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 Arizona's immigration law -- and China's human rights abuses
Did the State Department get caught apologizing to China for Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law, as various Republican congressman and right-wing bloggers have been proclaiming?
The short answer is: no. But it’s safe to say the Obama administration has given human rights advocates another reason to feel uneasy about its attitude toward abuses by the world’s worst violators, such as Beijing -- and the difference between dictatorships and democracies.
The tempest began with a briefing given by Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner about last week’s “human rights dialogue” between the United States and China. Posner explained that the administration’s view of the talks was that “you have an open discussion where you not only raise the other guy’s problems, but you raise your own,” adding, “we did plenty of that.”
That included raising the issue of the Arizona immigration law, which empowers police to check the immigration status of people they suspect of being in the country illegally. “We brought it up early and often,” Posner said, “as a troubling trend in our society and an indication that we have to deal with issues of discrimination or potential discrimination.”
That hardly sounds like an apology, as Rep. Dan Burton (D-Ind.) was quick to call it. Posner was only telling the truth: The Arizona law does, in fact, raise the question of whether police will use ethnic or racial profiling in judging whether the immigration status of people they stop should be checked.
There is, however, the matter of context.
Arizona’s law came up in discussions with a country that routinely deports refugees from North Korea back to their Stalinist state, knowing that they will likely be sent to prison camps or even executed for having tried to escape. As for ethnic profiling, China’s repression of its Tibetan and Uighur minorities is one of the world’s foremost examples of religious and ethnic discrimination -- and in no way compares with the treatment of immigrants, legal or illegal, in the United States.
Posner didn’t make a direct comparison. He said Arizona came up in the context of a discussion of how the United States handles such controversies, with governments, civil society and the courts all getting involved. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley made the same point when he was questioned about Posner’s comments by Fox News on Tuesday.
But Crowley also said, “There is, as many have said, real concerns about -- that this Arizona law will inevitably devolve into racial profiling. That would be a fundamental challenge to human rights around the world.”
A “fundamental challenge” --- like China’s deportation of North Korean refugees, or its massacres of Tibetan monks? I don’t think so, and I don’t think Crowley thinks so either. But that’s why the context matters. Republican Sen. John McCain, who has been wrong on so many issues recently as he fights for reelection in Arizona, was right about this much, in the letter he and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) sent to Posner: “There is no place for moral equivalency in democracy and human rights policy.”
(2010-05-19/ Washington Post )
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