American N_AZ_is

Last week Jan Brewer, Arizona's Governor, signed into law an undoubtedly unconstitutional law making people of obvious Hispanic descent victims. I must admit to spending way too much time on Huffington Post making counterpoint after counterpoint to the rabid supporters of this law. While there have been many participants on my side, I doubt that we have changed any minds. They are focused on a tiny percent of theoretical wrong doers and have no compassion at all. (So much for compassionate conservatism. Even Bush wanted to offer amnesty to the "illegal" immigrants.)

First let me explain why I think the law is unconstitutional. Citizens who look to be of Hispanic descent are now subject to being stopped by Arizona law enforcement for any "reasonable suspicion." While most of these "excuse" infractions may be real, I'll be willing to bet that a very low percentage of non-Hispanics will ever be stopped for the same infractions. Once stopped the citizen will be asked to show proof of legal residency. I for one do not carry around any such "proof," unless my driver's license would be considered proof, but I know that it is easy to obtain a driver's license whether illegal or not. Thus a citizen is deprived of their right to be "safe and secure in their person" by what can only be described as a police state activity.

Constitutional or not, what I really don't like is what is says about an already too large of a segment of our population and thus about all of us. The fact that there was no such thing as "illegal" immigration when the constitution was created does not take away our right to police our borders, protecting both our property and our rights, but Arizona is going about it the wrong way. They are making a target of Mexicans, Mexicans who are already so badly treated in their own country that they have risked everything to illegally immigrate to the U.S.

Once here they are often exploited by individual citizens and employers who pay them less than they legally should, while at the same time cheating the U.S. government out of a proper share of taxes and fees, including payments into the Social Security fund, payments that would definitely be made if the worker were a citizen or less exploited. If the "illegal" immigrant is provided with false identification, paid at least the minimum wage, and has all of the appropriate taxes and fees taken from their earnings, they will never be able to gain the benefits that these payments are for. (In fact, it was just written into the Health Insurance Reform bill that the insurance exchanges are NOT available to "illegal" immigrants, as if the insurance companies needed any reason to discriminate.)

Just think, since their Social Security Number cannot be their own and is often supplied by their employer, when the employer bothers to pay FICA on their wages, they will never be able to collect. Should they be laid off, they are not able to collect unemployment.

But the greatest problem I see from this law is that it makes them victims of crimes without recourse. It may very well be true that truly unsavory characters are mixed among the "illegal" immigrants. I am certain that those unsavory characters, who are probably representatives of drug gangs, already have real or forged documents that would pass police scrutiny at any random stop. So the law will do nothing for what I read as the expressed greatest reason for the law. It certainly deprives the non-criminal, except for crossing a boundary without papers, any ability to report these criminals, the exploitive employer criminals, or the white supremacy thugs who prey on them.

Protecting the exploitive employers may be the whole purpose for the law, as if it were needed for that. Since Arizona made it illegal to hire "illegals" a couple years ago, a grand total of two companies have had their wrists slapped.

While their lives are certainly changing more than mine, I never thought I'd live in a police state. Show me your papers, indeed.