A recent immigration law passed by Arizona is allegedly aimed at cracking down on hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, but investigative reporter Greg Palast uncovered evidence suggesting that the racially-charged show-me-your-papers law is another Republican tactic aimed at suppressing Hispanic voters.

Politicians in Texas, Utah, Georgia, Ohio, Maryland, Colorado, North Carolina, and South Carolina want their states to adopt immigration laws similar to Arizona’s new law which doesn’t take affect for a few more months. But, that hasn’t stopped some of their law enforcement agencies from harassing some Arizona citizens now.

The media plays the story as a wave of racist, anti-immigration hysteria that made Arizona Republicans pass the racist law last week requiring every non-white person to carry papers proving their U.S. citizenship and claims of racial profiling are filling the air.

Racial profiling is nothing new. The Federal government has been doing it for years. For those claiming that the immigration law has nothing to do with racial profiling, an email — written by the writer of the bill, who has nothing to do with Arizona — reveals the intention of casting a wide net against Latinos and the racial intentions of the law.

Governor Brewer’s an Old Pro at Suppressing Voters

Palast’s investigation found that Arizona Republican Governor Janice Brewer signed the Nazi-esque law because of the exploding number of legal Hispanic U.S. citizens who vote — by more than two-to-one — for Democrats.

Jan Brewer is no stranger to suppressing Hispanic and other minority voters. In 2008, Brewer, then Secretary of State, organized a racially loaded purge of voter rolls — no less than 100,000, overwhelmingly Hispanic voters — that were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, in what Palast refers to as the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

Why? Voting or registering to vote if you’re not a citizen is a felony, yet not one of those rejected was ever arrested. Were the disenfranchised voters criminal, non-citizens or just non-white voters ensnared in document-chase trickery?

Given the fact that a federal prosecutor investigated over 100 complaints for almost 2 years and didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case, the answer is obvious.

David Iglesias was the prosecutor. He’s no longer a prosecutor because he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants so he was fired — his termination was personally ordered by President George W. Bush, under the orders of Karl Rove.

Desperately Impeding Mexican-Americans to Prevent Them from Voting

Iglesias’ jurisdiction was in New Mexico, but he was reportedly aware that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working hard nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, despite the fact that there were none. Iglesias was fired when he stood up to the Republicans vicious attack on citizenship.

Not Jan Brewer though. She followed Rove’s plan to a T. She used a 2004 Arizona law known as “Prop 200,” which required proof of citizenship to register to disenfranchise voters. Arizona Republicans — undoubtedly under orders from Republican leadership — have used ‘legislation’ to sanction the police to stop residents and prove citizenship as the latest desperate attempt to impede Mexican-Americans and prevent them from voting.

Brewer was not elected to be Arizona’s Governor. She was placed in office last year — for reasons only known to President Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel — when Arizona’s Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano was appointed to President Obama’s cabinet, which automatically moved Brewer into the Governor’s office.

Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce — sponsor of the latest ID scam law — revealed his true intentions of blocking the vote when he said there was a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country.

Unsurprisingly, when asked by Palast for a list of names and addresses from their phony registration forms — Pearce’s PR flak told Palast there were five million of them — they were unable to produce a single name.

Another Republican Tactic to Influence Elections and Disenfranchise Voters?

The ‘five million’ voters swimming the Rio Grande just to vote for Obama was calculated on a Republican website that extrapolated the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they weren’t citizens. Not one of those five million had registered to vote. They had registered to drive in order to obtain licenses as required by law.

Once again, the Republican party made up information thinking it would improve their image and once again Democrats did absolutely nothing to stop it. Democrats are aware of the games Republicans play, but never seem to be interested in doing anything about it. Of course, that’s primarily due to the fact that some Democrats are doing their part to fix elections too.

As noted by Mr. Palast, the vast majority of perfectly legal voters and residents who lack ID sufficient for Brewer and Pearce are citizens of color and citizens of poverty. A study conducted by Washington State University shows that minority citizens are half as likely as whites to have government ID. Those numbers are worse when income is factored in.

It’s no secret that George W. Bush is one of the few, if not the only, President ever to serve two terms without ever being elected. As the Republican party continues blocking financial reform and using every other obstructionist method they can think of to tie up Washington and make sure nothing gets done, it would not be surprising if the Nazi-esque Immigration ‘law’ was nothing more than another attempt to steal the upcoming elections for Republicans.

Was Arizona’a immigration law another Republican tactic to influence elections and disenfranchise voters? Only time will tell, but as noted by The American Prospect, the GOP’s vote-suppression playbook features everything from phony lawsuits to questionable investigations to authoritative-seeming reports, all with the aim of promoting restrictive laws.

Email | Share This

Back to Bill’s Blog | Bill’s Links and More