Arizona

My father was a flight instructor at Luke Field, west of Phoenix, during the Second World War and in 1943, while he was still a cadet, my mother made the journey cross-country on a Greyhound bus to marry him there. That would have been just another romantic war story but for the fact that my father had grown up with terrible allergies that were almost magically relieved by the pollen-free environment of the Arizona desert. So years after they were married, he persuaded my mother to revisit Arizona to explore the idea of relocating there, and we packed ourselves into our un-air-conditioned 1960 Plymouth Valiant to check it out.

I don’t remember a lot about the trip (except the heat in the backseat of the Valiant), but I do remember the thrill of being in cowboy country. Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona – it was an All-American landscape any boy could love. Mesa was our target city, and my mom and sister and I spent a few days enjoying the sights around town while my dad researched his professional opportunities there. Mesa was a small town then, probably no more than 50,000 people, and in the end my father had to agree that his prospects were probably better back home in Allentown. So, to my mother’s relief, we packed up and headed back east.

Mesa is a big city now, with an estimated population of about 450,000 people, and more than a quarter of its residents are Mexican or of Mexican descent. It’s also the home of State Senator Russell K. Pearce, the sponsor of Arizona’s recently enacted – and hugely controversial – immigration bill. A recent New York Times article reported that Pearce told journalists that he had promoted the bill to “give the police a tool to weed out criminals before they act and help foster a climate of toughness that would discourage more immigrants from coming.” And a climate of toughness is exactly what the bill has delivered.

The new legislation has been blasted by critics for its Gestapo-like approach to the problem of illegal immigration. The idea that police in Arizona are now authorized to demand identification from anyone they suspect might be an illegal immigrant has outraged civil liberties and human rights activists, and provided fodder for late-night comedians.

Here’s Seth Myers on Saturday Night Live:

“Could we all agree that there’s nothing more Nazi than saying ‘Show me your papers’? There’s never been a World War II movie that didn’t include the line ‘Show me your papers.’ It’s their catch-phrase! Every time someone says ‘Show me your papers,’ Hitler’s family gets a residual check.”

But the problem of illegal immigration is real, and though Arizona’s approach is cruel, unfair – and probably unconstitutional – there’s no doubt that a comprehensive, national solution to the challenge of illegal immigration is desperately needed.

What’s also needed is some sense of empathy from those of us who already enjoy the privilege of US citizenship. In 2010, it’s easy to forget that the United States is a nation of immigrants, and that it’s the grit, determination, energy and imagination of those immigrants that has made America strong and mighty. Way back when, we all (Native Americans, of course, excepted) came here from somewhere. And we need to remember that the circumstances that drove our ancestors to seek a better life in the United States are still priming the immigration pump today.

I don’t know how I would have felt about the immigration issue if my parents had decided to stay on in Mesa and raise our family there. As the city grew and the percentage of Mexicans – legal and illegal – increased, I hope I would have welcomed the new immigrants to the land of freedom and opportunity. I hope I would have understood the desperate circumstances – the crime, the violence and the poverty – that drove so many of them to risk everything for a better life in the US. And I hope I would have been a tireless defender of their human and civil rights.

But who knows? Life in Mesa might have made me intolerant and hard-hearted. I could have turned out like Russell K. Pearce. Worse, I could have found myself wearing a police uniform, walking a beat and enforcing the law… and asking some poor Mexican on the street to show me his papers.