I am not welcome here in Arizona.
Or rather, my husband isn’t – and our future children won’t be either. You see, Mike is half-Korean. Why is this a problem, you ask? Because as of this afternoon in Arizona, any law enforcement has the right, and indeed the obligation, to demand proof of citizenship or legal immigration status from anyone that they suspect of being in the state illegally.

But why should this matter? Mike is not Hispanic, after all – which is the group that the “toughest immigration bill in the country” was attempting to reign in. The problem is the question of what constitutes an officer’s “suspicion.” Without probable cause – such as actually committing a crime for which he could be arrested regardless of race- there is nothing to go on besides of the color of his skin.

Even though he’s half German genetically (his dad has the same white/ruddy skin that I do), he has a nice olive glow which turns golden brown and then a deep tan in the summer. Already both of his arms have turned a mocha color from driving home into the blinding sun every afternoon, the white lines from his watch and sunglasses the only reminder of his winter shading.

Likewise, his dad has blonde hair and blue eyes, but they didn’t stand a chance against his mom’s dominate Korean dark brown eyes and dark, straight hair. Instead he got his dad’s physical build and some of his facial structure. How likely is it that from a distance, a cop is going to say to himself, “Well, gee – that man can’t be here illegally- look at his European frame and that German nose!” Instead, they will see the color of his skin, hair and eyes, and will have cause to demand his papers, especially if quotas or institutional incentives for high volumes of “inquiries” are in place.

It would not be the first time that he’d be mistaken for being Hispanic. With so many Latinos in Arizona and so few Koreans – and even fewer half Koreans- people could be forgiven for just assuming that anyone who looks unidentifiably dark could be from south of the border. An amusingly incorrect assumption in high school, something that he could laugh off as an easy mistake ten years ago, could now literally land him in jail.

You see, the Koreans are a feisty group. Mike has no intention of adopting some deferential stance as a second-class citizen, and will not quietly step out of the car and hand over his citizenship papers if pulled over for “driving while brown.” Not only is he guaranteed to give the officer a piece of his mind – which, although it should be a legal right, seems to be enough to get you tazered or arrested- but he doesn’t have a single document that he carries everywhere he goes that satisfactorily proves he is a US citizen. (Do YOU?)

Is a driver’s license enough? A passport? As someone who has devoted her academic and professional life to studying Russian and Central European societies and histories, that he should even have to consider carrying a passport domestically is troubling. Russia requires internal passports, documents that not only allow you to live in a certain area but which must be produced in order to accomplish even the most basic tasks. It is for this reason that they have one of their most famous sayings, “Nyet dokumenta, nyet cheloveka.” No documents, no person. In their system, people could literally vanish – at least under the communist era – for lack of the proper piece of paper or stamp.

Even if he did carry his passport around with him, it might not do any good. Case in point: he had to use a passport for identification while at a hospital in Atlanta two years ago upon a return from abroad, and the admin staff thought possessing a US passport meant he was a foreign national. I know it sounds insane, but no amount of logical, well-reasoned arguing could convince them otherwise, and we lost valuable time in scheduling an urgent surgery while they debated his citizenship. What kind of hope can we put in the local traffic cops (who also do not handle passports on a day to day basis, I imagine) that they will competently review this document?

Does he carry his social security card, then? Well that flies in the face of all recommendations for identity theft prevention. A birth certificate? Besides the obvious fact that we’re starting to dig pretty deeply into the filing cabinet here just to stay safe while driving across town, even this could present a problem. You see, he was born in Korea. To two American citizens, at a US military hospital, while his dad was serving his country at a US military base. But just like the passport, the good hospital admin folks thought this was proof that he was a resident alien. What are the risks that, if presented with this document, the cops will make the same mistake, throw him in jail over his objections and “sort it out later?”

This is all the more maddening because, unlike many of the state’s residents who have moved here in the past decade, my husband and I have spent almost our entire lives here. I’m a native, and until college, this was Mike’s only US home. Once his dad retired from the civil service, they bought a house in Glendale. We both grew up in the same school district during elementary school, went to the same high school (where he gave the graduation speech), and missed our gorgeous desert landscape when we went to Minnesota for college. After college, we moved straight back – despite knowing the risks of our cyclical economy, it was still our home in the truest sense, the place where we belonged. I got involved in ESL work in the same school district that raised me; he has worked for a local city government for almost his entire career, forfeiting the higher pay available in the private IT sector in exchange for serving his community.

I don’t think the Arizonans who supported this bill understand the full extent of its repercussions. In targeting what they thought was a convenient scapegoat, they have inadvertently but irrevocably targeted a much broader swathe of our society. Maybe old white retirees in Mesa and Sun City think that our world and “the other” are quite separate and distinct, but for my generation they are completely intertwined. My first childhood friend was half-Hispanic; her family has lived in Arizona since before mine got on a boat in Europe. One white female friend married a Japanese American; my Filipina friend is with a white man; her brother is married to a white woman. Two other friends – a couple that I’ve known since high school- are Filipina and of Mexican descent. Similarly, my husband’s work department consists of a Navajo man and two African American men, one of whom used to serve in the Air Force and is married to a Latina. Her large extended family are all Hispanic – and they are all Arizona natives. (Ironically, the only true immigrants I have ever known – people my age who left their country as children or young adults – were white, mostly from Poland and other Central European countries).

Judging by the explosion of outrage on facebook, I can say that we are all concerned. Those of us who are not Hispanic are afraid of being mistaken as such for our own safety; those who are actually Hispanic are in an even more precarious position. You could say it is an overreaction, which is how I’m sure it looks if you are at no risk whatsoever of being targeted. But listen to this story: my friend’s mom told me how her Hispanic brother-in-law was almost arrested by police as he went running with his Anglo wife along a desert trail. They were both citizens from birth, but the assumption, just based on looks, was that the Hispanic husband must have been an illegal immigrant that for some reason was trying to chase this good white woman. Even when the wife insisted that they were actually married, the police had difficulty believing them. And this was before the insanity of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and ICE round-ups began.

In this globalized world, people with skills have choices about where they settle and make their lives. We are teachers, IT managers, programmers, writers, musicians, accountants and business professionals – what will Arizona do if we all leave? Is the frightening answer that the state really doesn’t care? The predominately white industries of mining and ranching won’t be enough to float the economy, I can tell you that. I also wonder if they stopped to consider what our global pariah status will do to our tourism industry. (Arizona leaders might consider reading international news from time to time – they’d see that we’ve been a top story on the BBC lately).

I also wonder how we are going to pay for all of this increased law enforcement, jail time, processing and court appearances when our economy is still failing and we already have a tremendous backlog in our legal system. When even a one cent (that really is one cent, not one percent) tax for saving our education system is controversial, what is the likelihood that we’ll be able to raise enough money to start pulling people over at random because of their skin tone? And isn’t this kind of police state counter to the Republican virtue of small government?

Clearly, there are a lot of inconsistencies that haven’t been sorted out or thought through in the passing of this epically disastrous bill. That doesn’t matter to its supporters, because it wasn’t really about fighting crime or getting the drug cartels out of our national parks or ending border gun violence or any other laudable goal. It was only ever about hate. It is a vindictive gesture – a retaliation by the angry white mob for the fact that our country is changing. It’s a blind rejection of the reality that America now has many colors, that citizenship and heritage can live side by side and thrive. And while it may succeed today, it’s ultimately a Pyrrhic victory. The state will lose, and so will this broken ideology.

In the meantime, we’ll be making our lives elsewhere. ¡Hasta luego!