Arizona illegal immigration bill criticized

PHOENIX — Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed the nation’s toughest bill on illegal immigration into law on Friday. Its aim is to identify, prosecute and deport illegal immigrants.

The move unleashed immediate protests and reignited the divisive battle over immigration reform nationally.

Even before she signed the bill at an afternoon news conference here, President Obama strongly criticized it.

The law, which proponents and critics alike said was the broadest and strictest immigration measure in generations, would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Opponents have called it an open invitation for harassment and discrimination against Hispanics regardless of their citizenship status.

Hispanics, in particular, who were not long ago courted by the Republican Party as a swing voting bloc, railed against the law as a recipe for racial and ethnic profiling. “Governor Brewer caved to the radical fringe,” a statement by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said, predicting that the law would create “a spiral of pervasive fear, community distrust, increased crime and costly litigation, with nationwide repercussions.”

Ms. Brewer acknowledged critics’ concerns, saying she would work to ensure that the police have proper training to carry out the law. But she sided with arguments by the law’s sponsors that it provides an indispensable tool for the police in a border state that is a leading magnet of illegal immigration. She said racial profiling would not be tolerated, adding, “We have to trust our law enforcement.”

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[5/21/10] In her police mug shot, the doe-eyed cartoon heroine with the bowl haircut has a black eye, battered lip and bloody nose. Dora the Explorer's alleged crime? "Illegal Border Crossing Resisting Arrest."

The doctored picture, one of several circulating widely in the aftermath of Arizona's controversial new immigration law, may seem harmless, ridiculous or even tasteless. But experts say the pictures and the rhetoric surrounding them online, in newspapers and at public rallies, reveal some Americans' attitudes about race, immigrants and where some of immigration reform debate may be headed.

For about a decade, the pint-sized Latina character has taught millions of children the English alphabet, colors and Spanish phrases on a Nickelodeon TV show and through a global empire. Her smiling cherub face is plastered on everything from backpacks to T-shirts to fruit snacks.

But since the passage of the Arizona law – which requires authorities to question people about their immigration status if there's reason to suspect they're in the country illegally – Dora's life and immigration status have been scrutinized and mocked.

Several websites, including The Huffington Post, have narrated Dora's mock capture by immigration authorities. One picture circulating on Facebook shows an ad for a TV show called "Dora the Illegal Immigrant." On the Facebook page "Dora the Explorer is soo an Illegal Immigrant," there are several images showing her sailing through the air over the U.S.-Mexican border.

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[11/29/12] Latinos are religious, morally conservative and tend disproportionately to join the military. They also tend to be hard working and entrepreneurial. Do we really have too many of them?

After all, what’s wrong with amnesty? The idea has a well-worn legal tradition, one strongly associated with the Christian faith. It means forgiveness. After the Civil War, Lincoln offered amnesty to rebel soldiers. Was he wrong to do so? They had taken up arms against their own government; they had killed hundreds of thousands.  But Lincoln (as opposed to the radical republicans) had the wisdom to offer forgiveness. What about runaway slaves after emancipation? They had broken the law, shouldn’t they have had to pay the price even after the laws were changed? Of course not. Why should immigration laws be any different? If we liberalize them, which seems well overdue, should we still punish the people who violated the law which we later deemed too harsh?

Ronald Reagan saw it, even if alleged ‘Reaganites’ don’t. He signed amnesty into law in 1986, inviting three million ‘illegals’ to become ‘legals.’ He even defended the idea in his 1984 Debate with Fritz Mondale: “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.”  Would he do otherwise now?


Reagan was influenced by free-market thought in this regard. Milton Friedman believed that immigration, even illegal immigration, was good for freedom. His argument, which was in this regard identical to Austrian economists like Ludwig Von Mises, was that human capital should be free to cross borders just like financial capital should be. Forcible interventions into immigration were really just forcible interventions into the labor market designed to restrict wage competition, just like unionism, just like mandated 30-hour work weeks or forced retirement or wage floors. Von Mises saw that “There cannot be the slightest doubt that migration barriers diminish the productivity of human labor.” – Ludwig Von Mises, Liberalism.