Arizona's Law on Illegal Immigrants

Hispanic folks all over the country are demonstrating against the recently enacted Arizona law allowing police to detain illegal immigrants. Most of those demonstrators are here legally, so why are they opposed to this legislation? The answer is simple: folks have been led to believe that the new law allows police to stop anyone who looks hispanic and demand to see their “papers”. The NY Times has drawn the Nazi analogy, and the president has further inflamed the issue by conflating legal and illegal immigrants in his speeches. Yesterday he spoke twice on the issue, using only the word “immigrants”, thus implying that the law applies to all immigrants, legal and illegal. Administration officials have even suggested that they may direct ICE and the Border Patrol not to accept custody of any illegal immigrants detained by the Arizona police.

Here’s the truth.

• Existing Federal law requires all non-citizens in the US to carry, on their person, documentation showing they are here legally. Thus the new Arizona law simply directs police to enforce the existing Federal law.
• The new Arizona law forbids police from asking for documentation unless the person has already been detained for some other violation, so police will not be arbitrarily stopping hispanic people.
• Most of the police in Arizona are hispanic, so they clearly won’t be abusing the law.
• Arizona has neither the means nor the will to enforce this new law. No one in Arizona likes this law, including the legislators who passed it, yet there is overwhelming support for the law, even among hispanic residents. Why? Because the purpose of passing the law was simply to get the Federal government to do their job – protect our borders. Arizona has made a simple statement: “If the Federal government will not protect us, we will protect ourselves”.
• The criminals here are the drug cartels and gang members who are illegally crossing the border and murdering, kidnapping, and otherwise terrorizing law-abiding Arizonans. Yet, the administration and the media are villainizing the Arizonans and ignoring the actual criminals – go figure.

Come on folks, the answer to this issue is relatively straight-forward.

First address the crisis – stop the flow across the porous border. Easy. Use the National Guard to guard our southern border for a couple of years until we can finish building a good fence – a high, strong double fence with dogs and border patrol in between the two fences and sonar monitors to detect tunneling. Please do not dare to call this fence a wall. Walls keep people in (think prisons and Berlin), while fences keep people out (think your neighbor’s dog, and attractive nuisances like swimming pools). We not only have a right to protect our borders – it is the Federal Government’s solemn duty to do so.

Ok, so the first step is straight-forward: protect our borders from invasion. The next step is much more complex. We need to devise a means of legally allowing immigrants temporary access to work at jobs Americans don’t want to do. We also need to provide those folks a path to citizenship if they so choose. All of this is very complicated and controversial, and we should have a nice rational and civilized national discussion on the best means of achieving these goals AFTER WE SECURE THE BORDER.

In the meantime, I believe President Bush, President Obama, and their congresses have been derelict in their duty. Do your damned job, Mr. President, and Arizona will not have to push you into it. As for your adoring media and press: shame on you for obfuscating the truth in the service of blatant political partisanship.