Am I missing something?
I've been listening to people freaking out about Arizona's new immigration laws for three days now. The liberals seem to be missing the point regarding illegal immigrants, that being, they're ILLEGAL. I see nothing wrong with Arizona having the balls to stand up and enforce a law that the federal government enacted
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Arizona has manufactured much of its own problem by engaging, even before this law, in a wide range of measures to crack down on illegals which blew up in their face and made the situation worse. The really blatant way the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department has targeted Hispanics, even those legally in the US, poured gasoline on the fire and, quite obviously, fixed nothing.
A real solution would be a comprehensive federal immigration reform bill. But the Arizona law and the political firestorm around it has made that impossible this year; all the politicians working on it say the Arizona law has left all their potential allies running for cover. Legal immigration to the US is nearly impossible, and is kept at levels low enough that, if immigration laws were actually enforced, the US economy couldn't withstand it. Our immigration rules aren't laws; they're an economic suicide pact.
Arizona has more of a Joe Arpaio problem than an illegal immigration problem. His band of thugs, known colloquially as the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department, recently detained a Mexican citizen legally visiting the US, who had a valid Mexican passport, a valid US visa, and several other forms of ID on his person. It's clear that Arpaio simply wants to harass an unpopular ethnic group and blame them for problems created, in no small part, by his own efforts.
And even if the Arizona law were a good idea, it's all just pissing in the wind because there's no way in the world you can imagine enforcing its probable cause provisions in a way that is both race-neutral and national origin-neutral, both of which are required, as both are recognized as suspect categories under the law. So the federal courts will, quite correctly, smack down every last sentence of the Arizona law, and Arizona's politicians will be left only with the satisfaction of being able to beat their chests and curse the sky.
One of the more ridiculous provisions of the Arizona law is that a driver's license from any state that doesn't verify immigration status won't be considered evidence that the person is in the US legally. So if you're from Michigan or Florida (or four or five other states), you'll need to carry a US passport whenever you're in Arizona. Something tells me that white people from Michigan and Florida won't be the ones detained in police stations because their driver's license isn't good enough, even though they could be, oh, Canadians overstaying their visas.
The idea of requiring US citizens to carry passports (and most US citizens don't even have passports) to move between states is completely anathema to the spirit and letter of the US Constitution.
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And don't even get me started on Arpaio. The guy is an attention whore and a douche bag. In the scope of several of my criminal justice classes, we had law enforcement from a variety of agencies. Not a single one of them would say something positive about him.
It isn't just him, though. The City of Phoenix and he go round and round, but he has the support of the Maricopa County District Attorney, who holds some of his same view. That guy came to NAU a couple of years ago at the invitation of one of my professors (a Hispanic immigrant), and a riot just about broke out on campus. The students were actually very rude and were lucky they weren't arrested.
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