La vie aux Etats-Unis - synthèse en anglais

The intersection of 43rd Avenue and Thomas Road on the west side of Phoenix is lined with the same monotonous range of petrol stations, fast-food outlets, pharmacies and clothes stores that you'll find in any modern city in America's heartlands. It is distinguished only by the exceptionally mundane. Look closer, though, and a disturbing pattern emerges. Here is a real estate office that is shuttered and empty, here a panaderia - a bread shop - that has closed, and next door to that, a children's clothes store also shut. (…)Diaz [an English teacher] says his clients are fleeing a controversial new immigration law that comes into effect throughout Arizona on 29 July. SB 1070 amounts to the harshest crackdown against undocumented immigrants that has been made in any part of the US for a generation. It has put Arizona in the centre of a nationwide foment about immigration that is pitting individual states against the Obama administration, whites against Hispanics.

At the heart of the debate are the 12 million or so illegal immigrants, most of them Mexican, who already live and work in the US, about 500,000 of them in Arizona. Over the past few decades they have become a fixture of American life, building homes and families and carrying out the low-paid farm work that few US citizens are prepared to do. (...)

The mood has changed, too, among white Americans, who have interpreted the increasingly aggressive language used by politicians as a green light to express their own prejudices. Incidents of harassment towards undocumented Latinos from employers, landlords and neighbours have increased. Should the victims protest, they are frequently taunted with the refrain: "So what are you going to do about it, tell the police?"

The hostility has reached such a level that Guzman deploys an extreme metaphor, saying that a "Gestapo community" is in the making. (…)With two weeks still to go before SB 1070 becomes a reality, thousands of families are already leaving Arizona. (…)

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