You can read a really good analysis of  just why, exactly, Obama chose this time and place to speak about immigration in a big way. Just link here. Obama delivered his talk at American University, in Washington. He  said this, in a nutshell: It’s time to reform federal immigration policy using a four-pronged approach of border enforcement, workplace enforcement, visa policy modernization and a stand-in-line-and-pay-your-fees pathway to a green card. (Citizenship, and voting privileges, would come years later.) (Oh, and the comprehensive immigration reform Obama touted is not new;   Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain, with President Bush’s blessing, tried to get it passed  back in 2006. )

Obama also took a couple of jabs at Arizona and SB 1070, saying the law pummels law enforcement authorities with burdendome expenses and responsibilities, and, of course, opens the door to racial profiling.

Almost immediately after Obama stepped down from the podium,  John Kavanagh, a Fountain Hills legislator who has become a key spokesman for SB 1070 after sponsoring a similar law in the Arizona House, appeared on TV in Phoenix. He told  FOX News he was offended that Obama lumped immigrants who came here illegally with immigrants who came legally, like his grandparents. He said the Obama plan meant “amnesty” and SB 1070 protected against racial profiling.

Kavanagh had recently done a little offending of his own, when  he “joked” to a roomful of Latino journalists that Canadian “illegals” could stay in Arizona because they had money. You can read about that here.

Sen. Russell Pearce, the main sponsor of SB 1070, told Phoenix FOX news that Obama was fear mongering and just wanted “amnesty.” Pearce has been accused of fearmongering, too. The Arizona Republic noted that Pearce erred when he attributed 9,000 deaths to “illegal immigration.” In a fascinating and informative profile, reporter Gary Nelson notes:

Pearce has frequently cited a soaring crime rate caused by illegal immigration as one of the reasons for his stance.

However, statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports show that violent and property crimes in Phoenix have decreased in the last three years at a rate that is even faster than the nation’s as a whole.

As recently as two months ago, Pearce wrote a constituent that illegal immigrants are responsible for “over 9,000 American deaths every year.” The number has been attributed to U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who said he “extrapolated” from a Government Accountability Office study. The study, however, was on illegal-immigrant prison populations and does not mention that figure.

Read more: azcentral.com

Just days before Pearce accused the President of fear mongering, Gov. Jan Brewer talked about “beheadings” that couldn’t be substantiated, and said all those “illegals” crossing the border were drug mules.

Here’s Brewer’s beheadings video: Brewer talks about beheadings.

The beheadings couldn’t be substantiated, according to Politico.

SB 1070 has long been promoted by proponents as kicking in only after a  cop  lawfully stops detains or arrests someone they suspect of committing a  ”crime”  ( the ” crime” category includes   city ordinances and  traffic violations) and then only after “reasonable suspicion” exists that the  person is in the country illegally.

Today, thanks to  Evan Wyloge, a rising star  journalist who has been covering this angle relentlessly we learn:

Lyle Mann, director of the Arizona Peace Officers Standards and Training board, said what constitutes a “stop, detainment or arrest” is really much broader than the law’s supporter’s have been conveying since the law was signed April 23.

“The truth of the matter is an officer can stop anyone for any reason and ask them anything,” Mann said. “Is that kind? Is that brutish? That’s another question.”

Does this broad interpretation also apply to US citizens who are lawfully stopped detained or arrested while driving their undocumented relatives?

We’ll know for sure on July 29, when the law kicks in, barring court injunctions.

I wrote about this, and why the numbers are deceptive, in The Daily  Beast.

Senator Russell Pearce, the East Mesa Republican who pushed the most controversial immigration law in the nation through the Arizona Senate and House, now has a new cause. It has to do with not allowing all people born in the United States to be citizens — like those kids born to unauthorized immigrants.

This is a new plank in the election-year anti-migrant movement, and Pearce threw the first volley on the O’Reilly show on FOX. Next came the usual slew of viral e-mails about how immigrants are having all these babies in hospitals. The segment in RED is word-for-word copy of a  viral  e-mail that followed Pearce’s O’Reilly appearance. It sets the stage for the new election year-campaign to de-citizenize citizens.

Just One Hospital  

Unbelievable!

Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas , Texas is a fairly famous institution and for a variety of reasons:

1. John F. Kennedy died there in 1963

2. Lee Harvey Oswald died there shortly after

3. Jack Ruby-who killed Oswald, died there a few years later.

On the flip side, Parkland is also home to the second busiest maternity ward in the country with almost 16,000 new babies arriving each year.  (That's almost 44 per day---every day)

A recent patient survey indicated that 70 percent of the women who gave birth at Parkland in the first three months of 2006 were illegal aliens.  That's 11,200 anchor babies born every year just in Dallas .

According to the article, the hospital spent $70.7 million delivering 15,938 babies in 2004 but managed to end up with almost $8 million dollars in surplus funding.  Medicaid kicked in $34.5 million, Dallas County taxpayers kicked in $31.3 million and the feds tossed in another $9.5 million.

The average patient in Parkland in maternity wards is 25 years old, married and giving birth to her second child.  She is also an illegal alien.   By law, pregnant women cannot be denied medical care based on their immigration status or ability to pay.

OK, fine.  That doesn't mean they should receive better care than everyday, middle-class American citizens.  But at Parkland Hospital , they do.   Parkland Memorial Hospital has nine prenatal clinics.  NINE.

The Dallas Morning News article followed a Hispanic woman who was a patient at one of the clinics and pregnant with her third child---her previous two were also born at Parkland .  Her first two deliveries were free and the Mexican native was grateful because it would have cost $200 to have them in Mexico .  This time, the hospital wants her to pay $10 per visit and $100 for the delivery but she was unsure if she could come up with the money.  Not that it matters, the hospital won't turn her away.  (I wonder why they even bother asking at this point.)

How long has this been going on?  What are the long-term effects?

Well, another subject of the article was born at Parkland in 1986 shortly after her mother entered the US illegally - now she is having her own child there as well.  (That's right; she's technically a US citizen.)

These women receive free prenatal care including medication, nutrition, birthing classes and child care classes.  They also get freebies such as car seats, bottles, diapers and formula.

Most of these things are available to American citizens as well but only for low-income applicants and even then, the red tape involved is almost insurmountable.

Because these women are illegal aliens, they do not have to provide any sort of legitimate identification - no proof of income.  An American citizen would have to provide a social security number which would reveal their annual income - an illegal alien need only claim to be poor and the hospital must take them at their word.

Parkland Hospital offers indigent care to Dallas County residents who earn less than $40,000 per year.  (They also have to prove that they did not refuse health coverage at their current job.  Yeah, the 'free' care is not so easy for Americans.)

There are about 140 patients who received roughly four million dollars for un-reimbursed medical care.  As it turns out, they did not qualify for free treatment because they resided outside of Dallas County so the hospital is going to sue them!  Illegal aliens get it all free!  But U. S citizens who live outside of Dallas County get sued!  How stupid is this?

As if that isn't annoying enough, the illegal alien patients are actually complaining about hospital staff not speaking Spanish.  In this AP story, the author speaks with a woman who is upset that she had to translate comments from the hospital staff into Spanish for her husband.  The doctor was trying to explain the situation to the family and the mother was forced to translate for her husband who only spoke Spanish.  This was apparently a great injustice to her.

In an attempt to create a Spanish-speaking staff, Parkland Hospital is now providing incentives in the form of extra pay for applicants who speak Spanish.  Additionally, medical students at the University of Texas Southwestern for which Parkland Hospital is the training facility will now have a Spanish language requirement added to their already jammed-packed curriculum.  No other school in the country boasts such a ridiculous multi-semester (multicultural) requirement.

(Sorry for the length, but this needs wide circulation particularly to our "employees" in Congress.)

Remember that this is about only ONE hospital in Dallas , Texas .  There are many more hospitals across our country that must also deal with this.

If you want to verify the story:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/parkland.asp

In other update news, Kris Kobach, the controversial Kansas lawyer who was a lead author on SB 1070 and has been labeled a Nativist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is running for Secretary of State of Kansas. Here is his campaign sign.

And someone defaced these Republican signs, below, including a McCain sign,  in central Phoenix.

You be the judge.

At Los Cenzontles, he and his staff have encouraged kids to work hard, practice, take joy, dance, make wonderful music and art. Musicians at the center have  collaborated musically with The Chieftans, Taj Mahal, and Linda Ronstadt, among other accomplished singers and musicians.

Eugene Rodriguez has dark skin and black hair, and like many Mexican-Americans, he was taught to assimilate.

And there was a reason for this.

Self-preservation.

“Mexican Americans have a strategy,” he tells me,  ”Blend in and don’t make waves.”

He says: There’s been an undercurrent in the United States that Mexicans are less than human.

So very few Mexican Americans made waves.

Now all that has changed, because Arizona has passed a new immigration law. It requires all policemen in the state who “reasonably suspect” someone to be in the country illegally to stop them. And if they don’t have papers, to arrest them. Reasonable suspicion that a guy is an unauthorized immigrant must be accompanied by  a law being broken — your tail light is out, for instance, or you have a messy front yard, in the eyes of the policeman.   Next, the cop must have more than one reason to reasonably suspect you’re an undocumented immigrant. For instance, a person who dresses in a way a policeman thinks indicates that a person is an “illegal alien,” and travels down known smuggling corridors (that would be almost any road in Arizona) could arouse sufficient “reasonable suspicion” to be arrested if he’s not carrying papers.

Honestly, I didn’t make that up.

It’s in an instructional training video for  Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deputies. The guy in the video is Kris Kobach, who wrote the law and is called a “nativist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

As for Kobach’s video on what constitutes “reasonable suspicion,” you can see it here.

This  explains why Rodriguez, an accomplished American with degrees and  honors, intuits he could be stopped by any policeman in Arizona who “reasonably” suspects that he’s an unauthorized immigrant.

That outrages him.

His great grandfather was an Arizona pioneer.

“It’s too much,” he says.

In a way he’s grateful for the new law, because in his view the law has  given voice and shape to discrimination against Mexicans that  has been festering in the United States for decades.

So Rodriguez, a guy who says he never made waves, is now giving voice to a reaction to Arizona’s  law: An outraged call to action.

In a song.

Rodriguez wrote a corrido, which is a stylized Mexican ballad about a current event. This particular  corrido is about Arizona’s new law, and it’s called  ”Estado de Verguenza,” which  means “State of Shame.” It calls for Mexican Americans to fight Arizona’s fear-based racism with money, votes, and pride.

It calls for them to make waves.

You can hear it here. And also see it. It’s on YouTube.

At taxpayer expense.

What effect does this have on Arizona schools, where Spanish speakers drop their kids off every day? Will the police officers be forced to ask the parents for papers?

School officials are grappling with this problem right now.

I have been writing pretty regularly about Arizona’s new immigration law, SB 1070,  for The Daily Beast, and updating the galleys for my book, ILLEGAL, LIfe and Death in the Undocumented Underground, which is slated to be published in June. I regret that I have neglected this web site.

This new law is less than a week old, and already two lawsuits have been filed against Arizona over civil rights issues in the law. The Washington Post reports that the Justice Department might launch a legal protest as well. The Mayor of Phoenix promised to sue, but his city council didn’t back him up.

I want to post a series of photos really fast, just so you take a trip with me through the events of the last month.

The first picture was taken outside the funeral of rancher Robert Krentz. No one knows who killed him, but the highly politicized murder has been widely blamed on a faceless Mexican drug trafficker who crossed the border illegally. This caused an uproar for more secure borders, to which Janet Napolitano has repeatedly replied that yea, more can be done, but immigration is down at the border.

The second photo is of ranchers calling for border enforcement on the day SB 1070 sailed through the Arizona House of Representatives. The ranchers are flanked by Russell Pearce, who sponsored SB 1070, and J.D. Hayworth, who is running in the Senate primary against John McCain and supports the new law, which criminalizes about 460,000 undocumented immigrants for setting foot in Arizona and requires all law enforcement officers to enforce immigration laws. If they don’t enforce the laws, the cities and counties that employ them can be sued by Arizona residents.

Pearce is the fellow on the left, and Hayworth is on the right.

The rest of the pictures I shot were of various protestors. Some for the law, some against it. They were all demonstrating on  the grounds of the Arizona state capitol complex.

The photo below is of  people who support SB 1070 being interviewed by a reporter.

Here’s a placard I saw lying on the ground.

That’s all for today. More soon.

Earlier this week, I received an e-mail “alert” from a man named Eric Johnson, writing, as he put it, “for that Great American, Senator Russell Pearce.” Johnson wanted me to know that an immigration bill was zipping through the Arizona House of Representatives. The bill was, word-for-word, the same bill Russell Pearce had authored and successfully moved through the Arizona Senate a few weeks earlier.

I first ran into

Senator Russell Pearce last year, when he vowed at a press conference that he’d get his immigrant-trespassing bill passed in 2010. He called it the “safe neighborhoods” bill. It penalizes undocumented immigrants for setting foot in Arizona and turns cops into immigration enforcers.

True to his word, Pearce got a Senate Bill passed this year, and a similar House bill today sailed through the Arizona Legislature committee of the whole, and is set to be voted on tomorrow or later this week. It is called HB 2632. I sat in the balcony of the Arizona house today, surrounded by lobbyists who talked so loud it was hard to hear what the legislators said on the floor below us. I did notice Mexicans sitting with inscrutable expressions on their faces and a gaggle of yellow-shirted, Pearce fans dressed in yellow tee shirts.

I’d seen those shirts, and those faces, before.

Look at the pictures below, which I took during Pearce’s 2009 press conference.
Note three things.

First, note that Russell Pearce wears a yellow tee shirt

Second, note that his ally Sheriff Joe Arpaio stands nearby, and then takes the podium.

Third, note that the aging woman in yellow stands near a sign that says “illegal aliens” cost the state $400 million for uncompensated healthcare. I point out the sign because undocumented immigrants are banned from using state-funded healthcare.

The same lack of logic must have prompted Pearce to call his trespassing bill the “Safe Neighborhoods” bill — because critics say it would make neighborhoods less safe. It should, in fact, be called the Unsafe Neighborhoods bill.

Here’s why.

The proposed law, which should be voted on any day this week, will transform Arizona policemen into immigration enforcers, whether they like it or not, and these immigration cops will, like Sheriff Joe Arapio, neglect the solving of serious crimes, like rapes and murders, in order to arrest each and every undocumented immigrant in Arizona for “trespassing.”

Keep in mind that approximately 460,000 undocumented immigrants are thought to live in Arizona.

If the new immigration cops arrested even one-tenth of these men, women and children for trespassing on Arizona soil, the state would surely face expensive challenges in court because the immigration goons would almost certainly question, detain, and arrest people with brown skin who are American citizens. This of course, is already happening in Phoenix.
Beyond civil rights abuses, there’s the practical matter of, the expense of arresting 460,000 people in the face of severe budgetary problems.

Arizona faces the “second steepest budget decline” in the United States, according to The Arizona Republic.
Arizona’s leaders have already knocked more than 30,000 people (mostly little kids) off state-funded healthcare, sold state buildings and closed state parks and schools.

Yet those same budget slashers are set to vote this year on a largely unfunded law that would financially burden a state already crippled by the recession.

The promoters of the law say each immigrant will be forced to pay $500 and that will cover expenses.

But ask yourself whether the trespassers about to be deported are eagerly going to hand over $500.

Or if they even have such cash in the first place.

It’s not a practical solution.

Pearce is not a practical man, however, and he is not supported by practical men.

He is not supported by clear-headed conservatives or moderate Republicans. He is not supported by Democrats. He is not supported by the business community or the agricultural community or any other reasonable community.

He is supported instead, by national anti-migrant groups, a dwindling number of Arizonans who fear or hate Mexicans, the aging groupies dressed in yellow, and, finally, by Minutemen.

Or, at least a few Minutemen.

Pearce’s own son said at a hearing I attended last year that he is a Minuteman, and Pearce’s good friend and colleague in the senate, Al Melvin, judging from the last line on his resume, is also a Minuteman.

Minutemen aren’t just tea party gadflies on steroids. And they aren’t just retired military folks who’ve overstated illegal immigration threats so they can dress up in camouflage once again and drive around in quads and report to their command center about “illegals” invading America.

You may recall that a Minuteman splinter group was accused of slaughtering a nine-year-old child in Arivaca, Arizona. The trio says they are innocent, and await trial in Pima County Superior Court. According to police, they slaughtered he little girl and her dad in an effort to steal the dad’s marijuana stash so they could fund their operation to protect America from “illegals.”

Consider the logic of that plan.

Then consider the logic of Arizona legislators who just pleaded poverty and stripped tens of thousands of children off healthcare rolls and closed state parks and slashed school budgets and then turn around and vow to vote on a burdensome, expensive law that will mandate the arrest of 464,000 people for trespassing on Arizona soil.

What happened to all that concern about budget woes?

What happened to the logic?

I don’t have the answers to those questions.

You could get them from that Great American, Senator Russell Pearce, though, if you call him at the State Senate. Or, if you want, you could call Kirk Adams, who is the speaker of the Arizona House, the guy who just allowed the trespassing bill to pass through a committee so it could be voted on by the entire house, instead of keeping the bill in the committee and letting it die.

Or, maybe you could just call up a Minuteman.

For what must have been the umpteenth time, Pearce  listened to his own son, a sheriff’s deputy, detail how he’d  been shot three times by an undocumented immigrant during a bust that went awry.

The senior Pearce was near tears as he rattled off names of  cops in Arizona and across the nation who  had been killed  by undocumented immigrants.

It is awful, Senator Pearce. I agree.

It’s also awful when undocumented immigrants are stabbed by teens who said they were on the prowl for “beaners.”

This is why the New York based  activist group Long Island Wins focuses today on  the slaughter of  Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero. The New York  group, which advocates for immigrants rights and comprehensive immigration reform, has launched a memorial of Lucero on the anniversary of his death. You can read about it here.

The point is, undocumented immigrants, like cops, shouldn’t be slaughtered on the streets.

It works both ways.

Why do they come?

Why do they stay?

Here is one reason, from Mercedes Sosa, the late Argentine cantora, and Puerto Ricans Calle 13.

I don’t need to say anything else, except you may need a Kleenex.