Buffalo State College journalism and media arts professor, Michael Niman, mercilessly criticizes Arizona’s immigration policy in a recent ARTVOICE editorial. His effort, however, is a practice in Liberal moralism, American human rights ideology and a de facto apology for state centralist control of community values and autonomy. Of course within the axiological horizon of universal human rights ideology, we could expect nothing less. Such ideology presents ‘human rights’ as if they were a universally accepted set of values when in fact they are the particular values of American political culture though hardly universally accepted in America.
Niman’s heart is in the right place. The problem with that kind of heart however is that it presumes to be saving everyone before it can save anyone. But just as the characters of “Raising Arizona,” the movie, would rather steal someone elses “baby” rather than find legal ways to have their own, so also innumerable immigrants of Mexico, despite how sympathetic their plight may be, would rather profit from the work of others rather than deal with their own problems and poverty at home. Rather than face their own political issues, they flee to America to take advantage of our legal laxity, not to mention double standards. Surely, from a moral standpoint, Niman would save the Mexicans but from a political standpoint, he would not save the Arizonians who are as threatened by neglect by Washington as are the Mexicans by their powers that be. Presumably for Niman such “morality” checkmates the exigencies of law and politics, exigencies which have as many and as deep moral ramifications as do the exigencies of the immigrants.
However, even at the level of an interest in universal human prosperity and moral justice, the local political issue takes precedence over the moral imperative of our national human rights ideology. To allow the regional communities of Arizona to be illegally invaded by immigrants disallows them, firstly, to have a say in what constitutes an acceptable way of life for themselves and, secondly, to have a choice in how the moral dilemma ought to be dealt with.
On what basis does the Nation-state or those who speak in its name have the right to make morally motivated legal decisions for communities whose social fabric is being compromised and whose own constitutional rights are being systematically ignored by politically compromised institutions of “justice.”
Arizona’s legislation may in fact be “loony” as Niman purports but at least they are attempting to remain within the parameters of legality locally while they must suffer the illegitimacy of a “Federal” legal imperative that flouts its own Constitutional mandate nationally. Moreover corporate agriculture and other industries would surely throw Arizona to the wolves as long as it keeps that cheap labor flowing. Arizona must protect itself the best it can. Arizona’s social health is a priority for no one but Arizona. Why should it allow itself to be exploited and sacrificed in the interests of illegitimate national laws that in no way any longer represent their best interests? Arizona is joining a long list of states that would take the populist route and force the kind of decentralist reorganization of our pseudo-Federalism that this “nation” cries out for.
In any ethos of abstract equality and human rights ideology every community is subject to charges of racism as soon as it confronts the difficult problems of re-forming and transforming its communities into the concrete, multi-cultural hybrids necessary to preserve the best of the various traditions, customs and languages that now constitute our national polity. However, preserving the remaining integrity of communities in transformation is necessary if communities and the traditions that constitute them are to survive at all. Whereas Arizona errs on the conservative side of defending its own understanding of the limits and conditions of its communities, it acts defensively against the deleterious actions of a state centralist bureaucracy that would continue to homogenize any population that would dare to assert the prerogatives of its communal needs and rights which are knowable and legitimately determinable only from a decentralized or local standpoint. Whereas Arizona’s educational law seems to be a misguided attempt to preserve and defend particularity through teaching what appears to them to be correct history, it is true that they fail to understand that that particularity is a work in progress. However, official American history is as much a micro-history as is any ethnic history or gender history that seeks either to “set the record” straight or posture itself as the one and only correct history.
Niman’s historical review does not, however, justify illegal immigrants transgressing Federal Law. It does not relieve the Federal government from the obligation to enforce it. Whatever ethnic tapestry now constitutes Arizona, this is not a justification to prevent that state from defending itself as the legal polity that it is. Defending such illegal immigration is no more defensible than is the Chinese invasion of Tibet because apparently 1500 years ago what is now Tibet was “part of China.”
The solution to the oppression that Niman speaks of is not the disempowerment and political disenfranchisement of struggling communities opting for populist alternatives to modernist ideology of progress and universal human rights. Such human rights are a particular set of values falsely universalized in the interests of the Political Class benefitting from the powers and privileges of centralized nation-state prerogatives.
The contradictions that Arizona’s legislature has generated are not wholly the fault of Arizonians. They are caught between the Scylla of extremely excessive and illegal immigration and the Charybdis of a nation-state that chooses to accuse it of racism and unconstitutional actions rather than itself deal with the issues, not to mention the mandates of the Constitution itself.
Yes, we do need to “raise Arizona” but not to the expectations of illegal Mexicans compromising local sovereignty; nor to ridicule and condemnation but to the position of an example for other regions seeking populist autonomy to see that, like Arizona, Washington and the Liberal professoriate do not have your interests at heart.