By Zayda Cabrera-Mieles
At least 25 states are considering copying Arizona’s harsh anti-immigration bill, SB-1070.
Reporters for The Lookout magazine mentioned a few of those states in their Jan. 21 issue. Among them were Texas, Georgia and Florida.
If you look at the history of these Southern states, at least half of the land that now is part of the U.S today was once part of Mexico. Not to mention the fact that Florida, another of the states mentioned by The Lookout, means flowery or full of flowers in Spanish.
A person translating Spanish words into English would certainly be able to tell you a couple of state names that come from the Spanish language.
But have you ever wondered why people immigrate? I agree that it is bad to come in a country illegally, but has anybody asked themselves why people do that? Why many decide to venture into a desert full of lizards, coyotes and snakes? Some set out on a small boat, and pray to God that the sea takes them to the states.
But the real question that we need to be asking ourselves is: What are they running from?
Is it invasive to go into somebody else’s land and start a family there? Sure. But, consider this—in Mexico the drug cartels threaten the locals that if they speak of their doings, they will hurt them in order to keep them quiet.
Imagine this scenario being shown in the local news: “Only a week into the new year, 15 human heads sat outside a gleaming shopping center on the other side of the lush hills that frame this seaside resort’s big tourist hotels. Within hours, several bodies turned up in a taxi and elsewhere, bringing the number of victims to 33 in a single weekend, scattered around a side of town few visitors see.” This is the reality in many towns in Mexico today.
According to an article by Randal Archibold in the New York Times, this is the current situation that the people who live in Acapulco, Mexico go through.
But that isn’t the worst part. The worst keeps getting worse as the drug cartel war marches on in the area. And that’s just Mexico. Take note of the riots in the Middle East and the 50-year dictatorship in Cuba.
To make matters worse, some of the immigrants are pregnant women who eventually give birth in the United States or have children with them who, at best, have no idea why they are going thorough this ordeal.
And to top it of those babies born to illegal immigrants, called “anchor babies,” have to deal with the fact that when their parents are deported they have to wait until they are 21 to try and get them back.
Can you imagine going through such a situation?
And if the Arizona law wasn’t bad enough, some lawmakers are considering instead a move to create two kinds of birth certificates in their states, one for the children of citizens and another for the children of illegal immigrants.
According to another article from the New York Times, this is unconstitutional since it violates the 14th Amendment, said Gabriel J. Chin, a law professor at the University of Arizona.
“This is political theater, not a serious effort to create a legal test,” said Chin, whose grandfather emigrated from China at a time when Chinese were excluded from the country.
“The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, was a repudiation of the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, that people of African descent could never be American citizens. The amendment said citizenship applied to ‘all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,'” Chin said.
Then, in 1898, “the Supreme Court, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, interpreted the citizenship provision as applying to a child born in the United States to a Chinese immigrant couple,” according to the article.
The 14th Amendment is a powerful part of the Constitution. It was originally made so that African Americans could be actually considered Americans. The proof is there and the people that go through these ordeals can tell you very easily what it feels like to leave your family and everything you hold dear just to get a better quality of life.
But the bottom line is that we are all humans and we may have our differences, but we still need to feel, we still need to breathe and we still have this tendency to run away from danger.
Politicians are humans, but they only make matters worse by enforcing their beliefs into our minds with their political schemes. They also make the mistake of not considering that sometimes in order to make a good decision you must both consider sides of the argument.
