A Vote for Immigration Reform

Dear family and friends,

Today as a resident in Mesa, Arizona's LD 18, our State Senator, Russell Pearce has been recalled, and we are voting on whether to elect him back into office or give someone else, namely Jerry Lewis, a chance to represent us. Below is a personal essay in the which I finally get off my chest thoughts I've been entertaining for over 6 years and explain why I simply cannot vote for Pearce. On other other hand, it is such a relief to have a candidate in whom I can place my enthusiastic confidence. Please tell me what you think, and please do excuse the less than ideal text formatting.

Sincerely,

Laura

A Plea for Immigration Reform
A Personal Essay
by Laura Clement

When I was a young girl growing up in a Mormon home in the high desert of Southern California, I loved Ronald Reagan, as did my my proud Republican parents. They built our family a gable-style log cabin, laying the logs with their own hands. The thick walls of our home would provide us with protection: in the event of a major earthquake, the logs would bend and shift, and in the event of a nuclear attack from the Russians, they could withstand a nuclear shock wave better than the thinner walls of an ordinary home. We had plastic containers of dehydrated food to survive on, and both of my parents had guns and knew how to use them. In case of an end-of-the-world disaster, they may have needed to defend our home and food from pirate gangs out of Los Angeles loaded in Cadillacs in search of booty. I also learned faith in God and that my Heavenly Father knew and loved me in that modest log home.

Despite the thick walls of my childhood home, the outside world fascinated me. I marveled at the language of the Japanese tourists at Disneyland who wanted to take their picture with me when I was small and blonde. My third-grade teacher chose Kenya where she had taught English as the country our class would represent in our school's Olympic celebration and selected me to recite the Kenyan national anthem in Swahili at an assembly; besides teaching us some Swahili, she taught us to appreciate these dark-skinned friendly people who wore many necklaces, lived in huts, valued their freedom, and sang most beautifully. I began studying the Spanish language in junior high at my small K-8 school and delighted in the experience of having dinner in the home of twin friends whose family was from El Salvador. In high school, my closer friends included exchange students from France, Colombia, and Japan.

I attended college at BYU in Utah and earned a graduate degree in Teaching English as a Second Language. I have taught students from countless countries, from Germany to Thailand and from Norway to Saudi Arabia. Though I have never been able to afford to travel the world, I have learned much about many nations of the world from both what these friends have shared of their homelands as well as how they perceive American culture.

While attending college, I met my husband who hailed from Mesa, Arizona, a fellow child of the desert. We married in the LDS Temple in Mesa, Arizona and then continued moving around the western states for continued schooling and training. After living in the San Francisco Bay area, Mesa, and Washington's Puget Sound, we prayerfully decided to settle our growing family and put down roots in Mesa. We quickly learned to love the people in our neighborhood, many of which shared our same LDS faith. Encouraged by prophets and apostles, we began to build up our year's supply of food utilizing a nearby family cannery. This time, I was reminded by service missionaries at the cannery that, in case of catastrophe, we are not to shoot our neighbors but to share our food with them. I began to volunteer to teach an after-school Spanish class at my children's elementary school.

GROWING DISCOMFORT AND A QUESTION ANSWERED

Despite my love for Mesa, throughout the six years I have lived here my discomfort has gradually grown regarding the effects of Arizona legislation targeting our undocumented residents and their children. As more such laws are proposed and passed, I have felt that the ripple effect on all our immigrant residents is unjust. We are a country of immigrants, and I believe that immigrants and their children enrich our country and make it stronger. It seems to me that sometimes those who come here who are the most tired and poor and those who most desperately yearn to breathe free 1 are those who most appreciate what American has to offer. Once, when a politician knocked at my door, I voiced my opposition to the direction of legislation in Arizona; he told me that the movement against illegal immigrants had to be extreme (meaning borderline immoral) in order to affect a bit of change. I asked myself the question, where is all of this leading?

My question was answered as I heard my district's representative, Russell Pearce, reveal what I came to consider the end goal of the movement. While driving, I was shocked when I heard him say the following: "We know what we need to do. In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower put together a task force called 'Operation Wetback.' He removed, in less than a year, 1.3 million illegal aliens. They must be deported." 2 It was hard enough for me process the fact that my representative, a fellow Republican, had such sentiments let alone trying to understand how he could feel comfortable expressing such aims publicly.

RED FLAGS

Now, I was not only uncomfortable, but I was seriously concerned about the morality of the dangerous pattern I saw emerging in my state which was being led by my own representative. In the meantime, Arizona has continued in the same direction with SB 1070 becoming law, requiring public resources to be used for seeking out and deporting undocumented residents who are in violation of a statute that is civil, not criminal. I believe there are patterns in history that should send up red flags when laws begin to target a subclass of society.

For example, after the financial downturn of the great depression in pre-World War II Germany, more people began to listen to a crazy man who for years had made claims such that "the Jews [were] a people of robbers." 3 Public acceptance grew of economic, social, medical, and educational measures intended to stigmatize and harm the Jews, including taking away their citizenship 4 and requiring them to wear identification,5 all of which led to mass deportation and worse atrocities.

Another example familiar to us is the Jim Crow laws enacted in the southern United States from 1876 and 1965 which "[systematized] a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages" against black Americans, making them second class citizens. 6

A third example is the internment in camps of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II. During this time of U.S. history, "[American] columnist Henry McLemore reflected growing public sentiment" when he wrote this: "I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don't mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room in the badlands... Personally, I hate the Japanese." 7 To further illustrate the country's attitude toward citizens of Japanese descent at the time, the Los Angeles Times expressed a similar sentiment: "A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched.... So, a Japanese American born of Japanese parents, nurtured upon Japanese traditions, living in a transplanted Japanese atmosphere... notwithstanding his nominal brand of accidental citizenship almost inevitably and with the rarest exceptions grows up to be a Japanese, and not an American.... Thus, while it might cause injustice to a few to treat them all as potential enemies, I cannot escape the conclusion... that such treatment... should be accorded to each and all of them while we are at war with their race." 8 Such statements have parallels with the current nativist movement in the U.S.

The similarities between these few examples from history and current public attitudes to undocumented U.S. residents, especially those of Mexican and and Central American descent, are very easy for me to see. I do not believe that most leaders of the movement against undocumented residents of Arizona want to exterminate or lynch them as an end goal, yet how would Arizonans feel if Russell Pearce accomplished his hopes of resurrecting an old program that led to "abuse against Mexicans and US citizens of Mexican descent, including harassment and beatings"? 9

WISER, BETTER, BALANCED SOLUTIONS

Any Arizona citizen familiar with both the current sentiment against undocumented residents and their children as well as the justification for current laws targeting such residents should realize that we need to be very cautious with the direction we are heading with legislation in our state. Why are we asking law enforcement to busy themselves rounding up undocumented residents instead of using time and resources toward seeking out criminals? I argue that we need to backtrack and find a better way. So, what should we do to ensure that injustices and atrocities of history aren't repeated?

For starters, one general approach comes from a June 2011 official statement from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, authored by men I believe to be living prophets and apostles, and consequently the same leaders who have encouraged my family's self-sufficiency in building up our own home food storage. They have expressed "[concern] that any state legislation that only contains enforcement provisions is likely to fall short of the high moral standard of treating each other as children of God" as well as support for "an approach where undocumented immigrants are allowed to square themselves with the law and continue to work without this necessarily leading to citizenship." 10

Does such an approach seem too radical or liberal? I would vouch to guess that Republican presidential team of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush would agree with the principle of the need to allow undocumented residents to square themselves with the law. In a 1980 debate, 11 vice presidential candidate Bush voiced his assumption that illegal aliens living in the U.S., those he considered good and strong people, "would get whatever it is . . . that society is giving to their neighbors" and that the "[the creation of] a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law" as well as " kids being made totally uneducated and made to feel like they’re living totally outside the law" were problems that needed to be solved. Following Bush, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan then proposed, "Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we . . . Make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit. And then, while they’re working and earning here they can pay taxes here. And then when they want to go back, they can go back. Open the borders both ways."

There are several programs and proposals from which perspectives and ideas could be gleaned in creating federal immigration reform and state laws that could approach the problem of undocumented residents in our country in a more humane and balanced way. Such solutions could be paired with or be a precursor to enforcement. For example, the Bracero Program 12, coincidentally necessitated in part by the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II 13, allowed temporary contract workers to come from Mexico to meet the demands in the economy until the 1960s. More recently, the DREAM Act, an earlier version of which was authored by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and cosponsored by Senator John McCain, would "provide conditional permanent residency to certain illegal aliens of good moral character who graduate from US high schools, arrived in the US as minors, and lived in the country continuously for at least five years prior to the bill's enactment" if they would attend college or serve in the Armed Forces for two years. 14 Somos Republicanos, a national Republican group that advocates for Latinos, endorses common-sense measures in "12 Steps to Securing Our Borders and Legal Immigration," and lists as benefits of such reform "secured borders, better military qualified readiness, furthered assimilation by immigrants that demonstrates their loyalty to America, shared tax burdens and increased revenues to the tax base for state, federal, and local governments," and the maintenance of "labor market needs." 15 Daryl Williams, a Phoenix lawyer, authored an Oct. 11, 2011, essay "Illegal Immigration" which reviews immigration law history in the United States and argues for the need for Americans to "recognize the reality of the economic tides of market demand in our freemarket economy" by "[unblocking] the immigration road." 16 Additionally, Utah has passed bills for a state guest worker program "that included an enforcement law modeled on Arizona's but balanced by a program that will allow illegal immigrants to work and pay taxes in Utah if they register with the state." 17 I have confidence that our representatives, on both the state and federal levels, can come together and find consensus upon which to build better immigration laws.

I am also confident that Americans will eventually do the right thing when it comes to the problem of undocumented residents. Dr. Michael Berenbaum, a rabbi and leading expert on the Holocaust, 18 spoke in Arizona last year on the subject of treatment of undocumented residents. Like Berenbaum, I too, believe we must remain vigilant to the fundamental values of the United States of America which "include the inalienable rights of human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; . . . checks and balances, . . . restraint on the power of government, and . . . a sense that all human beings are created in the image of God and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights." I also heartily agree with this statement of Berenbaum from the same press conference: "A nation that turns against one another is a nation in which the center disintegrates, civility becomes more difficult. A nation that turns toward one another, that embraces one another, that includes one another, that values and cherishes one another is a nation that can withstand economic dislocation and that can withstand the difficulties of this time and come out this stronger, wiser, better." 19 The over 12 million undocumented residents in our country are just the opportunity for Americans to step up and do what is stronger, wiser, and better.

As I have shown, Russell Pearce does not represent me well as a citizen. Through the process of the recall election, I have been relieved to find many others in LD 18 and across the state who feel the same way I do. While there has been a lot of fear mongering going on among people of faith in LD 18, I choose to have confidence in my fellow man. Jerry Lewis 20 is a man who can find better solutions for strengthening our local economy, improving our schools, and finding a better approach to the immigration dilemma through civility and listening to all sides. In the recall election November 8, Jerry Lewis has my enthusiastic vote as the better Republican.

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ONLINE REFERENCES

1. I allude to the lines that are inscribed on a plaque in the museum in the base of the Statue of Liberty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty
2. http://www.azcentral.com/community/mesa/articles/0929Pearce29-ON.html
3. http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/Jews_Nazi_Germany.htm
4. http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/Jews_Nazi_Germany.htm
5. http://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/wls/themes/yellowbadge.aspx
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
7. Neiwert, David. The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. 2009, page 195, as cited here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment
8. Niiya, Brian. Japanese American History. 1993, page 54, as cited here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback
10. http://newsroom.lds.org/article/immigration-church-issues-new-statement
11. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/09/09/314473/1980-reagan-bush-immigration/
12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracero_Program
13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment
14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DREAM_Act
15. http://somosrepublicans.com/position-papers/12-steps-to-securing-our-borders-and-legal-immigration/
16. http://freepdfhosting.com/cfe45416fb.pdf
17. http://pewforum.org/Religion-News/States-talk-immigration-economics-at-Utah-summit.aspx
18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Berenbaum
19. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv6Lj3C3oiM&feature=player_embedded (from April 29, 2010, starting about 4:15).
20. http://jerrylewisforsenate.com/