Crossing into Arizona, migrants had to traverse lethal desert conditions. They also walked into a state that, unlike California, remained majority white. That was in part thanks to a migrant influx of a different sort: people from across the United States—including from places like Joe Arpaio’s native Massachusetts—flooded into the state’s cheap and sun-soaked exurban developments, many of them retirees.71 Americans riding the easy-credit housing boom migrated from the Northeast and Midwest, and also from California, whence an estimated more than 186,000 arrived between 1995 and 2000 alone.72 Many moved to Maricopa County, which had among the largest net gain of elderly people of any county nationwide.73
The California exodus included Voice of Citizens Together/American Patrol founder Glenn Spencer, a far-right, Tanton-funded Proposition 187 activist;74 and Chris Simcox, who would go on to found the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, an outgrowth of the 2005 Minuteman Project border mobilization.75 Many Californians were likely fleeing high housing prices and in search of a low-tax haven.76 Spencer moved because his state had lost what he called a “demographic war” to Mexico.77 “California has been destroyed by illegal immigration,” Spencer wrote in 2003. “Americans, especially white Americans, should get out of California—now, before it is too late to salvage the equity they have in their homes and the value of their businesses.”78
In 1998, California voters had passed Proposition 227, restricting bilingual instruction in public schools.79 But it was the movement’s last gasp in a state that was shifting decisively left. For people like Spencer, the white supremacist Golden State dream was over. Arizona, then, was the state to secure the conquest of 1848, a last stand for an Anglo and English-speaking Southwest. “I moved from Los Angeles because of illegal immigration,” said a Scottsdale woman in 2004. “Now the problems are following us to Arizona.”80
Arpaio’s Arizona passed a raft of anti-immigrant bills in the 2000s. Proposition 200, passed in 2004, required proof of citizenship for public services and to register to vote (the latter was blocked by federal courts), and required that state employees report any undocumented immigrants who tried to apply for services anyway.81 In 2006, Proposition 100 (also ultimately struck down in court) denied bail to undocumented immigrants charged with “serious” crimes.82 That same year, Proposition 102 barred awarding civil damages to undocumented immigrants;83 Proposition 103 made English the official language;84 and Proposition 300 denied in-state higher education tuition and state financial aid to undocumented students, and childcare funding to undocumented parents.85 According to the National Institute on Money in Politics, six anti-immigration groups, including Tanton’s FAIR and U.S. English, provided the vast majority of funding behind the measures.86 “The political and emotional landscape [of Arizona] is almost identical,” remarked Dan Schnur, a former aide to Governor Wilson. “History doesn’t repeat itself, it just moves east.”87
In April 2010, Republican governor Jan Brewer signed the anti-immigrant Senate Bill 1070 into law. Among other things it directed law enforcement to search out people suspected of being undocumented immigrants, imposing the Maricopa County model statewide.88 It also targeted day laborers and their employers, which in Arizona and elsewhere had become a flashpoint in the anti-immigrant reaction.89 The law, entitled the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, was the most significant moment in popular immigration politics since the Sensenbrenner bill. It was drafted by state senator Russell Pearce with help from the most consequential legal activist in the nativist movement: Kris Kobach, the lawyer with FAIR’s Immigration Reform Law Institute who helped develop Bush’s post-9/11 crackdown on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.90 Kobach also helped develop the overall strategy behind SB 1070 and the rush of other state and local laws: “attrition through enforcement,” or compelling immigrants to “self-deport” by making life in the United States too difficult.91 Pearce also had input from the private prison company Corrections Corporation of America, according to an NPR investigation, through their joint participation in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which brings conservative state legislators and business together.92
Eighteen days later, Brewer signed a law (this one also later blocked in court) banning ethnic studies and any instruction that sought to “promote the overthrow of the United States government” in state public schools. It was an effort to shut down Tucson’s Chicano studies program. State superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne complained of one Chicano history book that taught “kids that they live in occupied America, or occupied Mexico.”93 As the right denounced an imaginary immigrant reconquista, they attempted to ban teaching about the actual history of settler-colonial conquest.
Arizona’s nativist revolt took root throughout the 2000s and was then turbocharged by and merged with the Tea Party.94 Arizona’s nativist movement shared the profile of California’s suburban 1990s revolt. Arpaio’s base included the outer Phoenix suburbs, places like Sun City, a massive retirement community where deputies in 2008 conducted an immigration sweep after the sheriff received a letter complaining that employees at a local McDonald’s spoke Spanish.95 The domestic migrants that comprised much of Arpaio’s base, however, had helped create the demand for immigrant labor because their arrival sparked an enormous housing boom. Maricopa County added more housing units than any county nationwide in the 2000s.96 That boom, combined with border enforcement’s rerouting of migration routes away from California, drew in more Mexicans. By 2006, foreign-born Hispanics made up more than a third of the state’s construction workforce.97
In 2008, that real estate boom exploded in a spectacular bust. By 2009, Arizona registered the second-highest foreclosure rate nationwide.98 At year’s end, the state’s unemployment rate reached nearly 11 percent.99 By 2011, home prices had fallen by half in Phoenix, nearly double the national average.100 The stampede of Americans relocating to the area slowed to a crawl.101 Arizona’s boomtown future was suddenly beset by doubt. The white, retired middle-class Tea Party base was far from the hardest hit. But the “threats to these investments convinced many Tea Partiers that hard work is no longer fairly rewarded in America,” as Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson write.102 One study found that the crisis accompanied a major deterioration of attitudes toward undocumented Mexicans, particularly though not exclusively among whites.103 The study was limited to state university students in Arizona, and so likely found levels of anti-immigrant sentiment much lower than existed within a general population that included older whites.
It was a state founded on seized Mexican territory with a long history of segregation and racism, in explicit contrast to a heavily Mexican-descended New Mexico.104 A governing class of conservative developmentalist elites had transformed the desert outpost into the sprawling conurbation that produced Barry Goldwater—right-wing senator, Civil Rights Act opponent, and 1964 Republican presidential nominee.105 Phoenix was touted as a “romantic, urban, Anglo metropolis” with suburban homes for “the new metropolitan cowboy conservative.”106 But the conservative, elite-led growth machine created a reactionary constituency of white middle-class homeowners that would revolt against it.107
The decline of the high-tech industry in the 1970s made Phoenix increasingly reliant on real estate and services.108 “As long as new blood and new business kept heading into the state, Arizona met its budget.”109 The crisis struck deep. White transplant retirees worried that their rapidly depreciating homes were paying taxes for educating Latino youth.110 Latina reproduction was targeted. “The birth rate among illegal immigrants is substantially higher than the population at large,” wrote senator and 1070 sponsor Russell Pearce in exposed e-mails. “Battles commence as Mexican nationalists struggle to infuse their men into American government and strengthen control over their strongholds. One look at Los Angeles with its Mexican-American mayor shows you Vicente Fox’s general Varigossa [sic] commanding an American city.”111
Shortly after SB 1070’s passage, Pearce led a failed eff
ort to deny birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants,* saying that kids “are citizens of the country of their mother … That’s why they are called in some cases ‘jackpot babies’ or ‘anchor babies.’”112 The state’s economy demanded immigrant labor to build its homes and to staff its hospitality industry. But just as in California, many Arizonans consuming the fruit of immigrant labor found the presence of Mexican workers to be intolerable.
In California, immigrants had been portrayed as both an economic and criminal threat, and Prop 187 emphasized the denial of public services. By contrast, the politics around SB 1070 fixated on the criminal threat posed by Mexicans, and the law emphasized expanding law enforcement powers. Ever present was the fear of drug cartels shaped by the widely publicized violence of Mexico’s drug war, which had exploded in 2006. “We cannot afford all this illegal immigration and everything that comes with it, everything from the crime and to the drugs and the kidnappings and the extortion and the beheadings and the fact that people can’t feel safe in their community. It’s wrong! It’s wrong!” Brewer said, defending the law on Fox News.113
There had been no beheadings. A paranoid Brewer had projected US-driven drug violence in Mexico to north of the border.114 The threat was crystalized for many in the shooting death of Rob Krentz, a prominent southeast Arizona rancher, less than a month before the passage of SB 1070.115 The murder was popularly attributed to Mexican drug smugglers, though the killer has never been identified.116 There was no border, nativists insisted, and so the border was everywhere.
Which of two sovereigns
The Obama administration sued Arizona and in 2012 won a Supreme Court ruling that struck down much of SB 1070, which was later further winnowed down by a 2016 settlement with rights groups.117 But notably, Obama’s lawyers did not argue against the law on the grounds that it violated civil rights but rather because it unconstitutionally “preempted” federal immigration law.118 In short, they contended that the Constitution made it the federal government’s job to detain and deport immigrants, not Arizona’s. The federal government, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. noted, already used the Secure Communities and 287(g) programs to do much of what Arizona was attempting to accomplish by allowing local police to enforce immigration law.119
Famed Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse wrote that she found oral arguments in the case “utterly depressing,” noting “the failure of any participant in the argument, justice or advocate for either side, to affirm the simple humanity of Arizona’s several hundred thousand undocumented residents.” The two sides sparred over “which of two sovereigns, the United States or the state of Arizona, has the right to make the immigrants’ lives difficult.” Arizona was right, she concluded, to suggest that the state “was simply following Washington’s lead.”120
Obama’s strategy worked in court but failed politically. The activists mobilized against Arizona’s law seized on its unpopularity among liberals as an opportunity to draw attention to Secure Communities, its more consequential federal counterpart—managed by President Obama, who had been elected as a liberal hero. By 2013, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, Secure Communities was responsible for a majority of interior deportations nationwide.121 The problem for Obama was that SB 1070—declared odious by Obama and a broad swath of mainstream opinion—substantively resembled Obama’s policies, so much so that they argued that federal policies made the Arizona law redundant.
“This is the manifestation of all the repressive laws that the Obama administration has been promoting,” said Sal Reza, then a leader of Puente Arizona, as he and other activists blocked an entrance to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Fourth Avenue Jail.* “Obama is hiding behind the lawsuit [against SB 1070] while 287(g) and Secure Communities are empowering people like Sheriff Joe.”122
Secure Communities had initially received little public attention even as DHS announced enormous numbers detained under the program.123 Arizona’s “show me your papers” law, however, energized immigrant activists and Democratic voters wary of the Tea Party’s rise. The grassroots activists were determined to link the Arizona law to White House policy, and turned to city halls and state legislatures nationwide in an effort to thwart Secure Communities at its entry point, warning that the law would harm police-community relations and incentivize racial profiling.
“The passage of S.B. 1070 in Arizona should be proof enough of the dangerous and disastrous nature of ICE-police collaboration programs like the so-called Secure Communities program,” said NDLON executive director Pablo Alvarado in April 2010, announcing a lawsuit against the federal government seeking the disclosure of information about the federal program. “The President should heed his own advice and act responsibly by reclaiming the federal government’s exclusive authority over the nation’s immigration laws. By terminating all police and ICE partnerships, the President can help restore community safety and protect civil rights and due process for all.”124
Soon thereafter, the City Council of Washington, DC, unanimously announced its support for the nationwide movement to boycott Arizona, and called on police to thwart Secure Communities by refusing to share arrest data with DHS.125 Other cities, like Arlington, Virginia, and Santa Clara, California, tried to block Secure Communities as well. In 2011, Illinois, New York and Massachusetts announced that they were pulling out of the program.126
Obama charged that measures like SB 1070 “threaten to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans.” He blamed Congress, saying that “our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others.”127 Yet in May 2010 Obama responded by announcing the deployment of 1,200 National Guard troops to the border and visited Republican lawmakers to make the case that he was outdoing Bush on border security. He hoped that, in return, they would support CIR. By this time, however, it wasn’t just immigration extremists in Tom Tancredo’s mold standing in his way but also ostensible Republican moderates like Senator Olympia Snowe. Onetime CIR champion John McCain asserted that a deployment of six thousand troops was required. “I said we needed to secure the border first,” said McCain, recounting his meeting with Obama. “I pointed out that members of his administration who have not read the [Arizona] law have mischaracterized the law.”128
In August 2011, as Obama fought the law in court, his administration suddenly informed states and localities that their rebellion against Secure Communities was futile: DHS tore up their agreements and asserted that the program was, despite all misdirection to the contrary, essentially mandatory.129 All along, ICE had sent mixed messages about whether localities could opt out, suggesting at some points that it was voluntary, at other times that it was compulsory. Now, ICE was on the defensive. The public records lawsuit filed on behalf of NDLON by the Center for Constitutional Rights and others had surfaced internal government discussions about how to handle the local rebellion. One takeaway, according to the federal judge handling the case, was that there was “ample evidence that ICE and DHS have gone out of their way to mislead the public about Secure Communities.”130
Activists had exploited the backlash against SB 1070 to embarrass the federal government, forcing it to reveal that its mass deportation campaign had always been premised on a lie. The program had been sold as federal cooperation with localities; in reality, it was a negotiation-free imposition that commandeered local law enforcement. ICE was happy for localities to believe Secure Communities was voluntary only so long as everyone volunteered.
Even as Obama ramped up deportations, his administration attempted to differentiate its policies from Republican extremists, fighting SB 1070 in court and, in September 2010, suing Arpaio for refusing to cooperate with a civil rights investigation.131 The president was protected on his left flank by his close ties to major establishment immigration reform groups like the National Council of La Raza, the National Immigration Forum, and the Center for American Progres
s. According to Ana Avendaño, who led immigration policy at the AFL-CIO, there were constant White House attempts to “get us to tow the CIR line … most nefariously, over ending the deportations.”132 The Obama-tied establishment coalition, as political scientist Alfonso Gonzales writes, worked “to pacify the migrant movement and channel the popular demands of migrant workers” toward CIR.133 But the radical movement wouldn’t be checked. The awkward convergence between Obama and the nakedly right-wing Arizona law surfaced a divide in the immigrant rights movement and opened space for grassroots organizers to mobilize against the president.
Real America
The Tea Party movement had taken off in February 2009 in response to a mainly imaginary government bailout of “loser” underwater homeowners.134 Both grassroots-driven and Koch brothers–funded, the movement was a right-wing fiscal revolt and, as with California’s in the 1990s, it made nativism “central to [its] ideology.”135 It was a reactionary politics waged on racial, generational, and economic grounds, a rebellion against government redistributing the wealth of older white Americans to subsidize the rise of a diverse younger generation that would replace them.
The movement evaluated “entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.” And “two groups of people [were] unambiguously included in the ‘nonworking’ population: young people and unauthorized immigrants.”136 Obama, they worried, would legalize the undocumented to create a vast new pool of Democratic voters. Obama’s banal campaign call for “change” likely suggested something entirely sinister.
In 2010, hundreds of Tea Party activists rallied at the border southeast of Tucson with nativist luminaries including Arpaio, Arizona state senator Pearce, and former Republican congressman J. D. Hayworth, who was running a nativist primary challenge against McCain. “Instead of finding bugs in our beds, we’re finding home invaders,” said Tucson radio host Tony Venuti, attaching a sign to the border fence directing migrants away from the demographically fragile white utopia of Arizona and toward a Los Angeles presumably lost to the Mexicans.137 Fox News launched a series of stories about the border entitled “America’s Third War,” summoning the specter of the “Third World” while also riffing off Hayworth’s declaration on Fox & Friends that, “It’s not so much that we’re losing a war. We’re failing to fight it.”138
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