By GEORGE VECSEY
Published: July 10, 2011
Demonstrators plan to pass out white ribbons; Phoenix plans to pass out chains.
So it goes in the old immigration game. For all the hopeful blather that the wealthiest players would take one for a cause, baseball is arriving in broiling Phoenix, ready for the Home Run Derby and all the feel-good ceremonies and the All-Star Game itself on Tuesday.
The proposed boycott to protest Arizona’s immigration law, known as S.B. 1070, which would tighten the surveillance and prosecution of suspected illegal immigrants, has long since turned into a peaceful wearing of white ribbons and passing out of literature and perhaps some personal criticism of the law from a few players with social awareness.
To show his respect for the tasteful lowering of tension, Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio of Maricopa County said he planned to use one of the county’s chain gangs to clean up the area around Chase Field near downtown Phoenix.
“You think I put the chain gang in the desert where no one could see them?” Sheriff Joe was quoted saying Wednesday by The Arizona Republic. “I’ve never done that,” he added, noting that the chain gang members, all convicted of crimes, will have volunteered for their cleanup duty.
Work crews like this are quite normal for major events, Sheriff Joe reassured the world. Most likely, he added, any chain gang would include illegal immigrants. He used chain gangs of D.U.I. offenders during Super Bowl XLII and unveiled a winking neon “Vacancy” sign outside a jail during Super Bowl XXX. Why should Sheriff Joe change now, just because fans all over the baseball diaspora will have their eyes on Phoenix for a couple of days?
Welcome to Arizona, ground zero of the debate over illegal immigration. When Arizona’s controversial law was passed in 2010, baseball had long since awarded the 2011 All-Star Game to Phoenix. There was some chatter about moving the game, and a few Latino players blurted that they just might boycott the game.
“Unfortunately, they did not move the game,” said Luis Avila, the president of Somos America (We Are America), the umbrella group of 25 groups protesting the Arizona law.
Major League Baseball and Commissioner Bud Selig, who has a home in Arizona, did not immediately move the game elsewhere, the way N.F.L. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue had moved the 1993 Super Bowl several years in advance when Arizona refused to make Martin Luther King’s Birthday a paid state holiday.
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In one sense, baseball was taken off the hook last April when a federal court ruled against the strictest portions of S.B. 1070. For the moment, critics of the bill cannot claim that Adrian Gonzalez of the Red Sox or Jose Bautista of the Blue Jays are likely to be hauled into the pokey for looking vaguely, in the eyes of some police officer, like somebody who had just crossed the border without papers.
But they could arrive for the game unable to miss the chain gangs being displayed by Sheriff Joe just outside the team bus. Welcome to Phoenix, everybody.
The latest evidence is that immigration from Mexico to the United States is declining as more Mexicans stay home to work and to be close to their families. The state is appealing the federal decision to the Supreme Court, which has recently upheld another Arizona bill that penalizes hiring illegal immigrants.
Critics of the bill will stand as witnesses in the hot sun (a high of 103 is forecast) and will pass out white ribbons and antibill literature to patrons heading into the air-conditioned sanctuary of Chase Field.
“We are a diverse state,” said Avila, 28, who came from Queretaro, Mexico, a decade ago to study at the University of Arizona and is now an American citizen and a paid community organizer who volunteers his free time for Somos America.
“We are against knee-jerk talk,” Avila said. “We are against divisive rhetoric.”
Avila says he expected some of the many Latino players in the game to wear ribbons on their street clothes and to speak out against the bill. Major League Baseball has given signals that the players are free to air their personal opinions during the All-Star celebration. Avila says he expects several retired Latino players to attend and speak against the bill.
Two people who will attend the All-Star Game are Rachel Robinson, the widow of Jackie Robinson, and Sharon Robinson, the daughter of Jackie and Rachel. Sharon said she planned to wear a white ribbon because “I am totally opposed to the legislation.”
But she is showing up, partly because she is a consultant for Major League Baseball on an essay contest for children called Breaking Barriers. This year’s winner is Meggie Zahneis, 13, from West Chester, Ohio, who has a rare neurological disability and wrote an essay tracing her many opportunities to the promise of America.
“Listening to stories told by my grandma, I realize that back in her day, women didn’t have the same career opportunities or rights as men,” the young woman wrote. “Now that the road has been paved by pioneers such as Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr., anyone can grow up and be our president, as proven by Barack Obama.”
Since the All-Star Game became caught up in the tensions over immigration, the name of Jackie Robinson has been bandied about, as some sort of Che Guevara in spikes.
“I can’t speak for him, but the fact is, we are going,” Sharon Robinson said for herself and her mother, 88, who is still a force. She said that her father always showed up to play, and to play hard, but that he would surely have used the forum of the All-Star Game to make his point about the Arizona bill.
Jackie Robinson’s most visceral protest came as a young second lieutenant in Texas during World War II, when he refused to move to the back of the bus and went through a court-martial (he was acquitted) before leaving the service. In his early years with the Brooklyn Dodgers, he heard a lot of the ugly comments, but in short order, he began speaking out, from the bully pulpit of a hard slide or a few pointed remarks to reporters after a game. And in his retirement, he was a Republican, a businessman and an activist during the civil rights era — a presence, not an absence.
“My father marched with Dr. King down south, he went to the church in Birmingham where the little girls were killed,” Sharon Robinson said the other day. “He took the whole family to the March on Washington in 1963. I was 13, and I remember how hot it was, and I heard Dr. King speak. Later we held a jazz concert in our house in Connecticut to raise money for Dr. King, who came to our house.”
Roberto Clemente became America’s great Latin sporting hero the moment his flimsy charter plane crashed into the sea off his native Puerto Rico on New Year’s Eve in 1972, while he was ferrying goods to earthquake-stricken Nicaragua. Having been around the Pirates during the turbulent 1960s, I can guarantee that if Clemente were alive today, he would be showing up in Phoenix, with something to say.
The Major League Baseball Players Association, whose current membership is about 30 percent Latino, has opposed the bill from the beginning. But the executive director, Michael Weiner, has not urged players to skip the game or to take any unified action.
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“The Major League Baseball Players Association opposes this law as written,” Weiner said in a statement Friday. “We hope that the law is repealed or modified promptly. If the current law goes into effect, the M.L.B.P.A. will consider additional steps necessary to protect the rights and interests of our members.” But he never mentioned the words boycott or protest.
It was always a dodgy proposition to expect highly diverse millionaire ballplayers to be way out ahead of the rest of us. The issue belongs to Americans like Luis Avila and millions of other Americans, particularly those who live near the Mexican border and are entitled to their own views on immigration and S.B. 1070. The All-Star Game goes on, with white ribbons and chains.
E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com
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