Thread: Arizona's ugly immigration law reflects price of inaction

Arizona's ugly immigration law reflects price of inaction

Rarely does ignoring a pressing problem — be it medical, financial or that ka-thunk in your car — make it go away. And so it is with illegal immigration.

OPPOSING VIEW: We're protecting our citizens
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/ed ... _ST1_N.htm

Three years after comprehensive immigration reform collapsed in Congress, the nation's southern border remains porous. About 10.8 million illegal immigrants still make the USA their home, and businesses across the nation hire them in droves. Many states and communities, fed up with Washington's inaction, have taken immigration enforcement into their own hands — often with draconian measures of dubious constitutionality.

The latest, and perhaps ugliest, is the law enacted in Arizona last week that requires local police to question the legal status of anyone they "reasonably suspect" of being in this country illegally. That's an open invitation to racial profiling of Hispanics, and it has set off protests from the Phoenix statehouse to the U.S. Capitol.

Legal challenges might ultimately overturn the law, but they'll do nothing to dent the legitimate frustrations behind it. Arizona and other border states bear the brunt of the nation's failed immigration policies. It's sad, but not surprising, that 70% of Arizonans favored the law, according to a Rasmussen poll earlier this month. Even during the recession, illegal immigrants made up nearly 10% of the state's labor force.

Arizona taxpayers spend hundreds of millions of dollars to educate and provide medical treatment for illegal immigrants and their children. And violence by smugglers and Mexican drug cartels has reached such proportions that Arizona's U.S. senators last week called for the National Guard to protect the state's southern border.

The tool that Arizona lawmakers fashioned to address those problems is crude by any measure, though not quite as crude as critics claim. It specifically bars ethnic profiling, and it does not give police authority to stop people arbitrarily on the street and demand their papers.

But in practice it's hard to believe the law won't lead to harassment of citizens and legal residents. Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., suggested on MSNBC that along with "behavior," police will look at someone's "type of attire ... right down to the shoes" to determine if they raise suspicions.

Supporters have yet to explain satisfactorily just what will give police reasonable suspicion that someone they stop, say for a traffic violation, is an illegal immigrant. And, in fact, one way to stop police questions is to present some specified form of government ID — an idea that smacks of having to carry your "papers" to be safe. But only if you happen to look Hispanic.

Just the prospect of the law, scheduled to take effect in about three months, is sowing suspicion of police in migrant communities, which could prevent people from reporting crimes or cooperating with investigations.

And all just because of stubborn opposition in Congress to reasonable compromise. The outlines of a solution have long been recognized: sealing the border, sanctioning employers, allowing temporary workers, and providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here who work, stay out of trouble and pay taxes.

Until Washington makes the tough decisions to fix the nation's intolerable, unjust and mostly ignored immigration system, bad solutions like Arizona's will just keep on filling the vacuum.
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/ed ... 8_ST_N.htm

This writer mentions "providing a path to citizenship' for those here to work; however he leaves out the fact that most of these "workers" have illegal alien nonworking dependents who will than be made legal and continue to have children that taxpayers will have to support.