Arizonians Are All A Bunch Of "Racists"

By Austin Hill

They have a sick tendency to – as Barack Obama would say – “cling to their guns and religion” – while trying desperately to turn the clock back to the days of the old “wild west.” In so doing, Arizonans have embarrassed the entire country with a new law that “requires” police officers to “profile” people with “brown skin,” and have brought upon themselves such an economically calamitous boycott that they may never fully recover.

Or so the dominant, old-guard, “mainstream media” would have you believe.

In truth, Arizona entails a fairly conservative-leaning cultural combination of Middle America, and traditional “old Southwest,” with a heavy influx of suburban Southern California mixed-in. It is a place that’s hospitable to both child rearing, and retiring, and in brighter economic conditions provides ample opportunity for expansion, and upward mobility.

Yet the people of Arizona are angry, and for very good reason. Their best efforts to build a community and a cohesive culture are constantly being undermined in one fashion or another by the harsh realities of illegal immigration, and the general inclination of their elected leaders over the past two decades or so has been to look the other way and pretend that the assault isn’t happening.

In those rare moments when elected leaders actually sit up and take notice, it’s usually for the purpose of chastising the citizen class. Whether it’s President George W. Bush flippantly dismissing the Minute Men civilian border patrol movement as a bunch of “vigilantes,” or Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon maligning any and all efforts to curb illegal immigration as mere “racism,” or President Barack Obama brushing-off Arizona’s new illegal immigration law as “misguided,” Arizonans have grown accustomed to politicians who undermine the concept of “playing by the rules.”

This constant assault on the community, and the culture, has fueled the fire that led to the creation of the new anti-illegal immigration law in the first place. Yet, while many of the harsh realities of illegal immigration have become widely understood over the past several years – the bankrupting of public social services and the proliferation of crime are frequently associated with the subject in the collective American mind these days – there nonetheless has been a history of egregious events that, over time, brought the pot of anger from a simmer to a rolling boil.

Consider, for example, the Arizona outrage of 2003. Vicente Fox, then the President of Mexico, paid a diplomatic visit to Janet Napolitano, then the Governor of Arizona, in November of that year. So committed was Governor Napolitano to celebrating the “common culture” of Arizona and Mexico that she commissioned a poem to be written about President Fox’s visit.

Yet at the moment that President Fox and Governor Napolitano met in a public ceremony to enjoy poetry together, citizens of Mr. Fox’s country – illegal immigrants from Mexico who were apparently in a dispute with each other – decided to use the Interstate 10 freeway as a place for a gun battle, as they chased each other at high speeds through the Phoenix suburb of Chandler. As a Ford pickup truck and a Ford Explorer went flying down the road in afternoon commuter traffic carrying a total of 24 illegal immigrants and a stash of assault weapons, bullets began to fly and cars began to spin out of control. After the incident was over, four Mexican men were dead and three were severely injured (they were, of course, treated at Arizona’s publicly funded Maricopa County Medical Center), while stray bullets were left lodged in nearby suburban houses.

Predictably, neither Fox nor Napolitano dared to say a word about this horrific event during Fox’s entire stay in Arizona. The poetry was fabulous, yes, but the level of “hear no evil – see no evil” denial was off the charts.

Later in 2006, Governor Napolitano captured international headlines during her re-election campaign by being the first among the state Governors to dispatch the National Guard to the Mexican border. This was, of course, the same Governor Napolitano who during her first months in office had proposed granting drivers licenses to illegal immigrants, and the same Governor Napolitano who didn’t dare disrupt El Presidente’s poetry time with headlines about stray bullets and assault weapons in suburbia. And while the Governor refused to authorize the National Guard to use “force” during their border mission they were nonetheless instructed to “observe” the border, and, yes, for a moment in time, the U.S. – Mexico border was “militarized.”

Add to this milieu the Bush Administration’s bungled handling of so-called “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” back in 2007, and more recently, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano’s insistence that, under her leadership, the nation’s borders really are more secure (despite the lack of any supportive evidence), and you have an entire state of people who had no choice but to take matters into their own hands. And as if there isn’t sufficient salt in the wound already, now the state’s oldest professional sports franchise – the otherwise mass-appeal and politically benign Phoenix Suns NBA team – has chosen to slap the citizen class in the face with its official condemnation of the illegal immigration law.

The days of Arizonans patiently waiting to get beyond such cynical politics are over. The people have spoken, and their collective voice will now only get louder.

Email: Austin Hill


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