Today, Arizona's "show me your papers" anti-immigrant law goes into effect. Across the country, July 29th has been declared a national day of action for Human Rights. Phoenix is ground zero for the collective outrage and protest that this bill has inspired. Here thousands of people are in the streets, many showing their courage by participating in civil disobedience across the city. In particular, downtown Phoenix has been transformed into a temporary “Human Rights Zone” with public promises from communities, businesses, and police to not comply with the law. It is an inspiring moment of solidarity and protest during a very dark time. Don’t let the partial-injunction fool you, most of this law has been allowed to continue, and we all know there are no half-measures when it comes to human rights. The hate and racism we are seeing in Arizona is only the latest, in a long series of escalating demonization of brown communities.
There is one unlikely group that has joined in protest against the anti-immigrant law: Environmentalists.
As I am practicing civil disobedience in Phoenix today, I’m proud to be a part of the new generation of eco-activists who see the forests for the trees (and the people). We believe the fate of our planet intimately depends on how we treat our brothers and sisters, and that standing up for Immigrant Rights is a central element of our task. 
These new environmentalists represent a new way of thinking. We’re connecting the dots: an ecosystem is your home. Economy is the management of your home. When you globalize your economy, you globalize your ecosystem. Here’s the frank outcome: the ecological systems that support life on our planet have been pushed to the brink by an economy that trashes natural resources and destroys relationships between peoples across the planet in the process. When you convert forests into paper, mountains into coal, and oceans into oil, you force people off their land and deprive those land-based peoples of the resources they depend on to survive. A key lesson from the Environmental Justice movement is that supporting those communities in protecting their land and their livelihoods is one of the most strategic ways to fight the drivers of climate change. The root cause of environmental degradation and climate change is the root cause of forced migration.
Human migration has happened throughout history. Immigration is an ever-present, beautiful fact of Arizona’s history. Migration is not the cause of the climate crisis. But displacement of humans (and the next steps of detention and deportation being put in place by SB1070) will be the result of it.
Those of us who have worked around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change know that half of the UN debates center on “adaptation.” That means finding ways to accommodate the millions of climate refugees forced to find new homes because of the droughts, floods, famines, and destabilization that comprise the climate crisis. Right no the US immigration architecture is being built out. Forward-thinking climate activists know that now is a critical time to ensure that the precedent for immigration policy in this country protects human rights because immigration is going to get a lot more common, not less.
The environmental tradition in the U.S. has a checkered history: it has a great record of supporting wildlife; less great on supporting human communities that belong to these ecosystems. Today’s environmental activist is connecting the dots between people and planet, and standing for human dignity for immigrants in our community is a key part of that. Today is a day for environmentalists to show up.
For information about the vibrant actions taking place today, stay up to date at www.altoarizona.com and on twitter follow @puenteAZ, @ndlon
As the federal government's legal action against Arizona immigration law SB 1070 goes on, Americans continue to voice their support for the bold position the Grand Canyon State has taken. CBS News and Rasmussen report the support of SB 1070 is 57 and 65 percent of Americans while The New York Daily News reports CNN giving a 55 percent rate of support.
I found this here: Arizona cannot deport illegal immigrants under SB 1070
With SB 1070, state officials are more capable of finding illegal immigrants, although they can't send these immigrants out of the country. Attorney General Eric Holder has not signed the papers he needs to, to make sure that happened.
I see/hear lots of opinions on Arizona's anti-immigrant law and scant discussion on the Arizona anti-ILlegal immigrant law. Rarely has anyone seemed to have read the law, which is a re-phrase of the federal anti-ILlegal immigrant law, which the feds fail to act upon, leaving Arizona with an 80-mile swath inland along its southern borders that is so dangerous to Legal Americans that signs along highways tell them to stay clear for fear of death by Mexican drug cartel operations, not to mention the murders and threats of same to ranchers and police personnel in southern counties, nor of the ~35,000,000 illegal immigrants presently residing in the US and what this costs in social and healthcare services to taxpayers, nor of the practice of NOT arresting illegal immigrants for suspected criminal behaviour, because they will be released by the judge, because when they are handed over to federal authorities they will be released, anyways.
For more on the subject of anti-illegal immigration please see: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=13863:
You can't argue for unlimited immigration on one hand, and protecting the environment on the other:
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/5/8/230000.shtml
Conservation is a local matter, and adding thousands of people annually to an area with limited freshwater resources is hardly environmentally responsible. The poverty crisis in Mexico has been blamed on many things, but few in that country will accept responsibility for the root causes: very high birthrates leading to overpopulation, endemic corruption that is completely homegrown and a serious narco-gang problem. Mexico can't rely on its Northern Neighbor to be an escape valve; Mexico also knows this, which is why the Mexican government harshly cracks down on migrants from Central America who try to cross its borders.
One also has to be suspicious of so-called environmental activists who advocate for more local population growth. The Sierra Club accepted nearly U.S.$100M in donations from a wealthy investor, David Gelbaum, under the condition that they refrain from discussing immigration. The David Suzuki Foundation receives most of its funding from Chartered Banks, developers, Real Estate Trusts and developers--groups who have lobbied for doubling Canada's immigration intake, in order to boost housing and infrastructure starts. One suspects that these faux environmentalists enjoy the patronage of corporations in the U.S. which have benefitted from cheap migrant labour and immigration-fuelled housing and infrastructure demand.