Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
May 19, 2010
The Arizona Immigration Law
Immigrants and advocates for the illegal marched April 23 outside the State Capitol in Phoenix. Monica Almeida/The New York Times
In the post-show discussions after Sizwe Banzi is Dead this weekend, one issue that audience members consistently raised was the new Arizona immigration law, which grants state and local police broad powers to enforce federal immigration law. The New York Times paraphrases the bill:
The law would require the police “when practicable” to detain
people they reasonably suspected were in the country without
authorization. It would also allow the police to charge immigrants
with a state crime for not carrying immigration documents. And
it allows residents to sue cities if they believe the law is not
being enforced.
Audiences have been drawing connections between the enforcement of immigration documents in Arizona and the South African passbook law, which regulated the movement and employment of South African blacks and led to frequent unwarranted incarceration under legal apartheid. While I would caution against making broad statements of equivalency between U.S. immigration law and South African apartheid, what’s resonant in Sizwe Banzi is Dead is the infringement on basic human rights and dignity that a banal state-issued document (like a passbook, like immigrant papers) can support. Thus, as a widely cited example, a brown-skinned man may get pulled over for so much as rolling through a stop sign as an excuse to check his immigrant papers. The argument against the law, an argument that Sizwe Banzi is Dead makes quite powerfully, is that this kind of targeting and profiling of a sect of the population—namely, poor brown-skinned men and women—is nothing short of an existential infringement that violates an individual’s human (or natural) rights. The assertion from supporters of the new law that “you should have nothing to fear if your papers are in order” misses the larger consequence that such a law creates a paranoid system of human coercion over an unempowered people. Thus does Sizwe Banzi assert that “I am a man,” thus do Arizona immigrants assert that “we are human”—these laws take away those basic assumptions.
Allen Gilmore as Sizwe Banzi in Sizwe Banzi is Dead
Of course, what you think of the Arizona Senate bill has a lot to do with what you think of U.S. immigration law, which the Arizona law, in some ways, merely follows to its logical conclusion (ie. sustained local enforcement). What Sizwe Banzi is Dead does, however, is to illustrate exactly the human cost of such a measure, and indeed, goes a long way toward forcing your opinion on the way we handle regulate immigration in this country.
You can read the full text of the Arizona Senate bill here.
2 Responses to The Arizona Immigration Law
This piece, and others like it, can never be “dated” or “irrelevant.” It resonates with this time because of America’s ties to South Africa, our own race issues, and interlocking perpetual systems of inequality that create such injustices as apartheid. The messages in this play resurface in Arizona, the Gulf, urban plight, gross job loss, and other related topics.
But it was gender that caught my eye. In a dominant, imperialist white society, how does a black man become a man? How does he cultivate manhood? And under whose terms? Is assuming another’s identity or life the only way? That was one of the things that made this tragic. And tragedy endures in the human condition.
By Kerry Luckett on June 15, 2010 at 6:22 pm
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Your promotion says Court’s goal is to become a major force in classical theatre. YOU ARE!!!! And have been for many years. Sizwe Banzi left me with happy tears.
By Richard Jacoby on June 15, 2010 at 5:27 pm