Arizona Immigration: Just the Tip of the Iceberg

About a year-and-a-half ago, the first time I heard about Igor Panarin, I was absolutely convinced that the guy was crazy.

Now, as I watch what’s been going on in Arizona, I’m not so sure.

Panarin, a former KGB official and dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry academy for future diplomats, according to a December 2008 Wall Street Journal article, has predicted that the U.S. will splinter into six, separate “Republics” and territories, during the year 2010.

Panarin’s premise is that mass immigration, economic decline and moral degradation will be the cause of a civil war in this country, and lead to a collapse of the U.S. dollar in late June/early July, 2010. The Russian also predicted that “wealthier states will begin to withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the Union," according to the Journal.

Until very recently I had thought that Panarin was just “blowing smoke,” but the more I watch the right-wing political posturing and the increasing legislative "hard line" against all non-European Arizonans, I’m starting to wonder if Professor Panarin just might be right.

Less than a month after the passage of the country’s most stringent anti-immigration law in her state, Jan Brewer, Arizona’s governor, signed, despite a strong opposing statement by six United Nations human rights experts, another anti-immigrant-focused piece of legislation. This one was designed to prohibit Arizona public schools from offering classes primarily for students of a “particular ethnic group.” In case you weren’t paying full attention, that not only would prohibit heritage-focused classes for Mexican Americans, it also would ban Native-American and African-American studies courses throughout the state, effective January 2011. In teaching ethnic solidarity, says Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, the courses are also "teaching Latino students that they are oppressed by white people."

By the way, there are more than 275,000 black residents of Arizona, and their families will also be affected by all of this, though you wouldn’t know that from mainstream news coverage.

As if all of this hasn’t been enough, the state of Arizona and its public school system has also been working under a directive that requires that teachers whose spoken English is considered “heavily accented,” or ungrammatical, must be removed from classes for students who are still learning English. "Evaluators," believe it or not, have been dispatched across the state and have audited 1500 teachers, in 2008 and 2009, on things such as “comprehensible pronunciation.”

I’m just wondering...what part of England are these Arizona evaluators from that they can discern when a person is speaking English without an “accent?” Would Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Strom Thurmond, Haley Barbour, Bill Clinton or John F. Kennedy have been evaluated by them as speaking “without an accent?"

Are there really people in any part of this country who don't have some kind of regional accent? That, in my opinion, is just thinly disguised xenophobia and racism.

Needless to say, none of this is going down without incident. The city of Los Angeles, for example, with an elected Hispanic mayor and a 46.5 percent Hispanic population, has called for a boycott of the entire state of Arizona. And at the recent summit of the Union of South American Nations, the participants issued a strong statement condemning the law. Signers of the statement, which said the law would lead to “legitimization of racist attitudes,” included the presidents of Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Paraguay, chile, Bolivia, Venezuela and Argentina.

The truth is that what’s apparently taking place in Arizona is a great deal more complex than our mainstream media and elected leaders have led us to believe.

It reminds me of a trip I took to China in the mid-'80’s. On a tour bus through Macau, which, at the time, was still a neighboring Portuguese colony, the tour guide explained that, each day, tens of thousands of vendors from the Peoples' Republic of China would cross the border into Macau, sell their wares and return home to China each night. She was careful to point out, however, that on any given day, if the Chinese government wanted to do so, it could simply dispatch millions of Chinese citizens into Macau and encourage them to stay, and that Macau would be unable to do anything at all to make them leave. Macau, in 1999, by the way, was “handed over” by the Portuguese to the Peoples’ Republic.

Until 1836, what the U.S. now calls the state of Texas was actually a part of Mexico and, in 1848, the major portions of seven other current U.S. states – California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming – were also annexed, from Mexico, by the United States.
There was, of course, great resistance by the Mexicans, there was war and many bloody battles related to all of this but, in the end, those territories became a part of the U.S. and the size of Mexico was reduced by 45 percent.

Why else would all of those great U.S. cities in the southwest have Spanish, Mexican-derived names, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Mesa, Casa Grande, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, and El Paso?

Right up to the present day, there are many in Mexico, who still believe that the greater part of what is now called the southwestern United States is, actually, their own ancestral homeland.
To further complicate all of this, the Arizona legislature also has voted to advance a bill that would require all future U.S. presidential candidates to present their birth certificates, prior to being placed on the ballot for national election in the state of Arizona. Not adhering to the law, experts say, would be sufficient grounds to have a presidential candidate, such as Barack Obama, removed from the ballot.

All this brings us right back to our friend, Igor Panarin. According to his prediction, these kinds of controversies will lead, among other things, to Hawaii reverting to its former Asian control, Alaska reverting to its former Russian control and the rest of the continental United States being divided into four separate republics.

The “California Republic” would include seven states, including California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah. The “Texas Republic” would include nine states under the influence of Mexico, whose people, as in the Chinese example, already seem to be simply moving across the U.S. border, unrestrained, every day, and not returning home.

“Atlantic America,” according to Panarin, would include eighteen largely mid-Atlantic states, ranging from South Carolina to Maine, and the “Central North American Republic,” would include fourteen states in the North Central part of the country under the influence of Canada.

If this sounds a little far-fetched to you, please note that more than ten other states are also considering Arizona-type pieces of legislation, including Colorado, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Idaho, Utah, Missouri, Texas, North Carolina, Maryland and Minnesota. And, right here in Pennsylvania, former Lt. Governor candidate and state representative Daryl Metcalfe is a leading supporter of H.B. 2479, which would, among other things, direct the state's police officers to "attempt to verify the immigration status of suspected illegal aliens."

While I hope Panarin, the former KGB agent, was dead wrong in his predictions, I am starting to suspect that this is all so much bigger than "immigration" and it's just the "tip of the iceberg" of the deep political, scape-goating emotions that are spawned, routinely, by a depressed national economy.

While we, in the black community, watch, distractedly, what is happening to people who speak with "heavy Spanish accents" in Arizona, we would be well-advised to remember the old quote: "If they come for me in the night, they'll be coming for you in the morning."

I'm sure we'll be hearing more about all of this, in the not-too-distant future.



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