Arizona's Shame II

By now all the arguments, for and against, have been heard regarding the law mistakenly titled "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods", as it continues to head the news. I will repeat my arguments against this misguided law.

• A suspect is guilty until proven innocent under this anti-immigration law.
• 
  
• The unintended consequences are already apparent. Tourists and conventions will avoid this state because it appears to be racist.

• Mexican nationals, who normally add to Arizona's economy, will be reluctant to shop here.
• 
  
• It will cost Arizona much needed funds to fight the coming lawsuits.
• 
  
• Arizona's image has been tarnished world wide. The residents of this state are perceived to be backward and lacking in compassion.
• 
  
• The law does nothing to address the real problem of human and drug trafficking and the accompanying violence. Those criminals are already expert at evading the law officers. Nothing will change after this law is enforced.
• 
  
• It is very divisive, pitting Anglos against Hispanics.
• 
  
• There is no way to enforce it without racial profiling as Tucson's sheriff, Clarence Dupnik. has made clear. (He is refusing to enforce the law.)
• 
  
• It will separate families of those undocumented immigrants who are caught without their papers. Constitutional law makes children born in the U. S. automatic citizens, whether the extremists like it or not. If parents are deported, what shall we do with the children?
• 
  
• It will make life more unpleasant for legal citizens who happen to have dark skin and brown eyes.
  

• It will overwhelm our Department of Immigration with more undocumented immigrants to lock up and the cost will be astronomical in money and human lives.

In defense of this law I found only one valid argument; it shines a light on a very pressing problem that needs to be resolved. It may, or may not, force the lawmakers in Washington to deal with the issue. However, it was the very same ones who applaud this Arizona law who defeated George Bush's sensible attempt at Immigration Reform by screaming "Amnesty" and demanding that all 11 million undocumented immigrants be deported. How illogical is that?

Political opportunists like Arizona Senators, John McCain and John Kyle have an ad running in Arizona with their own unworkable solution to securing our borders. They will put 30,000 National Guardmen and Federal troops on the border and build more fence. I think most of the National Guard is in Afghanistan and I would applaud that part of their proposal if it would bring those guys home to safeguard our borders. As to the fence; fences can be breached so easily that it is almost pathetic that some people think this is a solution. We are not a medieval walled city. Even though the fence will keep some out, it is so expensive that it isn't worth the cost.

George Will calls the opposition to this law, liberal hysteria. He bases part of his argument on the fact that it has been a federal law since 1952 that every alien have proof in his possession of a receipt or certificate of alien registration. While this is true, it is quite another matter to require a proof that you are here legally
(Like having proof that the car you are driving is registered) as opposed to giving the police the authority to stop and demand to see the papers of any person who looks like he/she might be an undocumented immigrant. That is where the comparison to Nazi Germany is relevant.

George Will goes on to say that Cardinal Mahony's statement comparing asking for papers to Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia is a liberal tradition. He basis this vile argument on FDR's talk of returning tho the 1920's as the "spirit of Fascism".

This morning Frank Rich, NYT, tied this law into what is happening with the Tea Party movement. Here are a few paragraph's from his commentary.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The more you examine the law’s (AZ law) provisions and proponents, the more you realize that it’s the latest and (so far) most vicious battle in a far broader movement that is not just about illegal immigrants — and that is steadily increasing its annexation of one of America’s two major political parties.

Arizonans, like all Americans, have every right to be furious about Washington’s protracted and bipartisan failure to address the immigration stalemate----- is hardly tantamount to being a bigot. But the Arizona law expressing that anger is bigoted, and in a very particular way. The law dovetails seamlessly with the national “Take Back America” crusade that has attended the rise of Barack Obama and the accelerating demographic shift our first African-American president represents.

The crowd that wants Latinos to show their papers if there’s a “reasonable suspicion” of illegality is often the same crowd still demanding that the president produce a document proving his own citizenship. Lest there be any doubt of that confluence, Rush Limbaugh hammered the point home after Obama criticized Arizona’s action. “I can understand Obama being touchy on the subject of producing your papers,” he said. “Maybe he’s afraid somebody’s going to ask him for his.” Or, as Glenn Beck chimed in about the president last week: “What has he said that sounds like American?”

To the “Take Back America” right, the illegitimate Obama is Illegal Alien No. 1. It’s no surprise that of the 35 members of the Arizona House who voted for the immigration law (the entire Republican caucus), 31 voted soon after for another new law that would require all presidential candidates to produce birth certificates to qualify for inclusion on the state’s 2012 ballot. With the whole country now watching Arizona, that “birther” bill was abruptly yanked Thursday.

The legislators who voted for both it and the immigration law were exclusively Republicans, but what happened in the Arizona G.O.P. is not staying in Arizona. Officials in at least 10 other states are now teeing up their own new immigration legislation. They are doing so even in un-Arizonan places like Ohio, Missouri, Maryland and Nebraska, none of them on the Department of Homeland Security’s 2009 list of the 10 states that contain three-quarters of America’s illegal immigrant population.

The one group of Republicans that has been forthright in criticizing the Arizona law is the Bush circle: Jeb Bush, the former speechwriter Michael Gerson, the Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, the adviser Mark McKinnon and, with somewhat more equivocal language, Karl Rove. McKinnon and Rove know well that Latino-bashing will ultimately prove political suicide in a century when Hispanic Americans are well on their way to becoming the largest minority in the country and are already the swing voters in many critical states.

The Bushies, however, have no power and no juice in the new conservative order. The former president is nearly as reviled in some Tea Party circles as Obama is.

When Graham had the gall to work with Chuck Schumer of New York on an immigration reform bill, the hard-line Americans for Legal Immigration punished him by spreading rumors about his private life as loudly as possible. Graham has been backing away from supporting the immigration bill ever since.

It’s harder and harder to cling to the conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is merely an element in the G.O.P., not the party’s controlling force — the tail that’s wagging the snarling dog. It’s also hard to maintain that the Tea Party’s nuttier elements are merely a fringe of a fringe.

The Times/CBS poll of the Tea Party movement found that only 41 percent of its supporters believe that the president was born in the United States.

The angry right and its apologists also keep insisting that race has nothing to do with their political passions. Thus Sarah Palin explained that it’s Obama and the “lamestream media” that are responsible for “perpetuating this myth that racial profiling is a part” of Arizona’s law. So how does that profiling work without race or ethnicity, exactly? Brian Bilbray, a Republican Congressman from California and another supporter of the law, rode to the rescue by suggesting “they will look at the kind of dress you wear.” Wise Latinas better start shopping at Talbots!

In this Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, it’s politically incorrect to entertain a reasonable suspicion that race may be at least a factor in what drives an action like the Arizona immigration law. Any racism in America, it turns out, is directed at whites. Beck called Obama a “racist.” Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a “Latina woman racist.” When Obama put up a routine YouTube video calling for the Democratic base to mobilize last week — which he defined as “young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women” — the Republican National Committee attacked him for playing the race card.

The rage of 2010 is far more incendiary than anything that went down in 1988, and it will soon leap from illegal immigration to other issues in other states. Boycott the Diamondbacks and Phoenix’s convention hotels if you want to punish Arizona, but don’t for a second believe that it will stop the fire next time.