Arizona's new law requires state police to ask for proof of legal residence from anyone they "reasonably" suspect might be in the country illegally. In effect, it makes the state police into a division of the INS. It makes them the enforcers of federal immigration laws—something most state and local police have (wisely) refused to do.
I am opposed to this on the principle of "that which is not worth doing is not worth doing well." I don't want better enforcement of the laws against immigration, because I oppose them. A government that refrains from central planning of the economy should refrain from placing arbitrary restrictions and quotas on immigration. It shouldn't try to dictate the flow across borders of trade, of capital—or of labor.
But I recognize that Arizona's new law is a response to the total failure of the federal government to set any policy on immigration, one way or the other. As a nation, we have failed to decide between a liberalized immigration policy and a restrictive one. So we have relatively restrictive laws on the books—yet we shy away from the evil consequences of actually enforcing them.
That's how we end up with so many illegal immigrants. The number of illegals is a measure of the gap between what our laws say and what we actually do. That giant sucking sound you hear is not American jobs going to Mexico (Ross Perot's old fantasy), but the vacuum caused by America's failure to decide where we stand on immigration. The vacuum will be filled either by illegal immigrants, or by state-level enforcement.
I think the only way to resolve the problem is to make our immigration laws less restrictive, allowing more immigrants and foreign workers to come here legally. Unfortunately, this case is not helped by a lot of the opponents of restrictions on immigration.
A friend of mine who works in immigration law observed to me once that there is a whole leftist school of thought that favors more open immigration because immigrants are not Americans and therefore—according to this theory—they will dilute and undermine America's distinctive culture of individualism. This is the basic premise shared by the anti-immigration right and the pro-immigration left: that immigrants basically cannot be assimilated to American culture and values.
I challenge that premise, as I have argued extensively elsewhere. But the argument is made a little bit more difficult by news items about anti-American protesters rioting in opposition to the Arizona bill and urging a "reconquest" of the American Southwest, presumably on behalf of Mexico.
Michelle Malkin has a lot of documentation about these protests, though that story has since been eclipsed by a May Day riot by far-left demonstrators in California, as reported below.
For months, the mainstream media and the Democratic Party establishment has been warning us about the alleged "violent" tendencies of the Tea Party movement, and Mayor Bloomberg even speculated that the Times Square car bomb could have been planted by someone who is "against the health care bill." But now that it's clear where the real threat of violence comes from, you can bet that the mainstream media won't cover it.
"Calif. Immigrants' Rights March Ends in Vandalism," John S. Marshall, AP via Google, May 3
Close to 20 businesses were damaged after what started as a peaceful immigrants' rights march in downtown Santa Cruz turned violent, requiring police to call other agencies for help, authorities said….It was a harmonious but "unpermitted and unsanctioned event," [police spokesman Zach Friend] said, until some in the crowd started breaking windows and spraying paint on retail shops that line the downtown corridor.
Friend said he wasn't sure if the damage was caused by people marching in support of immigrants' rights, or if the group was "infiltrated by anarchists."…
"They're a group of people who seem to fancy themselves as revolutionaries, but what they really are are a group of morons," Friend said.
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