Arizona's draconian immigration law is rightly being castigated, but this bill needs a three legged attack strategy. It's mostly being attacked on only two fronts, boycotts and lawsuits. The last leg is in my oppinion most important; registering voters, organizing, and attacking the Republican party at the state level. I have long been an advocate of directing more money, and organizing at the local and state level. I once wrote a diary asking why we don't have an Act Blue contribution system for local races? Well Act Blue now does this now:
Act Blue Arizona State House and Act Blue Arizona State Senate?
Most districts still need candidates and bios, WE should make this a major push over the next several weeks. How much money do you think local Arizona Democrats in tough races in Arizona would have raised in the last week if we had all made this is a focal point of our diaries? I talking about everyone, dairist, front pagers, and commentators?
Arizona the Sundown State?
Well it's time to redirect the justified anger and dismay into political action! Politics created this abomination of a bill and I think politics (more than legal action) should remove it. Don't be mislead this Arizona law is about racial politics at least as much as it is about cultural racism.
Behind the Arizona Immigration Law:
Don't be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.
I don't buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.
What's new here is not the politicians' fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.
What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote -- and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.
In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.
Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.
That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.
So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?
No, not one.
Which raises the question: were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?
(emphasis mine)
Think about that 100,000 voters were thrown off the voting roll. In 2008 Sen. McCain the home state Senator beat now President Obama by 1,230,111 to 1,034,707 that is less than 200,000 votes to the home state Senator. To further stress this point, McCain won 46% of the Latino vote, his best winning percentage amongst Latinos nationwide (note: even with it's large Cuban-American population in Florida McCain won only 42% of the Latino vote). Remember McCain was the home state Senator and one of the most pro-immigration reform Republicans.
Let's do some number analysis. In the 2008 elections about 360,000 of Arizona's 230,000 voters were Latinos. Nationally Obama won 67% of the Latino vote. If they voted for Obama at the same percentage as Latinos did nationally this alone would have acounted for an 80,000 vote swing in Obama favor (instead of Obama winning ~201,600 Latino votes he would have won ~241,200 votes, so about 40,000 more votes for team blue, and 40,000 less votes for team red). In 2004 12% of Arizona's voters were Latino, in 2008 16% were Latino, by 2012 the percentage was expected to be 20%. Taking in account expected population growth that's about 460,000 total Brown voters.
I hope all those numbers are starting to sink in. 100,000 new Brown votes by 2012, 100,000 voters that were sytematically thrown off the voter rolls, an expected swing of 80,000 (2008 votes) if McCain hadn't been on the ballot. Suddenly Obama's 230,000 vote 2008 loss looks a whole lot more surmountable.
Here’s the list of Senators and their district numbers that voted YES:
Sylvia Allen (R-5)
David Braswell (R-6)
Chuck Gray (R-19)
Jack W. Harper (R-4)
Barbara Leff (R-11)
Al Melvin (R-26)
Russell Pearce (R-18)
Jay Tibshraeny (R-21)
Ed Bunch (R-7)
Linda Gray (R-10)
John Huppenthal (R-20)
Steve Pierce (R-1)
Thayer Verschoor (R-22)
Frank Antenori (R-30)
Ron Gould (R-3)
John Nelson (R-12)
Robert "Bob" Burns (R-9)
Act Blue Arizona State Senate?
Only one Republican voted "No":
Carolyn S. Allen (R-8)
Here’s the list of members of the AZ House of Representatives that voted for this law, every Republican house member voted yes:
Rep. Lucy Mason (R-1), Rep. Andrew Tobin Sr. (R-1)
Rep. Doris Goodale (R-3), Rep. Nancy McLain (R-3)
Rep. Tom Boone (R-4), Rep. Judy Burges (R-4)
Rep. Bill Konopnicki (R-5), Rep. Amanda Reeve (R-6)
Rep. Carl Seel (R-6), Rep. Ray Barnes (R-7)
Rep. Nancy Barto (R-7), Rep. John Kavanagh (R-8)
Rep. Michele Reagan (R-8), Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-9)
Rep. Rick Murphy (R-9), Rep. Doug Quelland (R-9)
Rep. James Weiers (R-9), Rep. Adam Driggs (R-11)
Rep. Steve Montenegro (R-12), Jerry Weiers (R-12)
Rep. Cecil Ash (R-18), Rep. Steve Court (R-18)
Rep. Kirk Adams (R-19), Rep. Rich Crandall (R-19)
Rep. John McComish (R-20), Rep. Warde Nichols (R-21)
Rep. Steven Yarbrough (R-21), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-22)
Rep. Laurin Hendrix (R-22), Rep. Frank Pratt (R-23)
Rep. Russell Jones (R-24), Rep. David Stevens (R-25)
Rep. Vic Williams (R-26), Rep. David Gowan (R-30)
Rep. Ted Vogt (R-30).
Act Blue Arizona State House
Too many progressive who haven't been involved at the local level don't realize just how far money goes in local races. I often remind people that Tom Delay criminal redistricted of Texas, that cost us 5 US House seats, was done by him raising (illegally) $194,000. $194,000 dollars in a State the size of Texas, that was it! Texas is several times larger and has several more expensive media markets than Arizona does yet just 6 years ago $200,000 dollars swung the state legistlator. If we as Democrats can raise vast sums on the Internet legally for national races (Obama, Dean ect.), why can't we begin an online fundraising campaign to flood the local races with campaign cash? I've donated to Bill Halter in Arizona, but imagine if we raised the half the $2 million plus we have Arkansas for the Arizona Democratic party?
Arizona State Offices and the Arizona State Party
One of the ways that conservatives have out organized us is at the local level. They have used seemingly inocuous election like school boards to further their agenda at a national level. We need a renewed focus on these down ballet elections. Local laws can have major national implications. Time and time again we have been beaten by state wide initiatives on issues we as progressives care about, for 30+ years progressives haven't spent time an energy to develop a strategy to fight this. Part of the problem is that we don't focus enough "national" money on these local races and issues.
We need to develop a plan of attack. Unions are great at registering voters, many like the SEIU have been active at immigration rallies. But what we need is greater coordination between the voter registration wings, and the protest wing.
This isn't just for Unions if you read about a local immigration reform rally, contact your local party and ask if you can volunteer to register voters there! We need to have a goal, that not immigration rally should happen in any of the 50 United States without a cadre of progressives with voter registration cards there! (yes I know there are some states were you can't do this but you get the point). The immigration rallies aren't just filled with unducumented workes, but also their friends and family members, many if not most who are US citizens.
You see other states controlled by Rightwingers and Teabaggers are already speaking of emulating this law. Utah is soon to take it up, and there is a bill being proposed in Texas along the same lines.
The enduring question of Latino voting
You can count on there being some number of articles about Latino voting every year. The Chron took its turn on Sunday.
The numbers are formidable. Hispanics made up 31 percent of the Texas population in the 2000 census and will likely be 36-37 percent in 2010. In five of the eight states projected to gain seats after Census 2010 — including Texas — and in all 10 of the states projected to lose seats, Hispanics made up a greater share of the overall electorate in 2008 than they did in 2000.
Hispanic voter turnout in Texas grew by 31 percent between the 2000 and 2008 elections. At the same time, Hispanics make up only about 20 percent of registered voters in Texas and only 12 percent to 14 percent of the total vote.
Lydia Camarillo, vice president of the San Antonio-based Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, contends that the Hispanic vote is actually performing about as well as the Anglo voting public.
"The Latino electorate can be an important factor," says Camarillo, "but it will not perform at the rate expected unless the resources are spent to energize it. It can’t be, ‘Oh, it’s just going to happen.’ That was the case with Tony Sanchez in 2002." (Sanchez is the Laredo banker who headed the Democrats’ so-called "dream team" that year and lost in a Perry landslide.)
Jerry Polinard, a political scientist at the University of Texas-Pan American, also notes that a voting population that’s been excluded takes several generations for voting to become the norm. "Women," he notes, "gained the vote in 1920, but they didn’t gain parity with men until 1968, and now they vote in greater numbers than men. For Hispanics the percentage of the vote is increasing, and the clock is ticking, but it won’t happen overnight."
Having spent a bunch of time poring over county election returns from 2002 through 2008, I do believe Democrats will do a lot better than they did in 2006 in mostly Latino counties like Webb, Hidalgo, and Cameron, because there will be a much better funded effort to turn out voters in those parts of the state. The goal should be to exceed the numbers from 2002 and get as many of the new voters from 2008 as possible to come out again.
In 2004 only 44% of eligable voting age Latinos voted (by eligable I'm only accounting for US citizens, those without documentation aren't taken in account)! In 2008 it was up to 54%. In 2004 and 2008 both Whites and Black voting rates were in 60 percentiles, which shows you how much room for growth there is. Signs at places where Latinos gather shouldn't be filled simply with "anti-Arizona" signs but also "this is what happens when you don't vote" signs. Voter registration needs to be seen as the primary means of protest. Don't get me wrong I'm a veteran of streat protest for environmental, social justice, and racial equality causes. But the greatest protest anyone can register is in NOVEMBER. Get that message out.
This is a site that claims to be full of Democratic activist, so let's get active. The time for just expressing anger and outrage isn't over but the time for action is now. If you live in a state near Arizona link up with the state party and get voters registered. During the civil rights period, protesters boycotted the business suporting American Apartheid, but brave souls like the Freedom Riders went into Mississippi to register voters. Although I understand the emotions behind not traveling to Arizona (I myself expressed them), we need to go there with a purpose. Once again I say Democratict Activist let's get active.
****LET ROLL PEOPLE****
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Leviticus 19.33-25
"When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God."
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