highest level of the State Department, SecState Clinton. It is hard to fathom just how Ms Clinton in her most twisted lawyer logic could allow Mr Crowley to aver that by repeatedly bringing up the Arizona law to his Chinese interlocutors, Mr Posner was "standing up" for Americans.
Even more difficult to understand is the logic behind the top floor's approval of Mr Posner's characterization of the Arizona law and its aftermath as "an issue of discrimination or potential discrimination" which is a "troubling trend" in the US. The only reasonable explanation of the Posner stance and its presumed approval by Ms Clinton is a hopeless and bootless conviction that political correctness must trump reality or at least realism.
There is no way around the fact that many, perhaps most, of the twelve of so million foreigners currently living illegally in the US are from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Thus while the Arizona law specifically bars race, ethnicity, and language as the "sole" reason for a law enforcement officer to question a person's legal status, it is reasonable to assume that most of those inconvenienced by the new law will be of Hispanic ancestry. It is also reasonable to assume that most cops, most of the time, will do what cops tend to do--apply a dynamic mental algorithm based on experience which can be accurately termed, "profiling."
These twin realities are unpleasant, and the Geek shares a distaste for both--having become personally all too well acquainted with both over the course of his life. This does not imply that the law either in principle or in effect is racist, xenophobic, or violative of civil and political rights.
The Obama administration has already demonstrated its irrational love of the politically correct by refusing to use accurate terminology when discussing the suicide bombers, the terrorists, those who subscribe to the violence demanding ideology of political Islam. In the interests of either political correctness or an ill-founded belief that using accurate terminology will infuriate those to whom the terms accurately apply, they have demanded that the truth not be told--even if that transparent effort to protect "sensitivities" may have the unintended consequence of impairing our capacity to detect and defeat our enemies.
Thus it is not surprising that the same intellectually challenged bunch refuses to acknowledge the real nature of our failure to control our own borders. Notice the use of the word, "our." It is critical to remember that the borders of the US are not the sole responsibility of Federal bureaucrats. The borders were established by the government--the state--acting according to the outcome of conflicting demands within our polity as well as between our state and foreign states.
The lines on the map, the almost invisible border between ourselves and the Canadians as well as the semi-fortified fence between ourselves and the Mexicans is not simply a line demarcating two different sovereignties. The border also divides different nations, different assemblages of culture, history, folkways and mores, different economies, different interests. More than the political sway of states, borders delineate peoples--nations.
The borders of our country are also the limits of We the People. As a result the securing of the borders, the decision to admit some incomers but not others may belong primarily to the federal government. It does not follow, however, that the federal government has sole responsibility in this area. Nor does it follow that when a perception of federal failure in this area exists that the several states are necessarily powerless.
As a one time professor of Constitutional law Mr Obama must be considered to have an awareness of the concept of divided and ambiguous sovereignty as between the central government, the several states, and We the People. Over the centuries the authority over borders and its concomitant, immigration, has been left to the central government. It made the system easier to administer, somewhat more equitable in application, and more easily understood by people here or abroad.
However, in the past, states have taken the lead on the immigration question. True, that occurred far in the past, but the precedent exists. Simply put, the action taken by the Arizona state government is not racist, not xenophobic, not discriminatory in intent. It is also not without precedent.
Even if the law lacked any precedent it still does not fall in the category of "interposition." It is not akin to the Nullification Act passed by South Carolina during the administration of Andrew Jackson. It is not even like the assorted measures taken by southern states seeking to block the effect of Brown v. Board of Education.
The state of Arizona has not sought by its new law to block the effect of federal laws dealing with immigration. Rather it has sought to repair a perceived failure on the part of the central government to effectively protect the American people against the impact of large scale, unregulated, indeed, illegal immigration.
There are no reasons for the Obama administration to apologize or explain this Arizona act to any foreign government. Not the Canadians. Not the Mexicans. And, most assuredly not the Chinese.
Considering the Chinese record of shooting down or having tanks run over protesters, forcing draconian measures of population control, censoring communications, oh, God, how the list goes on, for what should the US be apologizing or explaining? And, if the Obama "team" thinks it is necessary to explain or apologize for the human rights record of Arizona to the Chinese, who is going to be the next recipient?
Perhaps the Iranians.
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