Who drives the war against immigrants?

(Photo: lungstruck / Flickr)


Mexican immigrant beaten to death by US Border Patrol

Anastasio Hernández Rojas, a Mexican immigrant construction worker and father of five, died in a San Diego hospital Monday after a brutal beating and tasering by US Border Patrol agents at the San Ysidro crossing to Tijuana left him brain dead.

The San Diego Medical Examiner’s Office Wednesday ruled the death a homicide, with the beating having resulted in a loss of oxygen to the brain and a heart attack.

The 42-year-old worker had lived in the Encanto, California, area since he was 14, his entire adult life. His children, ages four through 20 were all born in the US and are American citizens. He supported his family through work installing swimming pools.

On this level, the BP catastrophe portends a far greater economic and security risk to America than even the fabricated logic of anti-immigrant forces can muster. A single corporation (with help from a few others) has done more to undermine the fabric of the nation than all of the purported negative impacts generated by millions of immigrants. Now, with the newly-affirmed right of corporations to enjoy the benefits of personhood - which are being actively denied to immigrants, by the way - we should likewise require that they be held to the concomitant responsibilities of natural persons as well. I would like to propose this as a simple solution and ostensible starting point:

Deport BP. It's a foreign corporation that poses a grave threat to the nation. In fact, let's round up all of the immigrant companies operating on our shores and (a) demand to see their papers and (b) deport them for even the smallest of infractions. Surely this makes about as much sense as what Arizona is doing these days and it would fit squarely with the impetus of reactionary protectionism being plied by the usual suspects in the media.

But there may be hope. Jessica Pieklo at Care2 writes that “It is becoming clearer and clearer that the only resolution to this issue will be a federal-state showdown, reminiscent of the ordered de-segregation of the South.” This week, unidentified Justice Department officials traveled to Phoenix to discuss SB1070, which will be enforced on July 29th. They came to no consensus.

In response to the number of anticipated legal challenges against SB1070, not to mention mounting national pressure, Eric Lach reports for TPM Live Wire that Gov. Jan Brewer will “have outside counsel defend the state against legal challenges to the laws — not the state’s Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat and one of Brewer’s opponents in Arizona’s gubernatorial race.” The announcement came shortly after federal officials traveled to the state to discuss SB1070....

Back at Care2, Pieklo also notes that SB1070 has polarized Arizona’s law enforcement community, with “Sheriff Joe Arpaio and some associations representing rank-and-file officers supporting it while a number of police chiefs have expressed growing unease with the law and see it as a means of driving a wedge between law enforcement and the Latino community, which represents approximately one in three legal Arizona residents.”