Essay on Latin American Politics

Has the argument against immigration reform changed? It seems that immigration has always been a big issue since the United States of America was founded. In Peter Schrag’s book, Not Fit For Our Society Immigration and Nativism in America, he describes how the arguments against immigration reform have not changed. One of the more recent immigration reform that caught national headlines for being unjust, is that of which Arizona’s Maricopa County, Sheriff Joe Arpaio enforced. “Early in 2009, Arpaio’s deputies marched some 220 immigrant detainees, shackled and in striped prison uniforms, none convicted of any crime, through the streets of Phoenix on their way to the sheriff’s tent-city detention center.” (NY Times, 81) That is just one example of the many ways Sheriff Joe Arpaio is notorious for enforcing Arizona’s immigration reforms. Among other things, he and his deputies under his command are accused of racial profiling. Demanding verification of residency and turning them over right away if they fail to provide proper documentation. In 2003 local governments started training local cops to work with immigration, this program is now known as ICE or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And in 2006 ICE agents started performing sweeps of local businesses. In one of those sweeps, “ICE agents arrested both executives and some 1,100 illegal workers at eight IFCO Systems plants that made crates and pallets for produce shipping in a half-dozen states. In another instance, called Operation Wagon Train- ICE raided six Swift meat packing plants in the West, Southwest, and Midwest and detained nearly 1,300 illegal aliens” (188) Many of these illegal immigrants had obtained stolen identification to work in the United States. Which lead their case to not only be an immigration issue but also a felony for the stolen identity, making ICE’s case more important to Americans. People went as far as comparing ICE to a modern day Salem Witch Hunt, where ICE, would go on there “sweeps” of different businesses and location where they believed harbored illegal immigrants.
Proposition 209 in California is another example of how immigration reform has not changed. Proposition 209 prohibits the use of race in any public schools, employment, and contracting. “Proposition 209 almost certainly also reflected public reaction against the extension of affirmative action preference to Latinos. African Americans, who had been affirmative action’s original beneficiaries, were indisputable victims of three centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. Latinos, on the other hand, had come here voluntarily, were often recent arrivals, and this had far more dubious claims to the amelioration of the lingering effects of historic discrimination.” (174) soon followed the removal of most bilingual education classes in public school where Proposition 209 had been passed. After the horrors of World War II many Europeans found themselves in refugee camps from their homes and villages being destroyed form when Hitler and his Nazi dominated Europe. Eight million Europeans were crowded into in few refugee camps. Having won the war of the worlds, President Harry S. Truman passed the Displaced Person Act of 1948, allowing two hundred thousand Europeans over two years to settle in to the United States. However, “the law also drew such tight limits that Truman only signed it, he said, “with great reluctance.” The legislation, Truman charged, “discriminates in callous fashion against person of the Jewish faith. This brutal fact cannot be obscured by the maze of technicalities in the bill by the protestations of some of its sponsors.” (151) we won the war we restored peace. But, with eight million Europeans displaced, President Truman only reluctantly opened the doors to those few less than half displaced Europeans. Not only did they suffer genocide, but

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