The Republican political establishment are truly revisionist hypocrites when it comes to history and political philosophy.Whether it is Rand Paul’s comments that the Civil Rights Act should be abolished or the Arizona legislature’s draconian immigration legislation, or the neo-nazi ties many in the GOP have, they continue to invent history for their own purposes or forget it all together promote and preserve conservatism.
Now many would assert that the Arizona Law is not rascist, since it matches the Federal law exactly. However, it does make presumptions about “reasonable” suspicion based on ethnic looks which is contradictive to federal racial profiling laws. I would argue that even considering such individuals as illegal immigrants is fatous, for the people making the laws are the real illegal immigrants.
Decendants of settlers from Europe settled the west, and it is difficult for me to see how a group can call others illegal for having no papers when they had no papers either. They forget the energy industry-led and government-enforced relocation of more than 10,000 Navajo from their traditional lands in Arizona among other states 35 years ago. On December 1974, Congress passed “The Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act,” which authorized the partitioning of the Navajo and Hopi Nations and established the Navajo-Hopi Indian Relocation Commission.
The 1.8-million acre section of northeastern Arizona that a federal court split in two in 1977, made the Navajos squatters on their own land. In 1882, President Chester Arthur designated 2.5 million acres in northern Arizona for the Hopi Tribe and other Indians. In 1958 the Hopi went to court seeking the return of the land the tribe claimed, and in 1962 a federal court in Arizona deemed 1.8 million acres a joint-use area. Congress approved the Navajo-Hopi settlement and relocation so energy companies could get rid of obstacles to exploiting the mineral riches of the west. Oil, natural gas, coal and uranium abound under the Indian lands.
So it is phony and fake to claim that you are worried about illegal immigration in Arizon when most of the folks there currently illegally imigrated to the state without papers themselves and hood-winked the people who were there from their land. I guess hipocrisy is the single philosophy of the GOP. –torrance stephens, ph.d.
For more with Dr. Stephens, visit twitter.com/rawdawgbuffalo and rawdagb.blogspot.com.
