American Jews & Immigration 2012

From the 2012 Jewish Yearbook: Another issue that continued to divide Americans was the status of an estimated 11 million undocumented aliens in the US. Arizona enacted legislation known as SB 1070 that some considered draconian. The law expressed as official state policy the goal of “attrition through enforcement.” …Opposition to the law by American Jewish groups was broad and sharp. Jewish leaders argued that immigration law has been the province of the federal government and that the law would encourage racial profiling of Americans, particularly those of hispanic origin. HIAS President Gideon Aronoff said that while few Jews were directly affected by the bill, “we are all Americans, we are all our brothers’ keeper.” Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism called the law “inhumane and retrogressive:” and Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center remarked that “this law makes no sense — it guarantees and stigmatizes people of color as second-class citizens and exposes them to intimidation and the use of racial profiling as a weapon of bias.”