AMERICA:Washington may challenge Arizona’s new immigration law on grounds it pre-empts the federal government’s right to determine immigration policy, writes LARA MARLOWE

THE MEXICAN-AMERICANS sit on folding chairs, around picnic tables laden with coolers, in the shade outside the state capitol building in Phoenix.

It is the 60th day of their vigil against law SB1070. There are no posters or political slogans, only the US flag and the emblems of the army, navy, air force and marine corps, to remind the white people that they, too, served this country.

A plaster Madonna draped in rosary beads, a framed image of Christ and burning candles form a makeshift chapel beneath another tree.

At first, they are wary.

“People come out of the building to talk to us. Then they go back inside and they distort what we say,” a teenage boy says.

“We’re not an organisation, just Hispanic people, trying to be together, a community,” says Carolina Caudillo (20), a student of journalism at Phoenix College.

With her long gold-brown hair and pale green eyes, Caudillo seems to have stepped out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel.

She speaks of fear, of people leaving the country. Sometimes her face breaks into a sad, beautiful smile.

“My friend Valerie went to high school with me,” Caudillo continues. “She spent most of her life here. This was her home. She went back to Mexico. She said she doesn’t have a future here.

“Another friend left because they deported her father. Her mother and siblings followed right away. She stayed on alone for a while. Families are being split up.”

Although her English is flawless, Caudillo searches for words to explain the hatred that has engulfed Arizona.

“It’s been going on for a long time, growing,” she says. “I don’t know who to blame. We don’t know how to solve it, but it needs to be solved.”

I leave the little encampment and head past the rose bushes and replica of the Liberty Bell for my appointment with state senator Russell Pearce, the author of SB1070.

Pearce (62) is a vituperative former policeman whose conversation is punctuated with the words “illegal”, “criminal” and “enough is enough”. He makes up extravagant figures – up to 10,000 illegals crossing the border daily – and is furious when I use the word “Mexican”.

“Why would you assume that this is about Mexicans?” Pearce says. “The media does that and it’s a fabrication and a myth . . . It has nothing to do with anything but the law. It offends me to the core when people assume this is about race.”

In 1977, Pearce was shot in the chest by a Mexican youth. He was out on patrol, and stopped when he saw three teenagers drinking. One of them grabbed his weapon.

“If I had a heart I’d be dead,” he jokes in an oft-repeated witticism about how belonging to the Republican Party saved him.

In 2004, Pearce’s son Sean, also a policeman, was shot in the stomach when he went to arrest a Mexican charged with homicide and drug-dealing.

These days, Pearce has found a home further to the right, with the Tea Party movement. Since 2004, he has written three laws targeting illegal immigrants.

He says many states (the first time he mentions it it’s 18; the second time 34) have contacted him for help in modelling their own laws after SB1070.

The Obama administration may challenge SB1070 on the grounds that it pre-empts the federal government’s right to determine immigration policy.

“I fully expect to be sued by the left-wing, open-border anarchist crowd that support law-breakers over law-keepers,” Pearce says.

His latest law will not take effect until July 29th, but Pearce is already working on his next project. The 14th amendment of the US constitution is “unconstitutional”, he says. “It was passed in 1868 for the sole purpose of righting the wrong done to former slaves.”

Juris solis was never meant to apply to the children of illegal aliens. It’s an aberration, Pearce says, for “anchor babies” or “jackpot babies” born in Arizona to enjoy citizenship.

It costs taxpayers “hundreds of millions of dollars” because “in this welfare state we have created in the US, and we are a socialist country ... everybody thinks they have the right to other people’s stuff”.

As Pearce tell it, whites are the victims. “Ranchers near the border have their fences torn down. Their water lines are destroyed. Their dogs are killed and their cattle are slaughtered. They board up their houses. If they hear noise at night, they don’t come out because they are fearful. They pray for daylight.”

Two Mexicans shot dead on the border in the past two weeks “were trying to kill our border patrol agents”, Pearce says.

“Home invaders, car-jackers, drug smugglers, child molesters. That’s what’s coming across that border every day.”

This invasion “is threatening American culture”, Pearce says.

On May 11th, governor Jan Brewer signed a Bill that will end ethnic studies programmes in Arizona schools.

Pearce cites a passage in a schoolbook, the title of which he can’t remember, that says, according to him: “The white people are dying. We need to run them out. If they won’t leave, we will kill the gringos.”

He adds: “They’re teaching these children they’re being oppressed, that they need to take back America, that this is their land, that they’re being abused, that white people are the enemy. This is nothing less than sedition.”

Does it really hurt anyone if Spanish language classes are taught in Arizona schools? “Yes it does,” Pearce says. “They can speak it in their own homes. I’m not gonna pay for it. We’re a nation that speaks English.”