Imagine you are in Grand Canyon National Park. Enjoying the splendor that God/Allah/Yahweh/Buddha/spirit/science created. You are approached by a man with a badge and a gun. Something right out of a Sam Fuller film. A real Arizona sheriff.
“Papers please,” he asks with his dusty accent. But alas, you left your passport at the hotel. Not that it matters, because the visa in it expired years ago.
Let me not understate this: Arizona prisons fucking suck. And nowhere do they suck more than Maricopa County, home of the Phoenix megalopolis. Maricopa Sheriff Joe Arpaio (pictured below), a self-promoter who runs notoriously fascist jails, was declared “America’s Worst Sheriff” by the east coast liberal rag the New York Times. Robin Hood never had it this bad.
Among his most controversial rules, inmates must wear pink underwear, sign up for organ donation and register for the military draft. It’s China meets Iran. I’d compare it to Nazi Germany, but they carried out their atrocities in the name of racial purity. Sadly, pure Capitalist greed is the motive of Sheriff Joe and his supporters. Prisons are a big business in Arizona. Even the executions have been privatized.
Arizona’s new “papers please” law is just the icing on a cake for Sheriff Joe. Recently, his office launched a “two-day crime suppression/illegal immigration operation” to enforce “immigration laws already on the books.” This is a book he helped write by arresting undocumented immigrants and throwing them in his jails. But this is where Sheriff Joe is different. Instead of handing them over to federal officials, Sheriff Joe keeps them in his jails. He doesn’t trust the Feds. And why should he? After all, it’s the Department of Justice under President Obama that has started investigating Sheriff Joe for civil rights violations. Kudos to them. Bad news for Sheriff Joe. He may end up wearing his own pink underwear.
I called his office to see if they have ever arrested and/or jailed an undocumented Irish citizen. I have yet to hear back although they did arrest two local journalists with Irish last names for publishing his home address. Fortunately for them, they were US citizens.
But recent history shows us that undocumented Irish immigrants get better treatment in the US than their darker-skinned, non-English-speaking counterparts. Take 2006 when then-New York Senator Hillary Clinton held up a t-shirt that read “Legalize the Irish”. It’s safe to say she’s never held up anything that said “Legalize Mexicans”. Or there’s the time, just a few weeks ago, when New York Senator Charles Schumer joked at an event for the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform that one of the requirements for the (now-delayed) immigration bill would be the ability to speak English. “That shouldn’t be a problem for the Irish,” he quipped.
Yeah, Chuck, linguistic racism is hilarious.
Back in the day of course, “Irish Need Not Apply” was a common sign in the US. But even though a couple of Irish-Americans have since been president, including the current one, several thousand undocumented Irish citizens in the US live on the edge of society. One nurse’s aide told the Los Angeles Times that she couldn’t go home to Ireland for her brother’s funeral for fear she wouldn’t be able to get back into the US. But in that same LA Times article, an undocumented Irish contractor acknowledged he’s never usually singled out. “If someone’s driving down the street and they see five Mexican guys on one side and five Irish guys on the other, they’re going to think that the Mexicans are illegal, even though it could be the other way around.”
I am in the enviable position of possessing two passports. One for the US. And one for the EU. I do not underestimate the enhanced legal status this brings me in our global society. It makes me appreciate the need to tear down all borders. I still have to figure out legal status for my Irish girlfriend. I may just have to marry her. But how fucked up is a system that keeps love apart. A mate of mine from Kerry has been kept apart from his wife and toddler son for more than a year because of a hold-up on his US visa. So much for Americans embracing family values.
That’s why the only way forward is global citizenship. It would equal the playing field so that all citizens, wherever they may have been born, can achieve their dreams or fall in love wherever they want. Anything less is unsustainable.
-JZ
Sidenote: By the way, if you could join the boycott against Arizona, that would really help. That includes boycotting companies like Best Western and godaddy.com. Boycotting in Arizona has worked in the past. Ain’t that right Chuck?
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
