EthnicMajority

(Fox Sports) Major league players still oppose Arizona's controversial immigration law, though their union boss said not to expect any boycott of Tuesday's All-Star Game.

"Our nation continues to wrestle with serious issues regarding immigration, prejudice and the protection of individual liberties," Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Michael Weiner said in a statement released on Friday. "Those matters will not be resolved at Chase Field, nor on any baseball diamond; instead they will be addressed in Congress and in statehouses and in courts by those charged to find the right balance among the competing and sincerely held positions brought to the debate."

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law in April 2010, legislation that sought to give state law enforcement officers authority to enforce immigration law. But lawsuits — including one led by the Department of Justice — have kept key provisions of the law from being implemented.

That's good enough for the MLBPA, which railed against SB 1070 a year ago and said it would take "additional steps necessary to protect the rights and interests of our members." About a quarter of major league players are Hispanic.

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(Washington Post) Colombian singer Shakira was honored Saturday by Harvard University for her artistic and humanitarian work. She later said some U.S. states’ proposed anti-immigrant legislation goes against her foundation’s efforts to provide education to poor people around the world.

The Grammy Award-winning singer, however, said Latino immigrants in the U.S. facing various anti-immigrant bills will have “justice” as public awareness about their plight grows.

“Justice will come. I’m sure,” Shakira told The Associated Press after the award ceremony. “Wherever there is … a kid, who could be the son and the daughter of a Latino immigrant, who cannot attend a school in the United States of America, that kid should be a concern to all of us and our responsibility.”

Shakira made the comments in an interview when asked about proposed measures in Arizona and elsewhere targeting illegal immigrants. A bill in Arizona, for example, would bar illegal immigrants from attending public schools, living in public housing or driving. Another bill seeks to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. if their parents are illegal immigrants.

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(ABC News) “What Would You Do?” decided to travel to Arizona. We installed our hidden cameras at BK Carne Asada and Hotdogs, a popular restaurant in Tucson, and hired actors to portray an off-duty security guard and a Latino customer. Later, host John Quinones, who is Hispanic, went undercover to see how restaurant patrons would react when he was the one facing racial profiling. (See the next page for more on Quinones’ undercover work.)

In our first scenario, the security guard approaches the actor playing the Latino customer moments after he enters the restaurant.

“You got any ID on you? Documentation? Papers?” he asks. “Are you visiting? Do you understand a little English?”

At first, people who seem to notice what’s going on just stare nervously at the two men. But within a few minutes, a man charges up and confronts the security guard.

“Excuse me, who are you? Do you work here?” asks the man.

“No, I’m a security guard, I just stopped in to get some food,” replies the guard. “I’m just trying to be a good American.”

“I wouldn’t say you’re a good American. I’d say you’re an ass!” yells the man.

What our actor playing the security guard was doing — racial profiling — was exactly what some argue would happen under the new immigration law.

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(American Progress) A handful of local communities across our nation enacted unconstitutional, discriminatory, and costly immigration controls in recent years in an effort to chase away undocumented immigrants and their families and friends, many of whom are American citizens. This growing backlash against Hispanic immigrants in particular was driven by fear, economic uncertainty, and cultural differences in these localities: small towns in New Jersey, Nebraska, Pennsylvania and Texas, and one county in Virginia.

Against the backdrop of a slowly recovering economy, high unemployment, falling state and local tax revenues due to the Great Recession, and a host of problems ranging from crime to overcrowded schools, Hispanic immigrants proved to be handy scapegoats for the white majority of citizens in these communities. Never mind that these immigrants—legal and undocumented—are neither the root cause of any of these problems nor a major factor in any of them.

Arizona, of course, drew the most attention for its law, S.B. 1070, which requires police to question the legal status of suspects when there is “reasonable suspicion” they are undocumented immigrants. The law also sets “attrition through enforcement” as Arizona’s official immigration policy, which in plain English means if the laws are harsh enough, immigrants will flee in fear. The state’s immigration control measure has not been enforced, however, because a federal judge put a hold on the new law pending the outcome of a lawsuit in which the U.S. Department of Justice challenged Arizona’s attempts to usurp federal jurisdiction of immigration matters.

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(Politico) National Republicans look at New Mexico’s Susana Martinez and would like to see the future of their party: conservative, Hispanic and the favorite to become governor of a key swing state this fall.

But she is dodging the most volatile and important issue to the conservative base in the southwestern U.S.: immigration. While other Republican governors are racing to copy Arizona’s toughest-in-the-country immigration law, Martinez has expressed only tepid support for it. While Republicans in Washington want to reopen debate on birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, Martinez opposes changing the amendment.

She insists that the Arizona law is a public safety issue and not a political one.

“Susana Martinez believes that states have every right to check the immigration status of someone that has been arrested of a crime,” campaign manager Ryan Cangiolisi told POLITICO.

But the Arizona law allows officers to detain and check the immigration status of people who haven’t been arrested — leaving the Martinez statement well short of an outright endorsement of the law.

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(NY Daily News) Arizona’s controversial anti-illegal immigration law is here to stay, at least in some form, a federal judge said Thursday in Phoenix.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton, who is presiding over the federal government’s lawsuit against Arizona over the legislation, said she has no intention of blocking the entire law, though she did not deliver a ruling on the closely watched case.

Bolton did, however, say parts of the 14 sections the law could be removed, the Arizona Republic reported.

Arizona’s law, Senate Bill 1070, gives police the ability to question a suspect’s immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in the U.S. illegally.

The state’s governor, Jan Brewer, signed the law in April and it is scheduled to take effect July 29.

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(Fox News) The Arizona Latino Republican Association will become the first Hispanic organization in the country to actively oppose the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against the state of Arizona’s new immigration law.

Larry Klayman, founder of Freedom Watch, Inc., said he will be joined by ALRA Chairman Jesse Hernandez and members of the Phoenix Law Enforcement
Association at an announcement Thursday morning in Phoenix.

ALRA will become the first group of Latino Americans to “put a foot forward legally” in support of S.B. 1070 by filing a motion to intervene against the Justice Department’s lawsuit challenging Arizona’s immigration policy, Klayman said.

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(Washington Post) The Justice Department filed suit Tuesday against Arizona, charging that the state’s new immigration law is unconstitutional and requesting a preliminary injunction to stop the legislation from taking effect.

The lawsuit says the law illegally intrudes on federal prerogatives, invoking as its main argument the legal doctrine of “preemption,” which is based on the Constitution’s supremacy clause and says that federal law trumps state statutes. The Justice Department argues that enforcing immigration laws is a federal responsibility.

But the filing also asserts that the Arizona law would harm people’s civil rights, leading to police harassment of U.S. citizens and foreigners. President Obama has warned that the law could violate citizens’ civil rights, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has expressed concern that it could drive a wedge between police and immigrant communities.

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(Politico) Ahead of Arizona’s new immigration law taking effect, the state is trying to train police to avoid getting accused of racial profiling.

The new hourlong training video features some of the state’s top law enforcement officials warning police that their enforcement of the new immigration law will be under intense scrutiny.

“We’re gonna be accused of racial profiling no matter what we do,” Tucson police Chief Roberto Villasenor said in the video, which was first posted by the liberal blog Talking Points Memo. “The best thing we can do is document thoroughly where we develop our reasonable suspicion and probable cause.”

The law is set to kick in on July 29. Critics say its granting police the right to ask for proof of citizenship from those they suspect are illegal immigrants will lead to racial profiling and the harassment of Hispanics.

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