Immigration Fallacy the Existential Fallacy Behind Arizona\'s

Immigration Fallacy

The Existential Fallacy Behind Arizona's Immigration Policy

Few issues currently featured in American public debate are clouded by as much emotional bias, invective and distortion as that of immigration reform. Particularly as this concerns America's shared border with Mexico, immigration is a discussion which carries significant political ramification, clear racial overtones and distinctions in ideology where American openness is concerned. As a result, many political figures have been moved to comment or drive policy on the issue-based less on the support of fact than on the employment of inflammatory rhetoric. And quite frequently, this rhetoric is presented with little concern for the logical fallacies which may underlie is basic formative claims. Rarely has this been evidenced with more vitriol or determination than in the state of Arizona over the last several years. In the context of our discussion, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is particularly noted for her steady employment of logical fallacy as a way of engendering support from those voters who share her hostility toward Hispanic immigration.

The central fallacies in the governor's position extend from the claims used to support and, subsequently, to defend the controversial state-based bill called SB1070. This was a bill which the governor aggressively pushed into passage through State Senate that would give law enforcement officers broad and undefined rights to search, seizure and imprisonment of illegal immigrants suspected of traveling without documentation. A bald-faced legal standard asking officers to engage in racial profiling, the policy would be underscored by a key syllogistic fallacy that the federal government and specifically the administration of President Obama, had created an immigration crisis in need of this type of response. Rather than addressing the core issues relating to the drug wars at our borders, the racial implications of her stance or the real economic figures that describe our immigration picture, Brewer employed a strategy of misdirection. Seizing on the hostility of conservatives in her home state against the president -- also extending at least partially from racial tensions -- Brewer would frame the discourse on immigration according to the failure of the president to act on their behalf.

Accordingly, Biggers (2011) reports that "Brewer argues that the Obama administration has intentionally allowed an immigration crisis to spiral out of control on the U.S.-Mexico border. When President Felipe Calderon from Mexico addressed a joint session of Congress and criticized Arizona for SB 1070, Brewer could not believe that a foreign leader was actually allowed to criticize the United States of America. 'I had to wonder where our country was going under Obama,' she writes. 'It started to dawn on me that this president and his liberal allies in Congress don't really understand what America is all about and what our fundamental principles are.'

That Brewer drew this notion from the criticism leveled against her state's legislation by the president of Mexico is hard to defend on a logical basis. And the fallacy of the assertion is only further betrayed by the fact that such criticism came in response to -- rather than in advance of -- the passage of her unconstitutional policy action. Still, Brewer makes the argument that a failure on the part of the president and the federal government to engage in meaningful immigration reform has forced her to take aggressive policy action on behalf of the state of Arizona. This is an existential fallacy, most particularly because it makes the assertion that the federal government has failed to take action to reform the immigration situation. Quite to the contrary, Biggers (2011) reports, "Brewer's account of Obama's remark ignores the fact that the Obama administration has deported record numbers of immigrants -- more than his Republican predecessor -- and ramped up Border Patrol and border security funds to unprecedented levels." (Biggers, p. 1)

The platform that Brewer has used to inflame her Republican supporters presumes that some dramatic action in policy orientation has been made necessary on the part of Arizona by the failure of the federal government to take action. However, all evidence to the contrary, the Obama Administration has taken considerable steps to address the paths to illegal immigration to the United States. The fact that the president has simultaneously attempted to pave the way to improved and streamlined legal immigration, however, diverges from the highly racialist anti-immigration stance within which Brewer's ideals are couched. In other words, because the federal policy on immigration does not currently parallel Arizona's cultural proclivity toward ethnic exclusion, racial profiling and anti-immigration law, Brewer makes the case that she has been forced to take legislative action.