With apologies to Washington Irving, if Rip Van Winkle were living in Arizona and had fallen asleep in 1990, at the height of the Martin Luther King Holiday crisis, and woke up this year, he probably would have a sense of deja vu. Granted, the governor would be different, but the attitudes would be the same. But if there is any story which is relevant to the current situation in Arizona, it would be Washington Irving's other classic, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."
Last week Jan Brewer participated in a gubernatorial debate against her Democratic opponent in an effort to retain her position as governor of Arizona, which she ascended to after the previous governor, Janet Napolitano, was appointed by President Obama to become Secretary of Homeland Security. Much has been made of her rather embarrassing performance in the debate, from the long pause during her prepared remarks to the obvious lies about the state budget being balanced. But the biggest news out of the debate came when she defended signing Arizona's draconian anti-immigration law, with Ms. Brewer saying that headless corpses had been found in the middle of Arizona's deserts according to law enforcement sources she contacted. However, when reporters attempted to follow up on her headless corpses comment and ask her which law enforcement agencies gave her that information, she evaded the topic and whisked herself away.
Whether or not there were actually any headless corpses in the desert, it was enough to reinforce the GOP position on Arizona's "papers please" anti-immigration law, which not only threatened undocumented workers with detention and deportation at the whim of local police, but also threatened naturalized Hispanic citizens with racial profiling and harassment. Much has been discussed about the racial aspects of the law and whether Governor Brewer was playing to bigots and xenophobes, including whether the governor was racist herself.
Frankly, I don't know if Governor Brewer is racist. I can't peer into her psyche.
But interestingly enough, I can follow her money trail and see what other motives she had in passing the draconian anti-immigrant law.
In fact, the local CBS news station in Phoenix did just that. It appears that much of Ms. Brewer's campaign staff have lobbying ties to a for-profit private prison and detention enterprise called Corrections Corporation of America. The station reported how CCA was awarded several contracts for detention facilities in the state, and how CCA was her biggest campaign contributor. Of course, before a Federal court struck down the most insidious aspects of Arizona's anti-immigration law, CCA stood to gain a huge financial advantage by building and administering several detention facilities to hold illegal immigrants captured by police under the new law. Never mind that these facilities often cut corners with physical upkeep and staffing, hiring inexperienced and often poorly trained prison guards, and there's no need to bring up the fact that a couple of convicted murderers escaped from one of these for-profit prison facilities and went on to kill a couple in New Mexico; the point is, according to Ms. Brewer, these facilities are absolutely needed to stop all of the illegal immigrants who are crossing the border and causing crime to spiral out of control in Arizona.
But it appears that crime and illegal immigration are not spiraling out of control. In fact, over the past five years, both the number of incidents of violent crime and the number of undocumented immigrants crossing the Arizona border illegally have gone down, and has done so every year in the past five years.
But who needs pesky, inconvenient things like facts to interrupt a scary narrative?
Sadly, it appears that Ms. Brewer is using the fear card to enrich herself and her buddies at the expense of Arizonans. Just as the residents of Tarry Town were brought to terror by the mere mention of the Headless Horseman, Ms. Brewer is attempting to scare Arizona residents with the specter of headless corpses. And she will succeed at doing so if she is elected this November.