Abstract
In a seemingly post-racial moment in 2010, Arizona’s Senate Bill (SB) 1070 was under fire and challenged as racially discriminatory. While the 2010 immigration bill was popular among white Arizonians, critics charged that SB 1070 could facilitate the racial profiling of all Latinos/as in state law enforcement officers’ efforts to check the legal status of those they suspect are undocumented. Analyzing 70 recordings from the Arizona house floor, press conferences, and television interviews during 2009–2012, I investigate how public officials discuss their support for this contested legislation. Proponents of the bill largely used color-blind maneuvers in response to questions concerning racial profiling but simultaneously constructed racialized undocumented immigrants as criminals and economic burdens. Consequently, political supporters of SB 1070 engaged in a racial discourse evoking an implicit white injury ideology that positioned whites as injured by the presence of racialized immigrants, while all Latinos/as were constructed as outside the (white, injured) citizenry.
The successes of the Civil Rights Movement are often touted as examples of how the United States has shifted away from its racist past and evolved into a post-racial society (Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith 1997; Bonilla-Silva 2010; Haney López 1996). Additionally, most Americans claim that they do not see race and openly espouse the idea that whites are not racially superior to other groups (Bonilla-Silva 2010; Bonilla-Silva and Forman 2000; Lewis 2001). The election and subsequent reelection of the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, further suggested to many that the United States had finally entered a post-racial moment. Following this logic, racism, it would appear, is a fire that has long been extinguished. However, the post-racial claim has not gone uncontested, and racism, like the ashes of a fire, continues to linger even in the post-Civil Rights era (Bonilla-Silva 2010; Myers 2003; Picca and Feagin 2007).
Modern-day racism exists in new forms, including what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2010) calls “color-blind racism.” This contemporary racism still reinforces racial inequality but is done and reproduced through coded and seemingly nonracial practices. Bonilla-Silva contends that part of the ideology of color-blind racism is that white Americans claim that race is no longer relevant by arguing that the challenges faced by people of color can be explained by nonracial causes. As part of this process, whites often use coded language in public to talk about people of color in ways that do not sound explicitly racist (Bonilla-Silva 2010; Myers 2003; Picca and Feagin 2007).
In Bonilla-Silva’s (2010) analysis of interview data, white respondents employ four color-blind frames—abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and the minimization of racism—to justify or explain away racism directed to black Americans. While this research helps demonstrate how one form of contemporary or color-blind racism functions, very little research has located how color-blind racism operates outside the historically black/white paradigm to include Latinos/as 1 (Maldonado 2009; Moras 2010). It is important to expand this research because Latinos/as comprise the largest minority group in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau 2007). Moreover, Latinos/as may experience group-specific processes of racialization. For instance, U.S.-born Latinos/as can be perceived as foreigners vis-à-vis cues, such as phenotype and/or surname (Jiménez 2008). Inversely, immigrants are often racialized as and associated with Latinos/as in mainstream media (Browne, Deckard, and Rodriguez 2016; Chavez 2013). In the public sphere, the “white racial frame” depicts people of color disparagingly in contrast to whites (Feagin 2013). In analyzing legal data, Carter and Lippard (2015) found interest groups in favor of Senate Bill (SB) 1070 used a discourse that supports Blumer’s (1958) group position theory by using language that could inspire prejudice against undocumented Mexican immigrants.
The framing of Latinos/as in the public sphere can also be complicated by immigration status. For instance, sociologist Hana Brown (2013) found that anti-Latino mobilization efforts for 1990s-era welfare reform relied on two different frames in California and Arizona. In California, welfare reformists used the legality frame, which demarcated the differences between undocumented and documented immigrants. Arizona, on the other hand, relied on the racial frame, which “explicitly racializes moral worth, blaming Hispanics or Mexicans for the suffering of deserving White American citizens” (Brown 2013:291). This research suggests the racial discourse concerning Latinos/as can be nuanced as the intersection of race and citizenship may impact the extent to which speech is color-blind or not. While contemporary social mores suggest that the expressions of racism are socially unacceptable, the mores concerning discussions of race and illegality may be less predictable (HoSang 2010; Jacobson 2008).
The widely presumed post-racial climate of the United States was tested when on April 23, 2010, Arizona Governor Janice Brewer signed into law the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, more popularly known (and hereafter referred to) as SB 1070. While the bill was popular among white Arizonians (Steinhauser 2010), the response to the legislation was heated. One of the provisions read:
any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made . . . to determine the immigration status of the person. (Senate Bill 1070 2010)
At the heart of the debate, critics were concerned the legislation could facilitate the racial profiling of Latinos/as of all immigration statuses in state law enforcement officers’ efforts to check the legal status of those they suspect are undocumented. These racial profiling concerns hit the national spotlight and sparked contestations against the bill, including a U.S. Ninth Circuit Court injunction and later a U.S. Department of Justice investigation. In the midst of this controversy, critics asked pro–SB 1070 elected officials, “What does an illegal 2 immigrant look like?” This controversial question brought to the fore questions of racialized group membership and illegality, even in a supposed post-racial moment. Therefore, this article asks: how then did elected officials discuss their support for SB 1070? An examination of racial discourse concerning SB 1070—arguably the most publicly contested immigration legislation in recent times—is a fruitful site in which to explore distinct processes of racialization even in a social climate that is often regarded as post-racial. In doing so, this work also takes on the critical call made to sociologists to explore how discourse can be a field where the racialization of immigrants transpires (Saenz and Douglas 2015).
As I will demonstrate, public officials in support of SB 1070 pulled from an implicit reliance on white injury ideology to mark categories of worth along racial lines. White injury ideology, first developed by ethnic studies scholar Lisa Cacho (2000), is a concept used to describe how whites conceive of themselves as victims of Latino immigration. In the case of SB 1070, supporters of the bill positioned whites as the victims of immigration while immigrants were constructed as threats and Latinos/as of all statuses were left outside the boundaries of citizenship. In this article, I bridge the literature on color-blind racism and anti-immigrant racism. Consequently, the findings support the concept of white injury ideology, which helps explain how racism continues to burn in a so-called post-racial era.
I analyze 70 recordings from the Arizona house floor, press conferences, and television interviews that include 32 public officials that hold state or federal positions. Elite actors are able to inspire racial prejudice in matters of immigration (Carter and Lippard 2015), but elected and public officials have considerable influence with both their governing power and ability to sway political attitudes (Matsubayashi 2013). Supporters of SB 1070 demonstrated their support for the bill by relying primarily on three strategies: (1) denying and minimizing racial profiling concerns, (2) constructing immigrants as criminals, and (3) casting immigrants as economic threats. While the three strategies were not mutually exclusive and the racial/anti-immigrant discourse was often both coded and explicit, supporters ultimately relied on an appeal to a white injury ideology to make their claims. Whites were constructed as injured or threatened Americans deserving of protection, leaving Latinos/as of all statuses outside the citizenry.
Arizona Under Fire: Racism, Discourse, and Ideology
Using Bonilla-Silva’s (2010) conceptualization of color-blind racism, whites’ color-blind discourse is accomplished through four frames, or central organizing ideas, packaged for an audience (Gamson and Stuart 1992). Bonilla-Silva’s (2010) abstract liberalism frame relies on abstract expressions of equal opportunity without an understanding of how institutional factors constrain choices and opportunities. The naturalization frame can be explained by sentiments such as “that is how things are” or claims that racial differences are natural. Examples of the cultural racism frame include attributing racial inequality to cultural differences, thereby placing the burden of inequality on people of color. The minimization of racism is “a frame that suggests discrimination is no longer a central factor affecting minorities’ life chances” (Bonilla-Silva 2010:29) and constructs racism as something that is only very explicit, such as the use of racial slurs.
While the lens of color-blind racism helps one understand one form of continuing racism, the research on anti-immigrant racism is also a useful tool to theorize contemporary processes of racialization. Scholarship in this area has documented how the antithesis of the immigrant, the U.S. citizen, was legally constructed as white (Haney-López 1996). One of the nation’s first statutes in 1790 required potential naturalized citizens to be free white persons (Haney-López 1996). This racial prerequisite for citizenship stood as a strong historical testament that whiteness and citizen were seen as one and the same to the detriment of people considered nonwhite.
While Mexicans in the United States had long been racialized before the 1920s, there was still no such thing as an “illegal” Mexican until 1924. As a response to rising immigration rates, Border Patrol was instituted in 1924, and the idea of an illegal migrant was born (Ngai 2003). In this case, illegality was associated with a specific racialized group and was constructed and codified into law as a way to curtail immigration. As historian Mae Ngai (2003:7) notes: “The actual and imagined association of Mexicans with illegal immigration was part of an emergent Mexican ‘race problem’ which also witnessed the application of Jim Crow segregation laws to Mexicans in the Southwest.” In the ensuring decades, the association between illegality and the racialization of Mexicans or Latinos/as would solidify further.
Recognizing the connections between race and the construction of immigrants, legal scholar Robert Chang (1999) argues that Asians and Latinos/as are perpetually marked as foreign and that therefore borders and the color-line are figuratively inscribed on the bodies of these racial others. As a result, Latinos/as can be racially profiled during public displays of punitive immigration enforcement (Romero 2008, 2011a), and such discrimination is even codified by legal precedent. The 1975 case United States v. Brignoni-Ponce established that U.S. Border Patrol has the policing power to interrogate and detain individuals based on an apparent “Mexican” appearance (Romero 2008) even though Whren v. The United States (1996) establishes racial profiling as illegal. While Latinos/as may be racially profiled as foreigners, whites continue to be racially constructed as true American citizens (Bloch 2013; Calavita 2007; Haney-López 1996; HoSang 2010; Hughey 2012).
On matters of immigration then, race remains pertinent. For example, while SB 1070 is an immigration bill, the racial discourse in Arizona focused almost exclusively on Latino/a immigrants (Orozco 2012). Racial discourse can be defined as the societal conversations and texts in which ideologies over race preside (Doane 2006). Ideologies help individuals make sense of the world, but “ideologies are not just about ideas . . . to have salience and resonance, ideologies must produce narratives that explain the world in ways that make sense to people” (Bonilla-Silva, Lewis, and Embrick 2004:560). Ideologies help individuals make sense of their lives, but they do not need to be plausible or accurate; most often, ideologies help individuals make sense of contradictions (Fields 1990). For instance, despite whites’ racially privileged position in society, white injury ideology supports the notion that whites are injured by the presence of racialized others.
White injury ideology is understood as the often imagined injury, innocent victimhood, or potential threat that can be targeted to a white citizenry. Scholar Lisa Marie Cacho (2000) has documented how white injury ideology was used to mobilize California’s 1994 Proposition 187. While the proposition was intended to cut social services to undocumented immigrants, support for the proposition was mobilized by whites’ economic insecurities and racial fears of a growing Latino/a population in the state (Cacho 2000). Supporters of this seemingly “color-blind” proposition mobilized support for this measure by constructing whites as suffering from the presence of racialized “illegals.” Indeed, it is during this time that the term illegal shifted from an adjective to a racialized noun (HoSang 2010:167) and became an effective anti-immigrant mobilizing force (Brown 2013; Jacobson 2008).
White injury ideology highlights how whiteness is activated in matters that implicate a relationality to racialized others. This is particularly important considering that whiteness is often experienced as an invisible category for white individuals (Hartmann, Gerteis, and Croll 2009). However ambiguous or ever changing the racial category denoted as “white,” whiteness is highlighted when it appears under attack or could be leveraged for better opportunities or social standing (Roediger 1991). Similar to Blumer’s (1958) concept of group threat, dominant groups establish their dominance when it appears the group’s privilege is threatened. Interestingly, in discussions of SB 1070, supporters may make threat claims, but this can take on many meanings: from threat of losing resources to an articulation of threat based on possible physical harm (Carter and Lippard 2015). Notwithstanding, this does not suggest that all whites would adhere to an injury ideology, nor does a focus on ideology suggest individual attitudes. Instead, white injury ideology is a situated ideology that can be hegemonic in a particular moment and place, just as whiteness itself can take on hegemonic repertoires (Hughey 2010).
Settings and the groups in question also matter. Kristen Myers’s (2003) conceptualization of “white fright” suggests that many whites are fearful of growing minority populations, but this explicit race talk happens in private. Public discussions are likely to be much more coded than private dialogue, particularly because being called a racist is particularly disparaging (Doane 2006). On the other hand, discussions about Latinos and undocumented immigration can be coded, using immigration as a rhetorical shield against charges of racism. That is, any color-blind discussion against Latino immigration can take on Bonilla-Silva’s minimization of racism or naturalization frame to argue that the topic at hand is ostensibly not about race and racism but instead about color-blind laws already in place. Short of someone, for example, using racial slurs against immigrants, those engaging in anti-immigrant race talk can use the minimization frame to argue their claims are about anything other than race.
Leading up to SB 1070, some conservative Arizona elected officials had perceived a “triple threat” to the people of Arizona: a growing Latino/a population, a weakened economy, and perceived violence on the border (Gonzalez de Bustamante 2012). In 2010, white Arizonians made up the majority of the state at 57 percent, while Latinos/as represented the second largest group at approximately 30 percent of the population (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). While Arizona was also in the throes of an economic downturn, SB 1070 co-author, then Arizona state senator, and outspoken opponent of birthright citizenship Russell Pearce suggested that the weakened economy was caused by unauthorized immigration (Del Puerto 2011).
As the state dealt with economic woes, Arizona’s Democratic Governor, Janet Napolitano, was replaced by Republican Governor Janice Brewer. Citing out-of-control border violence as one need for SB 1070, Brewer had announced in 2010 that severed American heads had been found on the U.S. side of the border, a statement later confirmed to be one of several spoken falsehoods (Milbank 2010). However false, the fear mongering was ubiquitous, as Brewer had continued to refer to violence while voicing her support for SB 1070. During that same year, public officials also signed HB 2281, dismantling the Mexican American/Raza studies program in the K–12 system by arguing that Mexican American studies is dangerous to Arizona (Orozco 2012). Undoubtedly, elected officials were central to the policy outcomes that raised questions about the place of immigrants and Latinos/as in Arizona.
The role of public officials is particularly significant because they have considerable say in the enactment of policy and have a broad audience to voice their stance (Blumer 1958; van Dijk 1999). Furthermore, their elite status can allow for the reproduction of racism (van Dijk 1992). This may be especially pertinent in the context of Arizona where hate groups have endorsed a number of elected officials in the state (Romero 2011b). Moreover, while not uncontested, elected officials are by definition representatives of the broader populace and help shape what is legitimate to the broader public (Stewart 2010). The interest groups in Carter and Lippard’s (2015:394) study have “access to the public ear,” but my focus on public officials means these elite social actors also have the governing power to create and/or enforce policy. Certainly public officials occupy a particularly powerful space to add fuel to the flame of ideologies that maintain the racial status quo. Therefore, investigating the discourse perpetuated by public officials can lend much needed insights on how support for SB 1070 was framed and how this discourse reveals racialized logics.
Data and Methods
The data for this study include 70 recordings of elected officials discussing SB 1070 from 2009 to 2012 on the Arizona house floor, senate judiciary meetings, conferences and panels, as well as press conferences, speeches, and on-air interviews on television programs and news media outlets. The data presented here represent about 10 percent from official governmental settings, such as the Arizona House floor, 17 percent from public speeches and press conferences, and 72 percent from interviews featured in television programming. 3 Elected and public officials featured in the data include officials at the local, state, and federal levels in and outside Arizona (see Table 1). Recordings of on-air interviews were typically at the 15-minute range while the most abbreviated clip in the sample ended at 6 minutes. Recordings in governmental settings were on average about 40 minutes long, with one 2 hour and 4–minute clip representing the longest recording in the data.
Officials Featured in the Data.
All recordings were accessed via public record channels through the Arizona house of legislature, online video archives such as CSPAN and CNN, and YouTube. I used various search words that refer to SB 1070 as well as search inquiries using the following search terms: Arizona, immigration, Latinos/Hispanics, undocumented immigrants, illegal immigrants, and the names of prominent Democratic and Republican politicians. In an effort to get a broad sense of the public discussions concerning the legislation, I watched all videos that turned up in search queries but removed irrelevant videos from the final sample. In addition to the benefits of capturing discourse in the media, analyzing discussions in political spaces, such as those in the Arizona legislature, have long been fruitful sites to explore how politicians flex their influence and shape public opinion (Edelman 1964).
I searched for videos pertaining to the bill until the point of technical and conceptual saturation. For instance, I ended data collection when various search queries yielded redundant recordings in all four sites. Conceptually, the data were also saturated with repeated claims made by pro-SB supporters. Throughout the collection period, I would periodically return to my data sites applying previously used search queries to check if new recordings had been made available. As I collected these videos, I chronicled them in chronological order by pre-passage, passage, and post-passage period. By tracking and organizing the discourse systematically, I am confident that I collected any discussion relating to SB 1070 in legislative spaces and included most publicly available media of elected officials discussing their support for the legislation. Upon watching a recording, I would transcribe what was said verbatim, including filler words. While labor intensive, this practice created transcripts to analyze that otherwise would not have been available. Finally, I used NVivo software to help code and organize my data.
Examining racial discourse is particularly challenging since researchers must be attuned to coded and seemingly nonracial talk (Bonilla-Silva 2010; Dietrich 2011). As a result, my coding strategy was in line with qualitative techniques and was both inductive and deductive as a means to allow discovery and the uncovering of meaning and nuance to emerge (Glaser and Strauss 1967). Following an ethnographic content analysis protocol, I allowed a circular movement from sampling to coding, data analysis, and interpretation (Altheide 1996). Therefore, my codes were both inductive and deductive: my deductive codes drew from the existing literature on post-Civil Rights discourses (Bonilla-Silva 2010; Bonilla-Silva et al. 2004), while inductive codes were established once I entered the data from the work on white injury ideology (Cacho 2000). I coded for the claims made by SB 1070 supporters. Since I was interested in both what supporters said and how they said it, I coded for the ideological underpinnings of their pro-SB 1070 comments. The increased national attention and scrutiny over the legislation may have made more openly racist comments more guarded and/or infrequent.
I identified three common ways elected officials discussed their support for the legislation, but they are not mutually exclusive. After the final analysis phase, I selected passages that were illustrative of the common discussions concerning SB 1070 to present here. Much of the public conversations concerning SB 1070 were centered on racial profiling. In these discussions, supporters most often denounced race or racial profiling by relying on color-blind frames and other rhetorical moves. Other common discussions concern the framing of illegal immigrants as violent threats and economic burdens, which is framed as justifying the need for Arizona to take a stand against undocumented immigration and support SB 1070 amid perceived federal inaction.
Findings
Minimizing and Denying Racial Profiling
Supporters of SB 1070 sometimes relied on multiple claims to voice their support for the bill, but whether they minimized racial profiling concerns or used threat narratives, these claims often worked together to uphold white injury ideology. When denying racial profiling concerns, supporters typically used Bonilla-Silva’s (2010) naturalization and minimization of color-blind racism frames or rhetorical moves to deflect attention from race. With the exception of a senate judiciary meeting, television reporters and program hosts asked SB 1070 supporters the controversial question: “What does an ‘illegal immigrant’ look like?” In total, the question of what an “illegal” immigrant looks like or how someone could determine who is in the country illegally emerged in the data 15 times. More general questions concerning racial profiling were asked in over half of the data (54 percent).
Initially, supporters of SB 1070 were much more candid in disclosing how to determine who is an “illegal” immigrant. In October 2009, the notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County, who proudly refers to himself as “America’s toughest Sheriff on immigration,” had already divulged on Glenn Beck’s FOX television program the ways in which he and law enforcement could determine who is an “illegal” immigrant: “They’re worried—and if they have their speech, what they look like, if they just look like they came from another country, we can take care of that situation.” In his statement, Sheriff Arpaio makes clear the boundaries that set apart who may or may not be an “illegal” immigrant. By including speech in his criteria, he is also ascribing accents and/or lack of English fluency to foreigner status, but more importantly, for one to look like they are from another country is a clear suggestion of the salience of phenotype or skin color. Interestingly, while understood that “another country” may refer to Mexico or another Latin American country, his more open-ended comment serves to mark many people of color as suspect. By 2010, in the wake of national attention, in response to similar inquiries, Sheriff Arpaio negated race or appearance as having anything to do with illegality. Particularly because being called a racist is especially socially condemning in the post-Civil Rights era (Doane 2006), supporters of SB 1070 used a color-blind discourse to frame responses to racial profiling inquiries in the following years.
By 2010, during and after the signing of SB 1070, President Barack Obama shared his concerns about the legislation with the country on a cable television interview with Larry King on CNN’s Larry King Live in June of 2010: “Although I understand the frustration of the people of Arizona when it comes to the inflow of illegal immigration, I don’t think this is the right way to do it. I think this puts American citizens who look Hispanic, are Hispanic potentially in an unfair situation.” President Obama’s comment in response to SB 1070 quite succinctly brought to the forefront concerns raised about the potential racial profiling of Latinos/as as “illegal.” Once these concerns had hit the national spotlight, discussions over racial profiling were ubiquitous, although supporters of the bill thereafter took on a more defensive position in actively minimizing racial profiling concerns and ceased to use looks, appearance, or clothes as an expressed indicator of who could be suspected of lacking unauthorized status. SB 1070 supporters crafted their support of the bill by relying on the color-blind strategy of denial and Bonilla-Silva’s (2010) minimization of racism and naturalization frames.
Somewhat consistent with Bonilla-Silva’s (2010) study on color-blind talk, people often avoid talking about race by employing strategies to move the conversation to other topics. Such post-Civil Rights maneuvers are commonly employed by whites to avoid sounding racist. However, while Bonilla-Silva’s study focused on how whites talk about blacks, discussions surrounding “illegals” take on a different form as the strategy of using a disclaimer (“I am not a racist, but . . . ”) is not always necessary since (il)legality can serve as a cover to discuss race (Bloch 2013). Elected and public officials navigate a terrain that is both about Latinos/as (racial profiling) and immigration. For instance, under the national spotlight, supporters of the bill used semantic moves, denials, claims of ignorance, and redirecting to argue that race was not a factor in determining who can be “illegal” under reasonable suspicion. Moreover, some SB 1070 supporters used “reasonable suspicion” as a rhetorical weapon to argue that police officers would be trained to avoid profiling, and in doing so, supporters tried to shift conversations away from race. In total, elected officials relied on the minimization of racism frame in 51 percent of the data to make their claims in support of SB 1070. In a response to a racial profiling question on an April 2010 segment of Larry King Live, Sheriff Joe Arpaio responded to a question about racial profiling in the following manner:
I’ll tell you what, we have twenty percent of the people in the jails that I operate, twenty percent charged with murders and every violent crime you can think of are in this country illegally. They came across the border—they are criminals. There is a law! You seem to forget that.
Consistent with other scholarship on color-blind discourse, people tend to avoid the subject of race, even in discussions of racial profiling (Alegria 2014). In this case, redirecting questions away from race was also accomplished by using illegality as a cover to construct undocumented immigrants as criminals. This effective strategy inspired fear and shifted the conversation away from the topic at hand.
When asked about racial profiling concerns and how law enforcement officials could determine what an “illegal” immigrant looks like, the framing of such answers denied the long-established link between undocumented status and race in the popular imagination. For instance, in November 2010 in a news station interview with Arizona’s ABC15 reporter David Biscobing, SB 1070 co-author Russell Pearce provided the following color-blind statement in response to a question on racial profiling: “We are a nation of laws—illegal is illegal; it’s not a race it’s a crime. Arizona didn’t make illegal illegal.” Pearce’s words were intended to shift attention away from the fact that indeed immigrants, particularly those that are undocumented, are racialized as Latino/a in the popular imagination. His comment is a negation of the shift in the term illegal, which has transformed into a noun, especially to mobilize anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiment (HoSang 2010). His comments are also in line with more recent research that finds that one color-blind way to discuss undocumented immigrants is to use illegality as a race diminutive (Bloch 2013). Interestingly, this use of the minimization of racism frame also arguably is somewhat reminiscent of Bonilla-Silva’s naturalization frame. While not making the claim that illegal status is natural, Pearce’s comment adheres to the common naturalization frame justification of explaining a social problem as “that’s the way it is” (Bonilla Silva 2010:37). Importantly, while explicitly minimizing race, Pearce simultaneously underscores crime. As David Hernandez (2008:39) has noted, “Presumptions of immigrant criminality, however, in particular Latino criminality, are resilient and are maintained by politicians, the media, and a misinformed general public.”
“Illegal” Immigrants as Economic and Violent Threats
Scholars argue the media participates in a cultural production of “Latino threat” or in promulgating a “Mexican threat narrative” casting Latino/a immigrants as criminals capable of destroying the American way of life (Aguirre, Rodriguez, and Simmers 2011; Chavez 2013). Using cognitive metaphor theory, Otto Santa Ana (2002) has also elaborated on how Latino/a immigrants are metaphorically constructed as invaders and parasites by the mainstream media. In the case of SB 1070, supporters of the bill equally recycled these tropes to garner support for the controversial legislation. In fact, the violence frame was used in 53 percent of the data, and the economic threat comprised 37 percent of the sample. On April 13, 2010, on the Arizona House floor, Representative Kavanagh expressed his support for SB 1070 in the following manner:
Illegal immigration has been, is and will continue to be a serious problem for the people and state of Arizona. Illegal immigration brings crime, kidnapping, drugs, drains our government services, takes away employment and when employment is left, it suppresses the wages. Nobody can stand on the sidelines and not take part in this battle. . . . We need to put this law in place now so when the new tsunami of imm—illegal immigrants come, we are prepared to do battle with them.
Most notably, Kavanagh’s words touch on a common theme found in public discussions; immigrants are constructed as a threat to safety and a population’s economic security. In one swoop, his statement also points to the preferred rhetoric in the state of Arizona that made “illegal” immigrants prime scapegoats for economic problems, but it also obscured the ways in which Latino/a immigrants contribute financially to the state. His call to action clearly articulates a threat narrative about immigrants in Arizona.
Evoking Mexican drug cartels as a way to induce threat and fear was also common. Not only is such a strategy effective in creating fear, but it also serves to construct all “illegal” immigrants as criminals and as racialized Latinos/as or Mexicans. In a brief interview with a local reporter for the news station KTVK in June 2010, Governor Brewer remarked:
We all know that the majority of the people that are coming to Arizona and trespassing are now become drug mules. They’re coming across our border in huge numbers. The drug cartels have taken control of the immigration illegal trespassing that we are seeing in the state of Arizona that is coming through and going to all of America, so they are criminals. They’re breaking the law when they’re trespassing and they’re criminals when they pack marijuana and the drugs on their backs.
Governor Brewer’s words point to the ways in which elected officials make arguments in a way that appears commonsensical (“we all know . . . ”), and yet, all arguments made are unsubstantiated by any claim to recent reports or studies. To evoke immigrants as drug mules constructs the immigrant as an inherent criminal, consequently suggesting that the threatened must be protected. Evoking criminal activity and drug trafficking was also a popular strategy used by interest groups to justify SB 1070 (Carter and Lippard 2015).
While the need for border security was a common declaration of SB 1070 supporters, when asked how the bill would actually address border security, Arizona Governor Janice Brewer responded on a TV 3 interview with reporter Tara Hitchcock in April 2010: “Well actually the bill doesn’t have anything to do with border security.” While prominent supporters of SB 1070 continued to discuss border security and the threat of “illegal” immigrants, they also evoked calls to protect Arizonians, to protect the people of the state who they claimed were facing an unruly threat. In many instances, prominent supporters of SB 1070 noted to the public how the people of Arizona needed to be protected. In July of 2010 on the program Anderson Cooper 360 with Anderson Cooper, Russell Pearce remarked: “Once they [illegal immigrants] cross that border, it’s our citizens, our neighborhoods, our healthcare, our education, our criminal justice system. It’s our citizens that we’re obligated to protect.” For every story, there are villains, heroes, victims, and would-be victims. Stories about heroes and villains are also persuasive for policy purposes (Stewart 2010), and such stories call for intervention (Smith 2005). While the construction of “illegal” immigrants as economic and violent threats is clear, the question is who, or which groups, is marked as the heroes and villains or the imagined communities in need of protection? While the words spoken by Sheriff Joe Arpaio in 2009 construct the ways in which illegality is tied to looking foreign, the citizenry imagined in Pearce’s statement connotes communities of white Americans. There are many communities in Arizona in which citizens and undocumented folks reside, and there are even mixed-status families. Considering Pearce’s stance against birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, it is doubtful that Pearce was referring to these families. Just as there is a common association of U.S.-born Latinos/as with “illegal” immigrants, there too is a hegemonic conflation between citizen and whiteness that is constantly reaffirmed (Hughey 2012). Latinos/as themselves also recognize that whiteness is an indicator of inclusion in the United States (Tafoya 2004). Underneath the surface, the discourses over SB 1070 suggest that the threatened are coded as white.
Fueling White Injury Ideology
Historically, supporters of anti-immigrant propositions in California used white injury ideology to construct themselves as suffering from the effects of a growing Latino/a immigrant population (Cacho 2000). Among other data, Cacho (2000) examined how newsmakers and supporters of an anti-immigrant proposition constructed Latino/a immigrants as a problem and white Californians as the true victims of immigration. Similarly, white injury ideology was evoked in debates over SB 1070. In total, this white injury ideology logic was espoused in 41 percent of the data. The people of Arizona were evoked as antithetical to immigrants. In this sense, elected officials offer implicit political nudges by evoking white “imagined communities,” to borrow the concept from Benedict Anderson (1983). In referencing the long-time suffering of the people of Arizona, it is understood that white citizens are part of the community while immigrants (understood as racialized Latinos/as) and their kin are understood to be outside the limits of the imagined white community (Cacho 2000; Romero 2011a, 2011b).
Importantly, white injury ideology can work by centering a dichotomy between citizens whose concerns are unimportant and citizens who need to be protected. As Brewer commented on FOX’s On the Record interviewer’s reference to President Obama’s critiques of SB 1070, Brewer remarked that the concerns over racial profiling are “brouhaha” and “over dramatic.” Brewer’s choice of the word brouhaha clearly relies on a minimization of racism color-blind strategy. Further, calling racial profiling concerns “over dramatic” does much to uphold white injury ideology since the people that would be profiled cannot be imagined as white victims. Brewer then shortly thereafter shifts by justifying her stance on SB 1070 over perceived federal inaction by valorizing the fear of citizens who are feeling unsafe by immigration:
If the feds don’t come in and protect us then we will come forward and protect ourselves. We have no other choice. We have, we have we have a right . . . to feel free in our state and to feel safe and with what’s going on, we have many, many people that feel that they are not safe.
In using the tactic of belittling racial profiling issues that would concern Latino/a citizens, Brewer marks a sharp distinction between which citizen concerns are “brouhaha” and which citizen fears deserve her intervention. While not using the identifier of “citizen” or more explicitly white American, Brewer’s boundary making suggests a white injury ideology logic that justifies gubernatorial intervention and the dismissal of racial profiling concerns that Latinos/as and their allies voiced across the country.
To illustrate how white injury ideology is powerfully embedded in discussions over SB 1070, we must consider the recent deaths of four Americans. In March 2010, one month before the signing of SB 1070, prominent Arizona rancher Robert Krentz, a white man, was killed on his property. While the authorities never determined who the perpetrator was, there were allegations on media airwaves that he was likely murdered by an “illegal” immigrant (La Jeunesse 2010). The narrative about Krentz’s life was also ideal for political purposes: He was a well-respected and prosperous rancher whose property had been in his family for over a hundred years and was known for helping those in need (Archibold 2010). The timing of Krentz’s death presented itself as a political opportunity, which supporters of SB 1070 quickly seized on to promote the legislation. For instance, prior to discussing the legislation in April of 2010, the data revealed that Representative Carl Seel introduced a local rancher’s group sitting in the gallery as a way to remind those present about the tragic death of Krentz. Krentz remained a prominent example to some of how SB 1070 needed to be supported. His death continued to be evoked by prominent supporters of SB 1070, including Arizona’s Governor Brewer and SB 1070 co-author Pearce in a number of public settings and media interviews. In March of 2010, during the pre-passage period of SB 1070, Arizona Governor Brewer discussed Krentz’s death on a television Fox News interview on America’s Newsroom:
Such a horrible tragedy to take place with that [Krentz] family . . . it’s unfortunate for those people that have lived down there for so long and now that they have this murder take place it’s just unacceptable and the state of Arizona and the residents of Arizona—we just cannot tolerate it—it’s an invasion, it’s absolutely an invasion of our country.
Similarly, responding to discrimination concerns brought on by the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on April 2012, Pearce discussed why Arizona needed SB 1070:
The invasion of illegal aliens we face today: convicted felons, drug cartels, gang members, human traffickers and even, terrorists pose one of the greatest threats to our nation in terms of political, economic and national security. During the debate of SB 1070 a rancher friend of mine, Rob Krentz, was murdered on the border by an illegal alien.
Brewer and Pearce’s remarks do not necessarily pay tribute to Krentz; instead, they reference this tragedy as a call for action. The death marks an outcry for which illegal immigration is identified as the problem. Undoubtedly, the emotive politics at play serve a purpose—Brewer’s use of the metaphor of invasion further ignites the ever-present threat that she purports the people of Arizona are facing. Moreover, Pearce’s description of “illegal” immigrants as various types of violent criminals not only evokes fear, but the particular words to describe criminals such as “gang members” or part of “drug cartels” are based off of racial and gendered notions of Latino criminality (Romero 2001); meanwhile, the term terrorist also carries with it the insinuation of racialized others already constructed in the wake of September 11. Moreover, a suspect in the Krentz case was never found, despite Pearce’s allegation that an “illegal alien” murdered him. Krentz’s death received a significant amount of media attention and was referenced many times in the data. While tragic, the comments about his death during discussions surrounding SB 1070 serve to demonstrate the ways in which white male citizens are constructed as valued members of society—deserving of protection.
Elected officials used Krentz’s death to engage in a discourse that perpetuated racialized threat and called to the presumed threatened (white) Americans to fuel anti-immigrant legislation. However, these officials simultaneously ignored three murders of U.S.-born Latinos/as that occurred in Arizona during the pre-passage period and soon after Krentz’s death. The silence of elected officials regarding the deaths of racialized others while simultaneously engaging in racialized anti-immigrant discourse highlights the extent to which they actively and selectively fueled a white injury ideology and placed Latinos/as discursively outside of the protected citizenry.
On May 30, 2009, a group of border vigilantes with alleged ties to the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Minuteman Project broke into the Flores home and shot Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia Flores, twice in the head. Despite the gendered vulnerabilities associated with girls, the death of Brisenia Flores did not spark a public outcry. In May 2010, two months after Robert Krentz was killed and only one month after the signing of SB 1070, Juan Varela (a fifth-generation American of Mexican descent) was fatally shot right after his neighbor reportedly shouted “go back to Mexico or die” (Kiefer and Ferraresi 2010).
Despite the alarming almost battle cry made by Varela’s neighbor, these words are not surprising. Indeed, as Varela was marked as not American and possibly “illegal,” one must be reminded how even major Arizona politicians discussed “waging a battle” against illegal immigrants and how even Arizona Governor Brewer discussed illegal immigrants as almost exclusively drug mules. In this racially charged atmosphere, Juan Varela’s neighbor may have felt completely justified in protecting himself against what he may have perceived as a real threat. While Varela’s neighbor is a murderer, it is Varela’s “Latino-ness” that marks Varela as the criminal. Similarly, and ironically so, the white vigilantes that invaded the Flores’s home are often not racially constructed as invaders, for that is the designation discursively assigned to “illegals” or often Latinos/as of all legal statues.
Murder, regardless of one’s legal status, is an offense; however, the crux of the matter was that Raul and Brisenia Flores were U.S.-born citizens and Juan Varela was a fifth-generation U.S. citizen. Like Robert Krentz, these victims were American. While at the discursive level Latinos/as are often constructed as “illegals,” this construction has repercussions that can and do manifest in very real and dangerous ways. How race and illegality conjoin—leaving Latinos/as outside the realms of the protected (white) citizenry—creates boundaries among groups that construct some people as citizens and deserving of protection while others hear that they must “go back to Mexico.” Notably, these two incidents correspond with a rising trend in anti-Latino/a hate crimes (U.S. Department of Justice 2012) alongside an increasing overall anti-immigrant sentiment (Massey 2009). The murders of Raul Flores, Brisenia Flores, and Juan Varela clearly illustrate how even U.S.-born Latinos/as can be scorched by the fire that is fueled by an anti-immigrant racially charged discourse.
Discussion
This article sought to address the question: How did elected and public officials discuss their support for SB 1070—a post-Civil Rights legislation charged as racially discriminatory? As Arizona was under fire, the debates over SB 1070 reveal that despite the proclamation of a post-racial era, evidence of racism persists. The dialogue about Arizona’s immigration “problem”—both in legislative spaces, such as the house floor, and in the public sphere, such as in television appearances—made it a fruitful site to examine the intersections of Latinos/as, illegality, whiteness, and citizenship. Although Sheriff Arpaio had linked illegality to race in 2009, by 2010, amid national attention over racial profiling critiques, supporters of SB 1070 offered support for the bill with color-blind responses to move conversations away from the topic of race.
As supporters used Bonilla-Silva’s (2010) minimization of racism frame to deflect from racial profiling critiques, they simultaneously constructed undocumented immigrants as threats. In doing so, racial profiling was minimized while the threat of undocumented immigration was constructed, and the threatened were understood as white Americans. Additionally, in Bonilla-Silva’s (2010) study, white respondents used the naturalization frame to explain and normalize black-white segregation and justify their stance against black-white interracial dating. This article expands on color-blind racism by finding that SB 1070 supporters can argue against Latino/a racial profiling by using the naturalization frame to claim that immigration laws constructing illegality already exist without taking responsibility for how new immigration policies can produce how illegality is racialized, lived, or importantly, reproduced.
Hana Brown’s (2013) research on welfare reform debates captured how social actors in Arizona mobilized a racial frame to cast all Latinos/as as undeserving for welfare benefits. She writes: “Arizona activists demonized Hispanic residents of all legal statuses while lauding the contributions of white citizens. In doing so, they interchangeably used racialized terms like Latino, Hispanic, and Mexican” (p. 304). However, while Brown found explicit demarcations of race applying to both citizen and “illegals,” the data presented here are more covert but no less powerful. This article also expands on Carter and Lippard’s (2015) research on the legal fight in support of SB 1070. While interest groups used language to create dichotomies of citizen and immigrant, pro-SB 1070 public officials in this study accomplished something more insidious; they not only crafted a threat narrative about undocumented immigrants but also constructed Latinos/as of all legal statuses outside the citizenry.
Under the national spotlight, supporters of SB 1070 pulled from an implicit reliance on white injury ideology to mark categories of worth. Since the undocumented are constructed as racialized and dangerous others, the Arizonians in danger are white citizens that would not run the risk of being racially profiled. The existing literature on anti-immigrant racism and white injury ideology supports the claim that the implicit American, citizen, and/or taxpayer is marked as white (Calavita 2007; Haney López 1996; HoSang 2010) Therefore, claims about threatened whites need not manifest in an explicit manner as the signifier “threatened American” serves just as well. In fact, as Mendelberg (2001) has demonstrated, conservative public officials are able to garner more white supporters when they use race appeals that are implicit but nonetheless inspire white resentment toward people of color. Similarly, supporters of SB 1070 had no need to add the signifiers of Latino/a or Mexican to “illegal” immigrants since discussing violence from Mexico and Mexican drug cartels already solidifies what the “illegal” immigrant looks like. While white injury ideology is coded and elusive, it is a dangerous gasoline nonetheless; the murders of Americans Robert Krentz, Juan Varela, and Raul and Brisenia Flores are a reminder that not all Americans belong in the category of injured and that instead, the category of threatened is a white-only space.
In the data detailed here, citizen and Arizonian carried their own racialized meanings and stood diametrically opposed to immigrants or people who might be mistaken for them based on phenotype or physical markers. In minimizing racial profiling concerns that directly impact Latinos/as, supporters of SB 1070 argued the bill would not lead to profiling but then often shifted to the need to protect citizens from the threats associated with immigrants and immigration. This color-blind talk is seemingly innocent but constructs and reifies boundaries of who may be considered a deserving and innocent citizen and which citizen concerns are invalid or exaggerated.
The data presented here provide a unique examination of how race and (il)legality are connected at a discursive level. While illegality is associated with Latinos/as, the data are an instructive case of how elected officials actually respond and deny this common conflation. The controversial question “What does an illegal immigrant look like?” challenged claims to post-racialism but also created an opportunity in which the norms surrounding post-Civil Rights speech would be less predictable. Indeed, the calls from activists and the counter-hegemonic voices of some elected officials, including President Obama, brought to the fore the centrality of race in the concern over racial profiling and SB 1070. This pertinent question troubled how discussions over immigration can seemingly be anything but about race.
By way of addressing the limitations of this research, some social actors for this study are overrepresented, particularly Governor Brewer. However, this is a result of her gubernatorial position and her willingness to be a publicly outspoken supporter for the legislation. While there were officials against SB 1070, many of them did not make as many public appearances as Brewer. Instead, Brewer, Pearce, and Arpaio were frequent participants for media interviews to champion their cause. To some, these supporters may be considered extremists. By November of 2011, Pearce was ousted from the state senate in a recall election, although he continued to make public appearances in support of the bill. On the other hand, Governor Brewer ran for reelection after the signing of SB 1070 and successfully won the gubernatorial seat against a democrat publicly against the legislation. Elite discourses should not be understood as uncontested, but notwithstanding this, elected officials like Brewer, at least symbolically, were the public face of Arizona.
Furthermore, debates over SB 1070 cannot merely be thought of as parochial politics. Vocal supporters of the bill were not solely representing Arizona; supporters were elected and public officials from across the United States. Organizations like the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR), 4 which provided the template for SB 1070, has political power that extends beyond Arizona. Indeed, while SB 1070 was under fire, similar legislation was proposed in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Utah, and Indiana.
Lastly, despite the claims made by SB 1070 supporters, Latinos/as are in fact racially profiled in Arizona, particularly when punitive immigration measures are enforced (Romero 2008, 2011a). Even more concrete evidence was established in 2013 when a federal judge ruled in Ortega Melendres, et al. v. Arpaio, et al. that Sheriff Arpaio and his deputies had indeed racially profiled Latinos/as. Therefore, this project captures a unique discursive space in which a social inequality is both denied and created. Since Latinos/as are the largest minority group in the United States, capturing discussions surrounding immigration legislation will continue to be important. The spread of anti-immigrant legislation as well contemporary debates catalyzed by the Trump campaign and administration may likely further provide new burning questions race scholars may seek to address.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the thoughtful feedback provided for this project by Enobong Hannah Branch, Joya Misra, and Mari Castañeda, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers at Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.