Arizona's controversial immigration law goes into effect July 29. Major League Baseball's All-Star Game takes place July 13 in Anaheim, Calif., but next year's game is slated for Arizona. Nearly a third of the league's players are Latino; some have threatened to boycott the Arizona game, and a move-the-game campaign has begun. University of Illinois history professor Adrian Burgos Jr. teaches courses on the history of Latino immigration and is the author of "Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line." He was a consultant on the upcoming Ken Burns' documentary "The Tenth Inning," about baseball's last two decades. Burgos was interviewed by News Bureau social sciences editor Craig Chamberlain.
Supporters of the Arizona legislation say that opponents have not carefully read the bill - that it will not lead to racial profiling, or cause problems for U.S. citizens or legal immigrants. Why do many Latinos believe otherwise?
History provides important examples about how enforcement of a law can become far more egregious than "what is in the bill." The civil rights movement exposed the fallacy of the "separate but equal" doctrine made legal by the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The reality was Jim Crow laws produced blatantly unequal conditions between whites and African-Americans and other minority groups.
Latinos and numerous civil rights groups point to at least two significant issues with Arizona's SB1070 legislation. First, there is the matter of constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure. Compliance with, much less enforcement of, SB1070 singles out U.S.-born Latinos, who will be required to carry proof of citizenship, in case they're stopped for even the smallest infraction.
Second, there is a flawed assumption to the "just show them your papers" position. The flawed assumption is that law enforcement would automatically accept the documentation of either legal immigrant status or U.S. citizenship as authentic. A case in point is that of Eduardo Carabello, a Puerto Rican and therefore a U.S. citizen, who was detained by federal immigration officials in Chicago for more than three days recently on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant. Officials kept him even after he provided his birth certificate.
This dynamic is evident in that Major League Baseball scrutinizes the documentation that Dominicans and other Latin Americans provide for proof of age or citizenship status. MLB just doesn't accept the documentation on its face, but has its own investigative office in the Dominican Republic to investigate authenticity.
The issue is not whether MLB should or should not do this: Baseball does this to protect its economic interests, seeking to prevent prospects from receiving a large signing bonus through age manipulation (fraud). The point is that the documentation presented by Dominicans and other Latinos already are viewed as suspect upon receipt.
What makes this issue, and its connection to Arizona, especially difficult for baseball?
Latinos are baseball's largest racial minority. When one combines the foreign-born players with the U.S.-born Latinos, the number nears a third of all big leaguers and half of all minor leaguers.
Also, half of major league teams hold their spring training in Arizona, just about all send prospects to participate in the Arizona Fall League, and almost every Major League organization has an academy in the Dominican Republic or elsewhere in Latin America.
MLB has to figure out a balance between its reliance on Latino talent, its desire to ensure the profitability of its collective enterprise, and the impact of its policies on any one franchise. Whether or not MLB moves the 2012 All-Star game out of Arizona, the decision of Commissioner Bud Selig will be viewed as making a stand on SB1070.
Why does a "nation of immigrants" repeatedly return to battles over immigration?
Immigration invariably means the incorporation of different people, and that raises questions about continuity, about the standing of those already here and of the newcomers, and about the stability of our institutions. As President Obama noted in his July 1 speech on immigration, this is not a recent phenomenon. At various moments the Irish, Italians and Chinese, among other immigrant groups, have been singled out as undesirables, as unassimilable, and the potential cause of the nation's downfall. The "nation of immigrants" concept tends to glance over the historical reality that legal entry and naturalization have not been available equally to all. The 1790 Naturalization Law permitted only "free white persons" to naturalize, which meant Irish and several other European groups need not apply since they were not (yet) accepted as white.
Baseball was long hailed as an institution that transformed immigrants into Americans, yet it is as much a laboratory of social ideas and racial understandings as it is a mirror of U.S. society. MLB even celebrates its role in the civil rights movement through its pursuit of racial integration in 1947, years before the 1954 Brown v. Board decision and the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Awareness of this history has resulted in Latino groups calling on Selig to move the 2012 All-Star game out of Arizona, and campaigns for the Chicago Cubs and other major league teams to relocate their spring training sites from the state. In these efforts, they're arguing that MLB has a responsibility to its Latino players, and fans, not to place them in a setting where their civil rights might be infringed through the enforcement of SB1070.