Arizona Immigration Law

Contrary to all the hype in the news recently about Arizona's new "immigration law," immigration in Arizona is not a problem issue at all. In fact immigration is no more broken (although deplorable for many reasons) in Arizona than it is anywhere else in the country. What is an issue in Arizona, what is broken, is that hundreds of thousands of scofflaws trespass into and through Arizona every year. Those who refer to these trespassers as "immigrants" are purposely (whether out of ignorance or design) obscuring the real issue and framing the debate in such a way that rallying cries such as "they are tearing apart families," "they are racial profiling," "this new law violates our civil rights!" tend to carry a semblance of truth and a heap of sentimentality. So, let's take each of those rallying cries and have a closer look at what's going on.

Last week a woman appeared on the local Phoenix TV news screaming epithets at Sheriff Joe Arpaio for arresting her husband. The lady's husband and some two dozen other trespassing identity thieves were rounded up at a West Phoenix business that refills ink cartridges. The wife is a citizen, the husband is not. So, the law is "tearing apart their family." Breaking news: every time the authorities arrest a lawbreaker, some family gets torn apart. The husband in this case entered the country against the law, then either purchased or forged false papers in order to gain regular employment. If this family had been "torn apart" because he stole an iPod and got caught no one would lift an eyebrow.

Of course the big no-no is the altogether popular racial profiling claim. This claim would carry more weight if millions of Irish or Scandinavian illegals were being ignored while the cops just went after Latinos. It would also carry more weight if the law didn't specifically state that some other violation of statute must precede any questions about immigration status or citizenship. So, unless one believes that all the cops in Arizona are racist morons (including the large number of Hispanic law enforcement officers) who have nothing better to do than pick on brown people, we have to concede that before being arrested over immigration status the individual involved came into the country illegally, most likely provided support to the identity theft industry, and then broke another law to incite a cop's interest. The fact that there is a huge number of legal Latino citizens in Arizona, with all the civil rights of any other citizen, suggests that the police will be very careful implementing this law in order to avoid being thrashed in court on a daily basis.

The civil rights issue is certainly the easiest to deal with. Trespassers have all the same rights as any other lawbreaker under the new law. The only difference is the trespassers have the right to a free ride home, the citizen criminal has the right to be a guest of the state for some period of time.

The fact that huge numbers of people have committed the same crime should not earn the miscreants a pass. The fact that huge numbers of citizen Latinos have aided and abetted these trespassers should not provide them with special protection from the consequences of their actions when the trespasser is caught and deported. Choices have consequences.

In the early 20th century, working Americans fought, suffered, and even died to get immigration quotas that would protect the value of labor in this country. Outsourcing, those who overstay their work or education visas, and trespassing all contribute to devaluing the efforts of American workers at every level not just the bottom of the scale. Gardeners and nannies can be recruited cheaper from a large number of desperate immigrants. Engineers, technicians, IT people, etc., educated in India or elsewhere, are cheaper than developing American talent. Go figure who wants to keep the flood of trespassers coming and who creates the soundbites that make it sound cruel and inhuman or unconstitutional to address the problem.