(C) Arizona Mirror
This story was originally published by Arizona Mirror and is unaltered.
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Don’t confuse hate with patriotism at ASU [1]
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Date: 2025-02-06
As I walked to my office on Arizona State University campus on Jan. 31, I was greeted by a procession of students chanting “Get ICE off our campus.” Many of the students hoisted signs emblazoned with a line from ASU’s charter, “measured by whom we include.”
My fellow students were protesting an event hosted by an ASU student organization, College Republicans United (CRU), imploring us to report undocumented students to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). CRU had brought their own sign, an otherwise unadorned piece of posterboard with ICE’s tip-line inked in a shaky hand.
Richard Thomas, CRU’s founder, has attempted to present this blatant fear mongering as a call to civic duty. On the website X, CRU claims that they were merely raising awareness of the “civic responsibility to report crimes to law enforcement.”
Asking us to turn in our neighbors under the guise of “civic duty” is a dark reminder of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act’s demand that all Americans aid in capturing runaway slaves. Calls to report our neighbors to ICE — which has wrongfully detained American citizens in the past — aren’t fundamentally about capturing criminals. The point is to terrorize and ostracize.
The more that our neighbors feel that they are unwanted and hated, not because of their citizenship but because of the color of their skin, the more they will want to hide and consider fleeing the country. That serves the ethnonationalist ends of groups such as CRU, who proclaim among their guiding values: “opposition to immigration and multiculturalism” and “preserving Western civilization.”
These thinly veiled messages are tiresome. Let’s be clear: The goal isn’t to enforce the law, or to secure our safety, it’s to make America whiter. When the crime is that someone is not an American citizen, and we are prompted to report our neighbors whom we don’t know, being “suspicious” is synonymous with being non-white.
Calls to report our neighbors to ICE — which has wrongfully detained American citizens in the past — aren’t fundamentally about capturing criminals. The point is to terrorize and ostracize.
Faced with a country, laws and social movements that pit respecting human dignity against being a good citizen, we must ask ourselves: What does it mean to be a good citizen? The 19th century American writer Henry David Thoreau offered a powerful answer: “[we] are to be [people] first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.” It is neither “late” nor “convenient” today. We must be mindful of the dignity of our neighbors and respect their humanity in our actions.
The ideology that groups like CRU spread is undoubtedly aligned with official American policy at the moment. But “civic duties” — if we can refer to them as such — built upon these morally debased edifices carry no weight.
Thoreau challenged his fellow citizens of Massachusetts: “Let each inhabitant of the State dissolve [their] union with her, as long as she delays to do her duty.” Chief among the state’s duties is to defend the dignity of her citizens. Individuals that kowtow to the demand that we racially profile our neighbors because it is “civic duty” whitewash their actions as though policy comes before or creates morality.
But morality is not determined by the dictates of any state. CRU, in asking us to profile our neighbors and report them to ICE, demands that we place the dictates of our state over those of our conscience.
Isaiah Alvarado, president of CRU at ASU, said that the event last week was “not an act of hatred or bigotry, [but] an act of love for the American nation.” Mr. Alvarado must not get the joke — advancing state interests does not legitimize hate. The problem isn’t that CRU’s event was anti-American, it’s that Mr. Alvarado is sincere: some Americans’ “love for the American nation” motivates the hatred and bigotry that he and CRU espouse.
Thoreau asked: “Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality?” In 2025, dismayingly, we haven’t.
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[1] Url:
https://azmirror.com/2025/02/06/dont-confuse-hate-with-patriotism-at-asu/
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