Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Arizona anti-immigrant bills defeated

A series of bills intended to limit the rights of children of immigrants has been withdrawn by their sponsors, an implicit acknowledgment that they lacked the votes to pass. (Read here: Trouble in Teabagger Land? - Blog For Arizona.)

Senator Ron Gould (R-Lake Havasu City) was the author of SB-1308 and SB-1309. SB-1308 would have established two new forms of birth certificates: one for children with at least one parent a legal resident and another for children of undocumented immigrants. SB-1309 required children to have at least one parent to be a citizen or documented immigrant in order to be considered a citizen of Arizona. If passed, both of these bills would inevitably face constitutional challenges in that they contradict the plain language of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." There's also the matter of 150 years of subsequent case law.

After his bills were withdrawn, Gould gave an angry floor speech in the Senate, saying:

You have to wonder sometimes why are conservatives still members of the Republican Party.

Feb 7: Sen. Ron Gould, R-Lake <span class=
Sen. Ron Gould

In another example of anti-Hispanic racism in Arizona's senate, Senator Lori Klein (R-Anthem) gave a speech which depicted Hispanic public school students as "gang members" who "don't want to be educated".  These conclusions were those of a substitute teacher who wrote a letter complaining about a single disobedient class he had to teach. Here is video of that speech, along with a Democratic response:



And now it turns out that the letter she read may have been a hoax.  (Read here.)  There's no record of a substitute teacher with the name of the person who sent that letter. 

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