by Pamela Powers Hannley
Last week– thanks to an executive memo by President Obama– millions of "Dreamers" were able to apply for deferred deportation, which will allow them to legally live in the US for two years. Dreamers are young, undocumented adults who, as young children, were brought to the US illegally by their parents. Deferred deportation would allow Dreamers to come out of the shadows to live and work without fear of being sent to a country they have never known.
In true heartless form, once the Dreamers were given hope, Arizona Goveror Jan Brewer set up roadblocks by issuing her own memo. Soon after young Arizonans started lining up to apply for deferred deportation, Brewer announced that in Arizona Dreamers would not be issued drivers' licences or state-issued ID card. One of the stipulations for being able to stay in the US is a clean legal record. Her denial of drivers' licenses sets up these young people. Not being able to a car is a serious burden in Arizona because cycling in the summer is grueling and public transportation is sketchy in the big cities and non-existent in the rural areas.
Brewer's actions quickly earned her the label of "George Wallace in a dress" because her memo clearly focused on pandering to the racists in her base and, furthermore, disregards what's best for our state– allowing Dreamers to integrate fully into American society and the workforce without fear of deportation.
After the jump is a short video by Dennis Gillman: Gov. Brewer's Executive Order vs. Students and Teachers.
Thank you Mrs. Hannley for the excellent and educational article !
Leonard Clark
🙂
One wonders if the Obama/Biden or Carmona for Senator or the Democratic Party has paid Jan Brewer off to make sure that Republican candidates from Romney/Ryan on down get as few votes as possible from Hispanics and people who, like myself, have Hispanics in our family, even if the people share “conservative” views on the budget, taxes, abortion, etc.
Many of us are not undocumented, but we know people who are. As a college teacher, I assume I have undocumented students in my classes all the time — of course, I have no way of knowing for certain and I don’t want to know — and I’m sure some of them are among my best students. (In New York City, I have taught college students who are natives of at least 70 different countries, including ones that you’d think are rare: Nepal, Mali, Montenegro, Moldova [two in one class one time], Tajikistan, St. Kitts and Nevis [three in one class at one time, each from a different town], Oman, Uruguay, Belize, Thailand, etc. Naturally these are wonderfully diverse classrooms and make for great teaching experiences.)
Emily Schultheis and Alexander Burns wrote in Politico this week, before Brewer’s executive order:
“Mitt Romney is on track to lose the Latino vote by a wider margin than any Republican presidential candidate in over a decade, and strategists in both parties say he may have made a bad situation worse with his selection of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate.
What’s clear is that Romney’s lagging fortunes among Hispanics are unlikely to receive any boost from choosing a vice presidential candidate who has voted in Congress against the DREAM Act and supports overhauling entitlement programs that are extremely popular among Latino voters.
The Republican ticket’s dire position among Latinos has even stirred some hope among Democrats — and apprehension among some Republicans — that back-to-back smashing victories by President Barack Obama could move Latino voters in the Democratic column in a more durable way that could put the GOP at an electoral disadvantage for decades.
That’s an alarming prospect to GOP strategists who have seen their party driven to near extinction in states like California, where strident anti-immigration voices have turned the Latino vote away from Republicans, maybe for good.”
(Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79683.html#ixzz242hqCqA3
George Wallace eventually changed his views on race and years later he got another term as Governor of Alabama precisely *because* African-Americans supported him. According to the Wikipedia entry on Wallace (who I met in person 40 years ago at the Democratic convention in Miami Beach; he and my grandmother had the same acupuncturist): “In 1979, Wallace said of his stand in the schoolhouse door: ‘I was wrong. Those days are over, and they ought to be over.'”
And the online Encyclopedia of Alabama in its entry on Wallace, says this about his final election:
“In 1982, black voters helped reelect Wallace, giving him one-third of their votes in the first primary. He then increased this constituency to defeat then-Lieutenant Governor George McMillan by one percentage point in the Democratic runoff. In the general election, Wallace carried 90 percent of the state’s black electorate, linking it with rural white voters and members of the Alabama Education Association to form a coalition that defeated his opponent, Republican Emory Folmar, mayor of Montgomery.”
On the other hand, as far as I know, Pete Wilson — the California governor responsible for driving away millions of Hispanic voters from the Republican party and turning our largest state into a safe, overwhelming Democratic (today we’d say “blue”) state — has never apologized about his racist views and never got support again from Hispanics (he didn’t run for office ever again).
Do you really think Jan Brewer will end up like George Wallace, renouncing her current views and actions like the executive order and maybe overwhelmingly winning Hispanic voters for herself or her party?
Isn’t a better comparison Pete Wilson? Brewer is probably the unwitting benefactor of the Democratic party in 21st century Arizona.