Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Reply to harsh Arizona immigration law: reform


They are words dreaded by millions of subjects in police states, including Hitler's Germany, when confronted by authorities.

"Your papers, please."

To establish their right to be where they were, people were required to carry documents.

Now that chilling demand is apt to be heard on the streets of Arizona in 90 days, when a harsh new "immigration" law takes effect, empowering local police with "reasonable suspicion" to ask people for documents establishing their U.S. citizenship.

In Arizona, with an estimated 460,000 Latino illegal aliens, "reasonable suspicion" is apt to mean a person's skin color and language, certainly not blond, blue-eyed Scandinavians.

Even legal residents who may look suspiciously out of place are likely to be swept up in this clearly unconstitutional usurpation of federal immigration powers. The statute features some other absurd provisions—such as allowing police to be fined for not enforcing the law and permitting undocumented people to be charged with trespassing in Arizona.

As fury over the law builds, however, its harshest critics agree the solution lies in federal immigration reform, which faltered and failed during the George W. Bush presidency, and now is unwisely languishing far down on the congressional agenda.

The Arizona legislation is a brew of frustration over lack of federal reform, plus a touch of bigotry. The same lawmakers also enacted a "birther" law requiring presidential candidates to prove their citizenship, also probably unconstitutional.

As the border state where most illegal Latino aliens enter the United States and where Mexican crime families conduct an unthinkable number of ransom kidnappings as well as drug-deals-gone-bad shootings, Arizona has been ripe for desperate measures.

If Congress persists in ignoring the urgency of immigration reform, other states could find the Arizona crackdown tempting, thus creating a patchwork of state immigration laws that in time would clog the federal courts with lawsuits between the states and Washington with the obvious nightmare of lawsuits.

Moreover, Arizona's "solution" is only illusory. With an estimated 12 million illegal aliens woven into the national economy, piecemeal arrests and deportation are the equivalent of filling the ocean one grain of sand at a time.

Fairness to employers, justice for hardworking immigrants who are part of communities and an end to rogue state laws demand that Congress act quickly, lest the domestic tranquility be torn apart.




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