ARIZONA EMPLOYER SANCTIONS LAW UPHELD BY U.S. SUPREME COURT ENFORCED AGAINST IMMIGRANTS, NOT EMPLOYERS

Last week, the United States Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s Employer Sanctions Law, which went into effect in 2008. The law was  supported by the  Federation for American Immigration Reform and sponsored by its chief Arizona ally, Arizona state senator Russell Pearce. The legislature passed the law in 2007,  and Gov. Janet Napolitano signed it, as a way to sanction employers who hired unauthorized workers. The law says any business twice caught and charged with hiring unauthorized workers could have its business license yanked.

I wrote about this law in 2007 and 2008 for Newsweek.com, taking a look at both sides.  At the time Janet Napolitano told me, “If Arizona is a laboratory for democracy, then so be it.”

And I wrote about the law again for The  Daily Beast, and included background info, the Supreme Court fight, etc. Keep in mind that this law has nothing to do with Arizona’s draconian immigration law, SB 1070, which is also being challenged in the courts.

Last week, the Supreme Court  upheld a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling. In a nutshell, the court ruled that the employer sanctions  law was constitutional because it did not infringe on federal law. In fact, states are entirely within their rights to control business licenses, the courts ruled.

But, as is so often the case with Arizona immigration laws, the employer sanctions law does not punish Arizona businesses.

At least, not much.

Less  than five businesses have been sanctioned in the three years since the law  has taken effect.

Employer-sanctions prosecutions have occurred in only one county — Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix and most of its suburbs. That’s the headquarters of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his allies in the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. Prosecutors  from other counties don’t take the law seriously, saying it is a flawed piece of legislation that does not allow prosecutors the necessary tools to put forth a good case.

(Photo credit: promigrant.com)

The law,  intended to go after businesses, has been used by Sheriff Joe to investigate car washes and landscaping companies and round up unauthorized immigrants in front of television news cameras. At taxpayer expense, the zip-tied immigrants are hauled off to jail, slapped with working-with-fake-papers felony charges (identity theft and forgery)  defended by public defenders, prosecuted, tried, and sent to jail for several months. (Please see wonky footnote at end of this story.)

Then after they serve their jail time, many are deported.

But many are not. If they’ve got families in Phoenix,  they will do anything to stay with their kin.

That includes mounting a fight against deportation in federal immigration court. And while immigrants pay for their lawyers, taxpayers pay for the court costs and prosecution, which drags on for years.

So in Arizona, many consider the employer-sanctions law as a thinly disguised way to get rid of Mexicans.

Not sanction employers.

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WONKY FOOTNOTE: (Sheriff Joe’s employer-sanctions based raids result in many undocumented immigrants in his jails classified as felons.  This classification is peculiar to Sheriff Joe’s  jails. The state and federal government do not have a way of counting the number of unauthorized immigrant felons in  prisons.  Repeat, there is no way to know how many undocumented migrant felons are in American  prisons. Prisons are where the hardcore guys go, and the feds don’t filter  felon undocumented immigrants in their stats. Instead, the feds and states lump all immigrant-crooks, documented and undocumented, into one category.)

Friends, I’ve spent about a month and a half working on an immigration story for Phoenix New Times, the mother ship of Village Voice Media.

Normally, these pages are reserved for some of my observations on Arizona politicking and immigration, but I’m imposing a gag rule on myself because I don’t want to spill the beans for the New Times Story.

It’s running in early December, and then I will wax eloquent once again. In the meantime, here’s a story I wrote on Sheriff Arpaio for The Daily Beast.

Since 2008, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has ordered thirteen raids (aka crime suppression operations) of heavily Latino Phoenix-area neighborhoods and workplaces in search of  ”illegals.”

But if he and his advisors gambled that rounding up hotel maids and landscapers would gain him more voter approval, they gambled wrong.

In part due to his “hard-nosed and sometimes perceived heavy handed tactics against illegal aliens” as well as an ongoing federal grand jury inquiry over alleged abuses of power, Sheriff Joe’s  support is tanking in the Phoenix metro area, according to a recent poll of Maricopa County voters.

The details: Well-respected local pollster Earl de Berge, who has taken the pulse of Phoenix for many years,  found that only 39 percent of registered voters now  approve of Sheriff Joe. That’s down from an astonishing 64 percent approval rating in 2007.  According to the poll, Sheriff Joe’s still got most of the county’s GOP voters in his camp, but he’s lost the support of those free-thinking Independents. And in a state where one-third of the voters are Republicans, one-third of the voters are Democrats (they never cottoned to Joe) and one-third of the voters are Independents, Joe might well lose his next election.

Which might explain why Sheriff Joe sent out a  fund-raising letter to voters who live outside of Maricopa County. A friend of mine who lives in heavily conservative Yavapai County forwarded me  a copy of Sheriff Joe’s fundraising letter. It references a January 16 human rights march in Phoenix that I happened to cover for my book, which comes out in August and is called ILLEGAL: Life and Death in the Undocumented Underground.

Before I get into the letter, here’s a picture of the march  by  photographer Kathy McCraine. (I’m the female journalist in jeans covering the march.) Do you see nasty signs? Do you see masked marchers? Do you see hooligans?

Photo by Kathy McCraine

See, the reason I ask all these questions is because Sheriff Joe, in a fundraising letter that he sent to  those conservative prospective donors in Yavapai County, writes this about the march documented in the picture above:

“On January 16, 2010, more than 10,000 protestors marched on my jails to oppose my enforcement of state and federal immigration laws.

Protestors brawled with and assaulted police. Demonstrators dressed in all black and wearing hoods to conceal their identity threw bottles filled with rocks and attacked officers including a mounted officer and her horse. The mob then surrounded her and hit the horse with sticks.

The masked protestors screamed profanities and called for my assassination carrying signs that read “Assassinate Arpaio” and other violent messages some so profane, I won’t bother repeating them here.”

Sheriff Joe says in the letter to send money fast, so he can continue to enforce the law even in the face of mounting attacks from the Leftist media, the Leftist presidency, the Leftist U.S. Attorney’s Office, and now, from this most recent demonstration he infers  a mob of 10,000 masked izquierdistas  threw bottles and beat horses with sticks.

Here’s the truth: Of 10,000 marchers, 9,997 were peaceful.

That’s according to public documents.

Only three marchers were singled out by county prosecutors for causing trouble at the January 16 march. That’s right. Three people. The first, nineteen-year-old Jeremiah Matthew Henry, allegedly used a wooden stick to whack a mounted Phoenix police officer  who was “working crowd control.” Twenty-seven-year-old Issa Emadi is accused of throwing one water bottle at the cops.  And twenty-four-year-old Sarah Grace Daniels is accused of striking a cop with the handle of a banner she had been carrying in the march.

I’m not saying Henry, Emadi and  Daniels were in the right if they did what they are accused of doing. They face serious criminal charges for their actions, and if they’re guilty, they’ll pay.

But isn’t it also a sin to scare donors into sending you money by  painting  an entire group of peaceful marchers (mostly Latino families) as radicals?

I have covered several of these marches against the Sheriff’s alleged violations of human rights, and I can tell you I have never seen any violence. I didn’t see violence on January 16.

However, a mom, dad and their two children  saw part of the melee that allegedly involved Henry, Daniels and Emadi. The parents told me they saw a female mounted cop ride into the crowd and squirt  people with pepper spray. Of course, the cop was probably trying to subdue the three protestors.

Unfortunately, the Phoenix mountie also sprayed this immigrant couple’s  five-year-old son.

The child was treated at a hospital emergency room for breathing difficulties.

I took this picture of him a week later. I slanted  my iPhone camera in order to take advantage of the natural light. 

You can see the child is  physically okay now, and he doesn’t like to talk about the pepper spray. Scroll back up and take a look at his eyes. You’ve  got to wonder what goes on inside his five-year-old heart whenever he sees a uniformed cop or a horse.

Ask yourself: Who is the true victim?

The boy?

Or the sheriff?