AZ has another bill.Follow

I agree with Samira that it still leaves opportunities for abuse but it's slightly less draconian than the original bill signed into law.

Huh. Well, that's good, I guess....

Hey, I'm not trying to defend this law because I think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread or anything. However, there has been a lot of misrepresentation about what it actually says, and I find it very unfortunate that it has brought to the surface some racial/national divisiveness in our country.

Jophiel, I wasn't trying to be cracking wise, but in all seriousness I am curious as to what your thoughts are on a solution to immigration in America. I find myself going back and forth on this issue: I certainly don't begrudge people wanting to come to America in the hopes of a better life for themselves or their children, but I also have friends/co-workers from India who have obeyed our immigration laws and have spent countless hours and dollars on paperwork and lawyers to become legal residents.

Samira, I am certainly not naive enough to think there aren't any bad cops that abuse their power based on their personal bias, but I also don't believe that most cops are bad human beings. I just hope that in this case, as I would hope in the case of every law, there are sufficient penalties and good people monitoring the arrests to ensure these abuses are minimized as much as humanly possible. I don't know, maybe that is naive.

We need comprehensive reform. Which means realizing that a fence (of whatever type) is good for trying to keep track of who is coming over the border and preventing select people/items from entering the country but is ultimately worthless if the border is flooded by benign people who just want to legally work and contribute but can't due to an antiquated quota system which fails to address the wants/needs of neither the immigrants nor the companies which are hiring them. Develop a method of legalizing those who have been here not just because it's the "nice" thing to do but because it can drain the pool of illegals and help determine who's here illegally because they're criminals and who is here illegally because State Department decided we have enough strawberry pickers and chicken cleaners. Let those who fall into the latter category pay into the system they're already using and stop running in fear when they ding your car because they don't want to be deported and lose their families over a minor traffic accident. Conversely, when you are arrested and can't provide proof of legal residence, it should be a flag for law enforcement that there's a reason for it beyond unavailable paperwork from the Consulate.

Yeah, it's a more difficult solution to implement than "Build a big fence!" or "Deport all them Mexicans!" but the intelligent solutions usually aren't the easy knee-jerk ones.

Jophiel,



A fence is a start. Better to plug the hole in the ship than try and reconstruct the hull while at sea.

Legally, you're supposed to carry your visa or permanent resident card with you anyway.

Despite all of the controversy, I really can't muster much anger over this. I see little difference between this and being asked to show a driver's license.

Edited, May 13th 2010 5:01pm by Sweetums

No, it's not. Because no fence is going to keep out the amount of people desperate to enter the country for rather benign reasons. What it does do is give us a fence with lots of holes (literal or figurative) to run around trying to fix over and over because we failed to ever address the root cause and waste the efforts of law enforcement in trying to track down people whose crime is trying to find work instead of people whose crime is the seven kilos of cocaine they possess or truck full of weapons. A fence is a waste of time and money without fixing the entire problem.


If you're a US citizen? News to me.

The issue isn't resident aliens being detained, it's legal citizens being detained because they have an accent or brown skin and don't have a driver's license, etc on them.

Edited, May 13th 2010 5:10pm by Jophiel

Right, and I'm not questioning that. I'm more thinking about Mary, who was born here and was raised by her Mexican family, speaks Spanish all the time, doesn't own a car, and doesn't have any picture ID. She's a citizen of this country, but she could be arrested for speaking Spanish while jaywalking, and not having her "papers."



Edited, May 13th 2010 5:22pm by Belkira

I agree, except for the bolded bit. My understanding is that one of the drivers for this bill is that everyone in various neighborhoods knows where/who the illegals are, and there is growing frustration that when they call up immigration to deal with it, nothing is done. Seems kinda silly to have a law empowering state and local police to check for national status, but barring them from doing so because someone called them and complained about someone suspected of not being here legally.

So, a cop driving by a section of road with 50 Latinos looking for day work, knowing that every single one of them is an undocumented illegal alien, cannot do anything unless there's some other crime being committed? I guess that's what I don't get here. If the objective is to prevent racial profiling, this is the wrong way to do it. Everyone's asking what criteria would be used to suspect that someone's here illegally, but anyone who lives in a border community knows the answer is simple and obvious. Everyone knows where the illegals hang out. They know where they live. They know where they work. No one does anything about it. There's no need to racially profile anyone. Unless you make it a violation of the law to pick up the obvious illegals, of course. Then you're left with profiling and guessing.


With this change, now it will be every Latino who's pulled over at a traffic stop being asked to prove he's a citizen. IMO, that's a step in the wrong direction.


Oh, and for the record, and since it's been awhile since we debated immigration, this is one of the few political issues on which Joph and I agree almost 100%. I think that we need a fence, but that a fence alone is moronic and will be counter productive. We also need some means to legally relieve the economic pressures along our southern border which cause so many people to seek work illegally in the US. Some variation of a guest worker program for Mexican citizens is desperately needed. Sadly, this idea ends out getting attacked from hard core ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum. The Right opposes it on law and order grounds and calls it "amnesty". The Left opposes it because it would necessarily weaken organized labor. It's sad that one of the few things both extremes do agree on is to perpetuate a really horribly stupid situation on our border.

Did you hear about the new one for deporting unregistered waterfowl?


Wait for it... Wait for it....

Blasphemy.