José Crow: How Arizona's hunt for "aliens" will steal a tight Senate race
by Greg Palast for ColdType (An excerpt from Billionaires & Ballot Bandits)
“There is a massive effort underway to register illegal aliens in this country!”
– Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce
– Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce
The Arizona Republican hunt for "aliens" from Uranus to the Rio Grande
has led to the removal of over 200,000 citizens, overwhelmingly Latino,
from the state's voter rolls. There's more than an even chance that
vote "suppression" - the polite word for racist, José Crow racial
tactics - will result in the Democrats losing an open seat in the U.S.
Senate where Democratic Hispanic Richard Carmona is pulling ahead of
Republican Jeff Flake.
But I don't think Carmona wants to win with illegal alien votes. After all, an alien voting has committed a crime - yet no one was arrested. Why? I flew out to Phoenix to investigate – and ended up in jail. That is, I visited the infamous tent prison of Sheriff Joe Arpaio who has led the alien hunt in his state.
But before I broke into Arpaio's prison, I called his political ally, Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, who sponsored one of the nation’s nastiest ID laws, Prop 200. It requires all new voting registrants to prove they are US citizens.
But I don't think Carmona wants to win with illegal alien votes. After all, an alien voting has committed a crime - yet no one was arrested. Why? I flew out to Phoenix to investigate – and ended up in jail. That is, I visited the infamous tent prison of Sheriff Joe Arpaio who has led the alien hunt in his state.
But before I broke into Arpaio's prison, I called his political ally, Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, who sponsored one of the nation’s nastiest ID laws, Prop 200. It requires all new voting registrants to prove they are US citizens.
When I heard about all these illegal aliens wading the Rio Grande, I had to call Senator Pearce’s office.
“How many illegal aliens have actually been registered?” I asked.
Pearce’s PR flak told me, five million. All Democrats too.
FIVE MILLION? WOW!! Our investigations team flew to Arizona to look
for these hordes of voters swimming the Rio Grande – just so they could
vote for Obama.
We wanted Pearce to give us their names and addresses so we could bust
a bunch and get a Pulitzer Prize. It should be easy: their names and
addresses are on their felonious registration forms. I’d happily make a
citizen’s arrest of each one, on camera. But Pearce ducked us, literally
hiding from our cameras. Turns out, he didn’t have five million names.
He didn’t have five. He didn’t have one.
His five million alien voters came from a Republican website that
extrapolated from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused
jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had
registered to vote: they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law.
The illegal voters, “wetback” welfare moms, and alien job-thieves are
just GOP website wet-dreams, but their mythic PR power helps the party’s
electoral hacks chop away at voter rolls and civil rights with little
more than a whimper from the Democrats.
There are only four proofs of citizenship in the USA:
1. If you have your original birth certificate. Good luck with that,
especially among the Hispanic poor who had home births and little access
to such records.
2. A US passport. (Not many of the clerks working at Wal-Mart look
like they’d just come back from their ski vacation in the Alps.)
3. Naturalization papers. If you become a citizen, you have documents
that say so. The problem is that most Hispanic families in Arizona were
citizens of the USA before there was a USA. They are natural, not
naturalized, citizens, and so don’t have the papers.
4. White skin. In Arizona, according to the US Justice Department,
the cops accept that white skin is a proof of citizenship. Maricopa
County (Phoenix) Sheriff Joe Arpaio is on trial for having his cops stop
citizens of brownish hue, demanding their citizenship papers and
tossing them in the hooskow when they don’t.
I tested the white-skin-is-citizenship rule myself. I went to visit
Arpaio’s famous (infamous?) open-air prison in the desert. You can see
the sign, ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE PROHIBITED FROM VISITING ANYONE IN THIS
JAIL – SHERIFF JOE ARPAIO. What if he found out that Grandma Palast
snuck in from Windsor, Canada!
Not to worry: the sheriff ’s crew was happy to escort me and my investigations chief, Badpenny, around Tent City, and the deportee-sniffing professionals never asked for her citizenship papers. She doesn’t have them because she’s not a citizen. But she did remember to bring her white skin.
But hunting for illegal aliens isn’t the point. Arizona Hispanics vote
two-to-one Democratic and if they were all allowed to register, the
Republican sheriff and the state GOP would be toast. Or, I should say,
tortillas.
And it’s darn effective. So far, not one illegal alien has been caught
voting – but one in three registrations in Phoenix have been rejected.
Olé, Señor Rove!
But you can't fool all of the voters
all of the time. On November 21, 2011, Russell Pearce was re-called
and removed from office by the voters of Arizona. Apparently, his José
Crow tactics are alien to most citizens of the state.
Much of the work exposing Pearce and his racial trickery goes to Democracy for America. We are proud to have DFA as an action group partner in the release of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Go to BallotBandits.org for other Action Groups, the book, excerpts and the 7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits free poster/leaflet download.
Much of the work exposing Pearce and his racial trickery goes to Democracy for America. We are proud to have DFA as an action group partner in the release of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Go to BallotBandits.org for other Action Groups, the book, excerpts and the 7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits free poster/leaflet download.
