NAKASEC’s Los Angeles affiliate, the Korean Resource Center (KRC) organized a press conference on January 17, featuring representatives of immigrant rights and Korean American organizations to stand against inflammatory remarks made against our community by John Kobylt (KFI 640) during the January 5 broadcast of Clear Channel’s “The John and Ken Show.” NAKASEC executive director, Morna Ha, also spoke and condemned the racist rhetoric and called for responsible speech in the media.

Coverage of the press conference in the Korea Times:

For years, John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, hosts of “The John and Ken Show” have spread false facts and hate speech targeting Latino, Asian American and African American communities in Los Angeles. Korean Americans, consumers, community members, immigrants and Californians are no longer willing to tolerate such hate speech in the media.

On January 19, following the press conference, KRC and NAKASEC organized a rally outside the offices of KFI Radio. Around 30 community members and advocates attended the rally to call for the John & Ken Show to be taken off air.

2012-01-19 KFI Racism Protest from Korean Resource Center on Vimeo.

The Korean American Bar Association is also holding efforts to demand an apology from KFI AM640 and its parent company Clear Channel Communications. Click here to sign the letter and show that you condemn racist rhetoric.

Click here to view the original post in the Salt Lake Tribune.

EXCERPT:

Church ought to be a sanctuary for everyone regardless of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class status and gender. It ought to be a place where we practice the unconditional love of God and forgiveness, and embrace all children of God in their uniqueness and diversity. Because of the kind of world we live in, the house of worship ought to stand in solidarity with the poor, the oppressed, the powerless and voiceless, the marginalized.

My hope is that we respect everyone as children of the Creator. No human being is illegal. I want to live in a world where everyone is honored and respected and given opportunities for a happy life. I support the DREAM Act and immigration reform wholeheartedly.

I came to the United States as an immigrant. I have tasted the immigrant experience. The aspirations or the reason for immigration reform is that all human beings are children of God. We have to transcend human-constructed barriers. I want to work toward a community where this happens. That’s why I do not hesitate to raise my voice and support for humane immigration reform at the Relief, Respect and Reform rally in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 15.

"We Are Our Own Heroes!" read the placards created and displayed by the young KRC members.

The reason for the protest was obvious enough for an 11-year-old Korean American girl from KRC who first pointed out to us that this film was racist. Unlike the original Saturday morning cartoon series “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” whose cast is made up entirely of Asian and Inuit people, the Hollywood version features white main characters and “Slumdog Millionaire’s” Dev Patel who is playing the villain. Dev Patel joined the cast only after Jesse McCartney dropped out from playing the role.

Young Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders do not need to grow up discouraged and feel like they need to seek other avenues to feel proud and confident of their identity and race. This is our America that we helped build and an America we are continuing to make vibrant and dynamic. America is changing and the youth of today will not support continued whitewashing of their history, culture and community.

For more coverage, read the LA Times story and watch the ABC 7 story.

12 arrested in mall immigration protest from L.A. County

BY CINDY CARCAMO and IAN HAMILTON

2010-06-15 09:15:48

COSTA MESA – The 12 immigration rights protesters arrested after they snarled traffic by blocking a major thoroughfare for about an hour Monday near South Coast Plaza were all from Los Angeles County, Costa Mesa police said Tuesday.

They joined about 200 demonstrators who descended on the shopping landmark about 3 p.m. to protest the Costa Mesa City Council’s recent resolution to declare the city a “Rule of Law City” that does not welcome those who are in the country illegally. The protesters also denounced Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law.

The demonstration was a highly-orchestrated event by leaders of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles who had the names of those who’d planned to be arrested before it actually happened. Buses pulled into the area about 6 p.m. to take protesters  home.

Those arrested locked arms in tubes and strapped their feet together with duct tape as they sat at a table in the middle of traffic near the intersection of Anton Boulevard and Bristol Street.

Fellow protesters cheered and commuters honked in frustration as police arrested and led each person away from the table. Police eventually directed traffic away from the intersection.

The first to be taken away was a man identified as Carlos Roberto Coronel. He identified himself as a U.S. citizen and a Marine who served twice in Iraq.

“We’re standing up for our families,” Coronel said while at the table. “We’re standing up for our country. We’re fighting for our future, and we want immigration reform.”

Police said the following were arrested:

• Ana Cid, 18, of Los Angeles

• Angelica Salas, 39, of Pasadena

• Eun Sook Lee, 42, of Los Angeles

• Bianette Guadalupe Linares, 19, of Los Angeles

• Jonathan Daniel Klein, 41, of Los Angeles

• Carlos Roberto Coronel, 27, of Sun Valley

• Balmore Dominguez, 21, of Los Angeles

• Felipe Escobar, 22, of North Hollywood

• Lewis Logan, 46, of Los Angeles

• Jonathan Carmona, 21, Asuza

• Neil Rivas, 26, Santa Clarita

• Frank Alton, 58, Los Angeles

The 12 were arrested on suspicion of a variety of misdemeanors, including unlawful assembly, public nuisance and not obeying officers, Costa Mesa Sgt. Matt Grimmond said.

Police said they will recommend that charges be filed with the Orange County District Attorney’s office. Officers cited and released the group by 8 p.m. Monday and the 12 got into a bus that was waiting to take them home, Grimmond said.

Before hopping on the bus, however, the group staged an encore of their earlier protest.

“They started protesting, marching outside our police station,” Grimmond said.

At the first protest, some motorists stuck in traffic confronted the protesters while others complained from their vehicles.

“They have a right to protest, but no right to protest in traffic,” said Diane Beeson of Mission Viejo, who was stuck in traffic for 20 minutes and frustrated at police for not clearing traffic sooner.

It was the latest in a string of protests, shows of support, and backlash directed at the city, which has taken a strong stance against illegal immigration.

Some Latino lawmakers in Sacramento threatened to block the sale of the Orange County Fairgrounds to the city from the state after city officials passed the resolution. Click here to read the story.

The City Council’s resolution, recommended by long-time illegal immigration opponent Mayor Allan Mansoor, makes it clear that those in the country illegally are not welcome in Costa Mesa. Click here to read the story.

Klein, a Rabbi, said he had planned to be arrested Monday along with other clergy from a Presbyterian Church and African-American Methodist church.

“Our focus is how a broken immigration system breaks apart families,” said Klein, executive director for the Los Angeles chapter of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice. “The goal is to get people to recognize how a broken system leads to exploitation of workers. We have a general religious theme, a moral frame that is we love the stranger.”

Protesters carried banners and posters, such as those reading “Legalization for All”, “and “No to Immigrant Scapegoating.”

It was also the most recent protest addressing the controversial Arizona law that makes it a crime to lack immigration papers and requires police to ask for documentation of legal status if there is “reasonable suspicion” that the person they stopped is in the country illegally.

A group of 40 locals returned early Monday from a Sunday rally in Phoenix, where they joined others critical of the law. Click here to read the story.

The weekend before, the Register followed a group of 15 local anti-illegal immigration activists who left Garden Grove for a rally in Phoenix. The “Phoenix Rising” event on Saturday drew hundreds to the state capitol in support of the law. Click here to read the story.

The law has also sparked an anti-Arizona protest in Santa Ana and a flurry of city officials to request that their city either denounce or support the law.

To read a comprehensive story on Orange County cities’ reactions to this issue, click here.

Monday night, a council member in Cypress unsuccessfully tried to get his city to take on a similar resolution.

Click here to read the story.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7924 or ccarcamo@ocregister.com

More photos at http://www.ocregister.com/news/city-253437-immigration-police.html.

Original story at http://www.ocregister.com/news/city-253437-immigration-police.html

Ms. Ok Sook Yoon speaking before the Los Angeles City Council.

Mr. Ki Tae Lee & Ms. Ok Sook Yoon pictured at the LA City Council.

KRC & NAKASEC members (far left) at press event with Councilmembers Janice Hahn & Ed Reyes.

Galvanized by Arizona’s tough new law against illegal immigrants, tens of thousands of marchers took to the streets in Los Angeles on Saturday as the city led the nation in May Day turnout to press for federal immigration reform.

As many as 60,000 immigrants and their supporters joined a peaceful but boisterous march through downtown Los Angeles to City Hall, waving American flags, tooting horns and holding signs that blasted the Arizona law. The legislation, which is set to take effect in midsummer, makes it a crime to be in Arizona without legal status and requires police to check for immigration papers.

Though the crowd was roughly half as large as police had projected, it was the largest May Day turnout since 2006, when anger over federal legislation that would have criminalized illegal immigrants and those who aid them brought out more than 1 million protesters nationwide. Since then, most activists have deemphasized street actions in favor of change at the ballot box through promoting citizenship and voter registration.

But this year is different. Outrage over the Arizona law, continued deportations and frustration over congressional delay in passing federal immigration reform prompted activists nationwide to urge massive street protests on this traditional day of celebrating workers’ rights.

That call was heeded by marchers like Yobani Velasquez, a 32-year-old Guatemala native and U.S. legal resident. He said the Arizona law energized him to come out and join the Los Angeles march.

“It’s a racist and unfair law,” said the Sun Valley truck driver. “It hurts parents and children.”

Rallies in more than 90 other cities drew thousands of people from New York to Phoenix. In Washington, D.C., thousands cheered as 35 immigration rights advocates, including U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), were arrested in front of the White House after they disobeyed police orders by sitting on the sidewalk along Pennsylvania Avenue, calling on President Obama to move immigration reform forward.

But the national epicenter for opposition to the Arizona law has become Los Angeles. City officials have called for a boycott of the state, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has likened the law to Nazism, and activists put aside past differences to stage a unified march. Five coalitions representing more than 150 labor, faith and immigrant rights organizations worked closely with Spanish-language media to publicize the call to rally, according to Angelica Salas of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

“There was unanimous sentiment nationally and locally that we have to mobilize strong on May 1,” Salas said. “It’s a message to President Obama that we want immigration reform and an end to massive deportations of our community, and a special message to Republicans to stop getting in the way of reform and supporting hateful laws in Arizona.”

But Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonprofit group that supports tighter controls on illegal immigration, said most Americans don’t support that message.

“What the public wants is enforcement of our immigration laws,” Mehlman said. “They don’t want people who break the law to be rewarded.”

At the march’s City Hall endpoint, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa took the stage to raucous cheers. Speaking in English and Spanish, he called Los Angeles a “bilingual city” and expressed strong support for immigrants’ rights.

Afterward, Mahony took the microphone. “Everyone in God’s eyes is legal,” he said. “We are all standing with our immigrant brothers and sisters.”

Police reported only two arrests for minor offenses as the orderly crowd marched under sunny skies. Street vendors hawked American flags and bacon-wrapped hot dogs with onions and peppers. Union members blew horns and chanted “no human being is illegal” over the rhythmic melodies of a mariachi band.

In a major theme of the day, one man wore a white T-shirt reading “Todos Somos Arizona,” or “We Are All Arizona.”

Leon Franco, 38, a Sylmar construction worker who installs tile and marble flooring, draped an American flag around himself as he prepared to march Saturday morning.

“In Mexico, there’s no way to get ahead,” said Franco, a legal U.S. resident from the Mexican state of Hidalgo who moved to the United States in 1993. “Back home, I had a very poor life. If it wasn’t for this country, I don’t know where I’d be.”

A year ago, Franco’s wife, Rosa Moreno, an illegal immigrant, was arrested in Los Angeles and deported to her home state of Sonora in Mexico. Since then, Franco said, he has had to be “mother and father” to his stepson, Daniel Estrada, 14, and son, Johnny Franco, 12.

“My kids would like to have their mother here with them,” he said. “I’m here because we don’t want to happen to other kids what has happened to these two,” pointing to his sons.

Morena Villanueva, 42, a Guatemala native, an illegal immigrant and a former carwash worker, held up a banner that read: “Wash away injustice.”

She said her son, Luis Humberto Robles Villanueva, 21, was killed Thursday in Guatemala, and tearfully told how she couldn’t return home to bury him.

“If I go back to Guatemala, I could never come back,” she said. “My hope is that another parent will never have to suffer the way I have, to be unable to bury their child because they are illegal.”

Victoria Vergara, a 53-year-old Mexico native and U.S. resident for 27 years, stood with a group of workers from the Westin Bonaventure and other hotels. Her brother, an illegal immigrant who runs a used-car business in Chicago, is afraid U.S. authorities will shut down his business and deport him after more than two decades here, she said.

“I was lucky. I was able to get amnesty in the 1986 law and now I’m an American citizen,” she said. “We want President Obama to know that it’s time to help these hard-working people who don’t have papers, who have worked hard all their lives in this country and want to be good Americans.”

The marchers also included African American union members, Korean drummers dressed in colorful traditional garb and even a white educator hoisting a sign that read “Gringos for Immigrants’ Rights.”

One illegal immigrant from South Korea, who asked to be identified by his first name, Jeff, said he came to protest the “broken-down immigration system.”

“This does not just affect Latinos,” said Jeff, wearing a white shirt that crossed out the word “minutemen.” “This affects all communities.”

In the hot seat of Arizona, rallies in Tucson and Phoenix drew hundreds of protesters.

In Tucson, organizers released a flock of doves and hundreds of white balloons, and Aztec dancers performed. Rally speakers included labor organizer Dolores Huerta and singer Linda Ronstadt.

Rep. Raul Grijalva, the Arizona congressman who has called for an economic boycott of the state, was received with boisterous cheers. “We are going to fight this law,” he told the crowd.

A couple of dozen counter-protesters carried signs that read “Deport Illegal Mexicans,” “Remember the Alamo, Mexico,” “Boycott Mexico” and “Mexico Out of US.”

Claudia White, 56, a Tucson resident and naturalized Mexican immigrant who organized the counter-protest, said she supported the Arizona law because she worried about the consequences of what she called “open-border policies.” Recent immigrants, she said, show “less of an interest in how this country was originally set up — where everybody is an individual and doesn’t identify as part of a group or a block or a race.”

In Phoenix, where many activists were too exhausted by the fight against the bill to plan a unified event, a few thousand people poured onto the broad lawn in front of the state Capitol for what became a sort of daylong festival against SB 1070.

Vendors sold ices and mangoes, anarchists handed out literature about the right of indigenous people to travel freely, and families wheeled strollers carrying toddlers who chanted “Si se puede!”

A handful of people supporting the law trickled in during the day and often had to leave under police escort after being surrounded by agitated demonstrators.

Amelia Sally, a 35-year-old customer service representative, held a sign that read: “Got Your Papers? If So … Welcome.” She was disheartened at the way demonstrators around the country were bashing her state.

“Arizona’s finally taking a stand,” she said. “We’ve been begging for help.”

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

Times staff writers Ruben Vives, Andrew Blankstein, Sam Quinones, Robert Faturechi and Rong-Gong Lin II in Los Angeles, Paloma Esquivel in Tucson and Nicholas Riccardi in Phoenix contributed to this story.

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

By Teresa Watanabe and Richard Winton

Originally posted at L.A. Times

Blasting Arizona’s tough new immigration law as “unpatriotic and unconstitutional,” Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Thursday backed a boycott of the state and urged Southern Californians to join an immigrant and labor rights march this weekend that police say could swell to 100,000 participants.

“The debate has caused a call to action,” Villaraigosa said.

Organizers of the May Day march, scheduled for Saturday morning in downtown Los Angeles, say that the outcry over the Arizona law and the slow pace of congressional action on immigration reform have prompted renewed activism. The law, set to take effect in midsummer, makes it a state crime for illegal migrants to be in Arizona, requires police to check for legal status and prohibits people from hiring day laborers off the street.

Meanwhile, many immigrant-rights activists say they are losing patience with the Obama administration and Congress for not pressing comprehensive legislation that would legalize the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants and allow more family visas in addition to beefing up border enforcement. Although Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) unveiled a 26-page “conceptual proposal” for a bill Thursday, activists remain dismayed that he continues to postpone introducing actual legislation.
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The combination of those events — along with fear that several immigrant-friendly Democrats will suffer political defeat in November — has pushed the alarm button for many activists. For the first time since 2006, several immigrant rights coalitions have put aside their differences and are unifying behind a single march this year.

“Absent our unity, immigration reform will always be put off to another day,” said Angelica Salas of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. “We need to show a powerful force that we won’t give up on immigration reform in 2010.”

Salas said the Spanish-language media, which helped fuel a massive turnout of more than 500,000 marchers in 2006, have closely covered the Arizona law and are helping publicize Saturday’s march.

The Korean community has also been galvanized, said Eun Sook Lee, executive director of the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium in Los Angeles. She said her center has received numerous phone calls from Koreans wanting to sign up for bus trips to Arizona to protest the law and to participate in the march. Several hundred are expected to turn out, including as many as 100 Korean drummers in colorful folk garb.

“Many people who may have been ambivalent in the past are outraged,” Lee said. “This has sparked a national outcry.”

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said his department is expecting tens of thousands of participants in Saturday’s rally but also a peaceful event.

“We have estimates as high as 100,000,” he said. “That is a reasonable estimate. We are prepared to police that effectively.”

Beck stressed that his officers would be guided by Special Order 40, the department’s long-standing policy that prohibits officers from initiating contact with anyone for the sole purpose of determining whether they are in the country illegally.

At his news conference Thursday, Villaraigosa urged people to march with white shirts, U.S. flags and trash bags in a peaceful demonstration of immigrants’ desires to work and participate in U.S. civic life.

Marchers will begin gathering at 10 a.m. at Olympic Boulevard and Broadway and will walk north on Broadway to City Hall. In addition to the downtown march, police are preparing for small gatherings in MacArthur Park and Westwood.

Planning for this year’s march has been in the works for months, police said. With a tight budget the department had to ensure that a massive number of officers were available to work the May 1 rally. In this year’s planning, march organizers and other groups have expressed concern about how the LAPD will approach the marchers, among whom would be illegal immigrants.

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

richard.winton@latimes.com

Times staff writer Andrew Blankstein contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

By Hector Tobar

Originally posted at L.A. Times

The bus left Koreatown in the predawn darkness and headed east, out of Los Angeles.

Half awake, the 55 people inside watched the morning sun climb over the white sands of the Sonora Desert. They arrived in Phoenix at noon — which is never a good time to arrive in Phoenix.

Stepping out of the bus into 90-degree heat, they marched in circles in front of the copper-domed Arizona State Capitol. Latino men and women struck Korean janggu drums, and Korean American adults and kids carried tall placards with messages in Spanish: Legalización Ahora!

L.A. had arrived in the Valley of the Sun.

The bus riders crossed the desert Sunday to protest the Arizona right’s latest assault on democracy, a new law that gives Arizona law enforcement a mandate to demand immigration papers from anyone they “reasonably” suspect could be an illegal immigrant.

“This affects all of us, everywhere,” said Hyun Joo Lee of the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium, one of several organizations represented on the L.A.-to-Phoenix ride. “It’s about uplifting the values that make this country great.”

Court challenges are inevitable. But if Arizona’s SB 1070 is allowed to go into effect it will suddenly be dangerous to look or sound like an indocumentado in Arizona.

Popsicle vendors, beware. Mestizos in blue jeans, look out. Grandmothers with thick accents — silencio!

Conceived by the Arizona far right, SB 1070 has already accomplished something truly remarkable. It has united cosmopolitan, left-leaning Angelenos with libertarian, right-leaning Arizonans, throwing them together under a big tent of pro-civil rights, populist anger.

“I left the Marines in December, and I come home to this,” said retired Sgt. Alejandro Salazar, a 26-year-old Mexican American from Phoenix, who arrived at the Sunday rally with wife — a Mexican born, legal U.S. resident — and a bright-red Marine Corps flag draped over his shoulder.

Sgt. Salazar served in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in 2008 he voted for Sen. John McCain for president. He finds SB 1070 deeply insulting.

Marines can be tough-looking guys, but out of uniform, Salazar told me, he’s just another tough-looking Latino. “I look like I’m illegal,” he said. “If you drive a car with a [sound] system, or with rims, you’re going to get stopped.”

Don Sanders, a 65-year-old retiree from Ahwatukee, which he calls “the Pacific Palisades of Phoenix,” was angry enough to come to his first ever immigrant-rights rally.

In 1970, he was living in L.A., a long-haired messenger at MGM studios — and when he drove his beat-up car through nearby Cheviot Hills, the LAPD frequently pulled him over. “I used to get stopped for looking like I didn’t belong,” Sanders told me. “And that’s always wrong.”

I asked Sanders if he knew anyone who might be confused with an illegal immigrant. “Hundreds of people,” he told me.

Christ Ater, a 35-year-old call-center employee from Phoenix, wore a shirt that asked “Am I Illegal?”

“I made this after our governor said SB 1070 wasn’t about race,” he said with a mischievous smile. “Well, if it isn’t about race, then I should be stopped too. Right? I could be Canadian or Russian.”

SB 1070 was a colossal mistake for the anti-legalization movement. They’ve transformed Arizona into a symbol of intolerance, and given their opponents a potent rallying cry.

The long debate over immigration and its impact on this country has rarely been a rational one. Opponents of legalization draw crude caricatures of the undocumented, while supporters aren’t fully honest about the challenges to U.S. society.

The Arizona law pushes the debate further into unreality.

When she signed SB 1070 into law, Gov. Jan Brewer said she was protecting Arizona against Mexican drug cartels. That’s a specious argument, as wrongheaded as saying interning Japanese Americans protected us against invasion during World War II.

For a lot of Latino people, SB 1070 is a slap in the face, a cheapening of their citizenship. Teresa Muñoz felt such a strong sense of injustice that she brought her 7-year-old, U.S.-born son Edgar to the Phoenix rally. She had him carry a U.S. flag, while she held a sign over his head featuring an arrow and the question “Illegal?”

Believe it or not, a lot of people think they know what an illegal immigrant looks like. They write to me all the time. They see “illegals” everywhere, on their front lawns and in their hospital clinics. A few seem to think every Latino voice in my column belongs to an “illegal,” even such unlikely suspects as kids in South-Central mastering Shakespeare.

If they could cross the cultural divide that separates them from their neighbors, they’d see how short-sighted they are. But now their paranoid vision of life has been codified into law in Arizona — and that’s scaring their opponents into action.

“I myself am an immigrant, since I was 2,” said Julio Muñoz, a 24-year-old Pomona resident, explaining why he rose before dawn to ride the Koreatown bus. He’s a naturalized U.S. citizen and speaks perfect English, but has many relatives — “my cousins, my mom, my dad, and uncles” — who could be harassed by police were they to visit Arizona.

I asked two other bus riders, Yenni Diaz and Vanessa Castillo of Orange County, how long they’d been involved in the immigrant-rights movement. “Ever since we were kids and had to translate for our parents,” Castillo answered.

On Facebook you can find dozens of works of Arizona-inspired art, including a poster portrait of Emiliano Zapata looking through an Arizona-shaped window and a poem by the San Francisco writer Genny Lim with the line, “I wish I could bring you purple violets to commemorate the death of hatred.”

SB 1070 has put a righteous wind into the sails of the immigrant-rights movement.

On Saturday, supporters of legalization will gather in central Los Angeles for a march and rally. Organizers hope for good weather and tens of thousands, maybe even 100,000, protesters.

Meanwhile, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has announced he’ll support an official Los Angeles boycott of Arizona.

For a state that depends on tourism, making so many of us angry may turn out to have been a very bad idea.

hector.tobar@latimes.com

Guest post by David K. Song, Adjunct Professor in the Asian American Studies Department at California State University, Northridge, on behalf of the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC).

…

The signing of Arizona Senate Bill 1070 into law is the latest move to paint crosshairs on the backs of people of color, despite claims that it’s only about having the proper paperwork. Proponents of the bill have been quick to stave off criticism that the law is racist. According to Governor Jan Brewer and the Arizona legislature, it’s merely a corrective action taken on behalf of fearful citizens who are safeguarding their neighborhoods from an unrelenting flood of Mexican drug cartels (read: hardworking immigrant families).

According to SB 1070, “reasonable suspicion” would be enough to require state law enforcement agencies to detain and report a person. “Reasonable suspicion” is ambiguous when it involves immigration status and should be enough to scare anyone who doesn’t fit the phenotype of the “average” US citizen. What constitutes “reasonable suspicion,” aside from actually catching a person in the act of crossing the border or overstaying a visa? Excessive skin pigmentation? Imperfect English?

The reality is that SB 1070 is another piece of coded legislation in a society that is struggling to convince itself that racism is a non-issue, a society in which even the mention of race, or to “play the race card,” is seen as a self-serving expression of your own racial anxieties. This view has become even more popular with the election of our first African American president, which some have hailed as the final realization of a post-racial United States. Me? I’m still skeptical, especially in the ideological helter-skelter of a post-civil rights era in which the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. can be invoked to justify policies attacking affirmative action.

This isn’t just an issue that should worry Chicano and Latino communities, but every group that has historically encountered racist policies in the United States and even anyone who is concerned with preventing such injustice from happening again. Similar coded language was deployed back in the early half of the twentieth century when anti-Asian prejudices ran high resulting in the alien land law acts and the Immigration Act of 1924. The Act stipulated that entry into the country would be prohibited to “aliens ineligible for citizenship” – legal shorthand to seal the borders to Asian immigration – in a campaign that had begun with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882; another hostile piece of legislation that was at least a little honest about its intended effect.

Tuning to NPR, I heard former Congressman J. D. Hayworth of Arizona on air, commenting that racial profiling was not an issue with SB 1070. Hayworth said that the whole Mexican immigrant thing was more a byproduct of geographic happenstance. Mexicans would not be singled out. As a matter of fact, he asserted that Arizona has also been dealing with “large numbers of Chinese illegals… and perhaps most disturbingly… any number of illegals from the Middle East.” Hayworth might as well have said that anyone who looks remotely “foreign” will be fair game for interrogation.

Contrary to popular assumption, Arizonans are not now living in fear. On the ground, people are mobilizing and organizing to support one another with even greater energy and determination. The weekend after the bill passed, Arizonans and people from across the Southwest gathered in the thousands to rally for reform.

Eliminating SB 1070 is only one part of our work under the overarching need for immigration reform and the tenor of the entire immigration debate makes this coming May Day all the more critical to take a stand. Shame on Arizona – No to SB 1070! Find your local May Day event this Saturday in Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. and other cities across the nation. Show Congress and the White House that we need immigration reform now.

…

To find out more about local May 1st events in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC, go to the NAKASEC website here.