Elian Gonzalez: A Decade Later

A young child's plight captured the nation's attention a decade ago. Elian Gonzalez was torn between two countries and two families. One wanted him to stay in the United States; his father wanted him back in Cuba. To add to the tragedy of it all, his mother died on their way to Florida.

Now, 10 years later, young Elian is a teenager and recently gave his own perspective of the situation that drew media attention, sympathy, and outrage. The celebration of the anniversary of Elian's return to Cuba was largely a political event. Despite the negative picture painted many of the media comments, a majority of Americans felt sympathy for the child's situation and wanted him to have a happy life, whether here in the US or with his father in Cuba.

And this same sympathy and outrage is expressed over the outrageous Arizona Immigration Law. With new laws surrounding immigration, one has to wonder how Elian's situation would be played out today. What if Elian had, by chance, arrived in Arizona today instead of Florida 10 years ago?

Today there is more outrage than ever over illegal immigration, largely due to the economic crisis, as well as some extreme hatred over the country electing its first black/multi-racial President.

The Arizona Law and the extreme propaganda that Americans are seeing today reflect the same kind of behaviors that proceeded historical tragedies such as the Holocaust. In the case of America, yes, the laws for illegal immigration undoubtedly need to be reformed and enforced. But the government needs to work with people that feel they have no choice if they wish for a better life for themselves or their families. Currently, the wait for filing and receiving citizenship is extremely long. Occasionally, media coverage has focused on the unfortunate situations involving immigration, such as when parents immigrate and work in the United States for 20 or more years only to be torn away from their US -born children once their citizenship status is denied.

The Arizona law amounts to apartheid, and there's no way around that. According to that law, police officers can use race as a factor in stopping someone and asking to see identification papers. See http://www.factcheck.org/2010/06/arizonas-papers-please-law/ for more information on what procedures are considered acceptable.

Making a law to discriminate on groups of people based on their race and/or gender seems to be against the very values that the country is supposed to stand for, yet these types of laws are becoming more common after a time when it appeared that they would soon become nothing more than cautionary footnotes in our turbulent history. If the United States is to continue to move forward and provide an example of what a country can be once it's reached its full potential, laws based on racist and homophobic ideas must be voted out
(or better yet, not on the table at all) and the politicians that propose them voted out of office as well.