The Racial-Profiling Smoke Screen
the corner
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
The Racial-Profiling Smoke Screen [Heather Mac Donald]
As each day passes without any abatement in the increasingly surreal hysteria over the Arizona immigration law, the ground for that opposition becomes ever clearer: The real problem with the Arizona law is that it threatens to make immigration enforcement a reality. Every other argument against it is a smoke screen.
The two main lines of attack against SB 1070 — that it is preempted by federal immigration laws and that it will lead to racial profiling — make sense only if you believe that we should not be enforcing our immigration laws.
Putting state resources behind immigration enforcement interferes with federal enforcement only if it is federal policy not to enforce the immigration laws. Without question, more people will be picked up in Arizona for being in the country illegally with SB 1070 than would have been picked up without SB 1070. Arizona has only several hundred ICE agents, and they are are overmatched by the estimated 560,000 illegal aliens in the state. Authorizing the state’s 15,000 police officers and deputies to inquire into suspected illegal aliens’ immigration status during lawful stops acts as a significant force multiplier for ICE.
That is SB 1070’s only effect. Opponents of SB 1070 can argue that a state’s detection of illegal aliens conflicts with federal policy only if it is federal policy that those illegal aliens never be subjected to the immigration laws in the first place. Everything that the Obama administration has said regarding SB 1070, as well as its implementation of the 287(g) and Secure Communities programs, suggests that such lax enforcement is in fact its de facto stance on immigration.
President Obama reiterated the racial-profiling trope in his meeting this Wednesday with Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón: “We’re examining any implications, especially for civil rights, because in the United States of America, no law-abiding person, be they an American citizen, a legal immigrant, or a visitor or tourist from Mexico, should ever be subject to suspicion simply because of what they look like.â€
