Washington Post columnist George F. Will wrote recently in "Arizona law's foes are using the real immigration scare tactics" of his dissent from Cardinal Roger Mahony, who said in "Arizona's Dreadful Anti-Immigrant Law" that Arizona's new law pertaining to illegal immigration involves
... reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people are required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation.
The statute, signed into Arizona law by Governor Jan Brewer on April 23, requires state police to question anyone who appears to be in the country illegally. This has been called a mandate for racial profiling. In effect, "breathing while Hispanic" in the state of Arizona can now get you in trouble with the cops.
Cardinal Mahony is right to oppose it, and George Will was wrong to take umbrage. (In fact, there can be little doubt that the Arizona law will quickly be shot down constitutionally by the very liberal U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which sits in San Francisco. The U.S. Supreme Court, though it tips conservative, will likely uphold that ruling.)
But Will was also right about something:
... the vast majority [of Americans] who do not favor completely open borders believe that there should be some laws restricting who can become residents, and presumably they believe that such laws should be enforced.
Once Americans are satisfied that the borders are secure, the immigration policies they will favor will reflect their -- and the law enforcement profession's -- healthy aversion to the measures that would be necessary to remove from the nation the nearly 11 million illegal immigrants, 60 percent of whom have been here for more than five years. It would take 200,000 buses in a bumper-to-bumper convoy 1,700 miles long to carry them back to the border. Americans are not going to seek and would not tolerate the police methods that would be needed to round up and deport the equivalent of the population of Ohio.
We need to get control of the border. Senator John McCain was on the same page with Will in this campaign ad:
"Completing the danged fence" along the Mexico-U.S. border is a politically necessary prelude to granting amnesty to the 11 million illegals who are already here and not otherwise in trouble with the law. So is getting sufficient numbers of U.S. Border Patrol on the job in Arizona and other states along the border.
Why is it so hard to find anybody who sees all of the following:
- how important securing the border is
- how necessary amnesty for the illegals already here is
- how laws like the new Arizona one are an insult to basic American values
No comments:
Post a Comment