ImmigrationNew book discusses on immigration issues in Arizona

Jeff Biggers left his job as head of Literacy Volunteersa decade ago to focus on his career as an historian, and journalist. Now, in a book titled State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown over the American Dream. Biggers attacks politicians in a state which, he argues, has gone too far in its anti-immigration fervor.

In his early work, Biggers wrote about the south and his family’s heritage, but political changes in Arizona inspired him to address the issues of politics and immigration. “I was outraged by the rise of political interlopers and an extremist state legislature that passed Arizona’s punitive immigration law (the infamous SB1070 “papers, please”) in 2010, and then crafted a bill to outlaw Mexican American Studies in Tucson,” Biggers told the Arizona Daily Sun.

“As a cultural historian, that was the last straw for me; this wasn’t “my Arizona,” and I felt I needed to go home and re-examine the state’s history and chronicle a new chapter over the civil rights showdown taking place today.”

Biggers that theSupport Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act(also known as senate bill, or SB, 1070) has changed the way people look at Arizona and that the history of revolutionary politics in the state has been forgotten. Biggers wants people to remember the political figures of the past who made Arizona prominent in U.S. history and politics.

“There is another side of Arizona, like any other state, that has fought back through extraordinary movements, campaigns and struggles and helped to shape the national liberal and conservative agendas; the progressive stalwarts that churned out one of the most enlightened constitutions in the country,” Biggers told ADS.

“The labor ranks that challenged outside corporate power, including 20th century civil rights icon Cesar Chavez; and more centrist political figures, both liberal and conservative like Morris K. Udall and Barry Goldwater, that have defined Arizona and national politics. Today, that ‘other Arizona’ is more vibrant than ever — a new generation of fearless young Latino activists and retired baby boomers who led the successful movement to recall the ’Tea Party President’ and architect of SB1070 Russell Pearce, and progressive figures like U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva. I think they deserve more attention.”

According to Biggers, American citizens are angry with immigrants and deportation issues in Arizona as a direct result of politicians who constantly speak of jobs that immigrants take and the crime they bring into the country. Biggers notes, however, that the apprehension rates of undocumented immigrants are at their lowest since 1970 and “rates of violent crime along the U.S.-Mexico border have been falling for years — even before the U.S. security buildup.”

These facts, however, have not stopped some politicians from continuing to scare people by twisting misrepresenting the facts, and Biggers says he plans to use his book to set the record straight.

“Those are the facts. But they are meaningless for politicians like Russell Pearce, who has based his entire career on harboring fear of immigrants and a so-called “invasion” and takeover of the American way of life as a way of justifying state’s rights legislation,” Biggers told ADS.

“Gov. Jan Brewer embraced Pearce’s SB1070 fervor when a rancher was tragically shot in the borderlands. Her ratings soared, she became a national figure, and despite the facts on immigration and crime, Brewer has effectively ridden the ’brown scare’ wave to challenge President Obama and federal authority on issues of health care, guns, environmental regulations and even incandescent light bulbs.”

Despite the rise in anti-immigration sentiment in Arizona over the last few years, Biggers does not expect it to last much longer as the majority of people who have bought into SB1070 and other anti-immigration legislation, will soon be overtaken by a younger more diverse set of voters and citizens in the state.

“We’re not going to have this discussion in a few years. With the nation’s highest ‘cultural generation’ gap” —more than 80 percent of the aging population is Anglo, and roughly 60 percent of the children are from Latino families — Arizona has changed from 72 percent to 50 percent non-Latino in the past two decades. A historic demographic shift, galvanized by emerging new Latino political leadership and bipartisan allies, is inevitable,” Biggers says.