Alabama in Mexico? More Mexicans than you’d expect are aware of the fallout of Alabama’s radical new immigration law. They have family members or friends working there, or fleeing work there. The severe immigration law copied the law drafted by former Arizona state Senator Russell Pearce, who was recalled November 8. Pearce was a favorite of the Tea Party. Both were aimed, said supporters in both states, to make life so uncomfortable for illegal immigrants that they would leave. Alabama’s new law appears to be wreaking more economic havoc than its extremist conservative leaders expected.
Farmers are toting up their losses — the cost of crops left to rot as workers flee. Any township, district, or county can calculate diminishing revenues as taxpayers move away. Alabama already is “at the low end of states in employment and economic vitality” studies show. It’ll get worse, residents of “The Heart of Dixie” say. A number of them clearly note the loss in productivity as they stand in line for hours to prove their citizenship in any transaction with the government. They predict officials won’t rush to announce the already obvious losses. The cost of the state’s maimed business reputation may be harder to immediately assess, though some residents have taken that measure already. Alabama is known for wooing foreign auto makers. And in recent years Mecedes-Benz, Honda and Hyundai have set up shop there. Then, acting on the new law, Tuscaloosa cops busted a visiting Mercedes manager for driving without his license, and jailed him as an illegal immigrant. The bloom began fading from the foreign investment flower patch. Quickly, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial page invited one and all to come to Missouri: “We are the Show-Me State, Not the Show Me Your Papers State.”
The immigration imbroglio won’t go away. Certainly not for Latinos here or there. It has invaded a place of fertile eccentricity: the Republican primary debates. This may seem to some merely a north-of-the border “matter.” It isn’t. That this process is kindling local outrage among Mexicans may seem startling, but it’s just as intricate for some foreigners. For centuries most Mexicans have been familiar with homegrown racial and class prejudice. Now more of them than ever are reading and watching “the news.” A dicey thing for bigotry-ladened authoritarians, no matter how clever their disguises. Many young people are scrounging up used PCs. In good part it’s a consequence of education, an idea much praised by many foreign residents and visitors reluctant to learn Spanish. At first it was simply porn on school computers. Now it’s nourishing a more skeptical population.
The intricacy comes in the combination of what alert Mexicans read and see in the media, what they’re told by relatives living (some legally, some not) in the United States, and what some discover on the internet. While it’s true that most do not easily untangle the clumsy surrealism of current U.S. politics, their own homegrown species has taught the blight of racial and class prejudice, and 500 years of corruption — no matter how often deniedThe harsh actions of local governments in Arizona, Alabama, and other states — so avidly nourished by “conservative” extremists — strike many Mexicans along Lake Chapala’s shores as acts of hate. Particularly abhorrent are the unconstitutional portions of both laws aimed at denying education to children born in the U.S. to illegal migrants.
It’s difficult to explain the eccentric political joys of the north logically to, say, someone to whom you once taught English, spent hours outlining the democratic freedoms the U.S. enjoys. Such sessions underlined the limitations of Mexican citizens in those years — The late 1960s-1975, then 1994 until recently. There was a journalistic impulse to note the government’s fear of releasing its despotic grip limiting the freedom of speech, a freedom that didn’t begin to arrive, gradually, here until the 1980s.
But actions by the state and local governments in Arizona and Alabama, to take only two examples, accompanied now by the racist-tinged pronouncements expressed by GOP candidates in the party’s seemingly endless debates, arouses more than puzzlement among Mexican-Americans and Mexicans on both sides of the border. The endlessness issues from the impression these debates provide: a GOP primary field manned mostly by what an increasing number of Americans see as a group of often incoherent and/or extremist flip-floppers given to making bizarre statements, errors and campaign decisions. U.S. voters have retreated from Bachmann, Cain and Perry. They now wonder if the present front-runner, Newt Gingrich, with his tarnished personal and ethical record, can sustain his sudden momentum to ultimately challenge the steady, somewhat lackluster and frequent flip-flopper, Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor. After all the gaffs, many independent voters, along with Latinos (who made up an estimated 11-percent of the vote in 2008) tend to eye the GOP zigzags with as much curiosity as short-term fever. Latinos are primarily assessing the revolving front-runners’ racist tendencies. At the moment, for those Mexicans recalling all the noisy family values rhetoric flung about by Republicans, the fact that Gingrich, with his packet of personal and ethical scandals, is the (momentary) frontrunner constitutes such an astonishing choice that the Republican party has become something of a joke, though a possibly dangerous one.
But that’s of niggling import beside the problem that the Arizona/Alabama template presents Mexicans. If there are 11 million undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. (an obvious guess), and 21.5 million Latino voters, the recent Arizona vote recalling long-time radical Republican state Senator Russell Pearce, makes Alabama’s stance on immigration — and thus race — increasingly abhorrent, possibly unsustainable for economic reasons, if not moral ones. Many Mexicans with newly acquired interest in a wider swath of news — prompted by newly acquired access — certainly hope it is for both reasons.