Americans have traditionally, vehemently, resisted the notion of requiring citizens to carry national identification papers to verify their citizenship or legal residency status. Arizona’s new law requiring immigrants to carry proof of their legal immigration status — and become subject to police stops and detention on sight if they fail to possess such documents — effectively and wrongly leaps that long guarded barrier to unprovoked police stops. It also promises to produce the specter of a police state that its conservative anti-immigration otherwise claim to abhor.
The new law might scare undocumented immigrants to avoid the sight-line of police, but it will do little to accomplish its goal of reducing illegal immigration. What it is almost certain to do is unleash a wave of racial and ethnic profiling against brown-skin Hispanics, who, whether citizens or not, now must fear leaving home without whatever important documents they need to prove their right to walk the streets.
This sort of law, signed last Friday by Gov. Jan Brewer, may be what some citizens wrongly think is needed to thwart a flood of illegal immigration in Arizona But if that’s the case, it’s hard to imagine that they and Arizona’s pandering Republican legislators, who adopted this bill on a strict party-line vote, gave bill SB1070 thorough constitutional scrutiny.
The new law, supporters say, will give police “the tools” to do what the federal government has failed to do with regard to stopping illegal immigration. There’s just enough of a half-truth in that to fan zealots’ ire.
It is true that Congress has failed to produce a comprehensive immigration reform bill, mainly because of the virulent partisan divide that infects debate over immigration reform. Yet almost any competent reform bill would be superior to what Arizona’s Republican lawmakers cooked up.
The law not only requires immigrants to carry documents to validate their legal residency (or citizenship). It also requires police officers, unless they are inhibited by an investigation or medical emergency, to stop anyone who appears to be a possible illegal immigrant and check their documents, and to arrest and expel those found to be without legal documentation. Further, it allows citizens who believe their police and public officials are not enforcing the law to file lawsuits against them.
Those provisions, police have argued, will make it hard for police and sheriffs to do their ordinary police work of catching criminals. They also say, with good reason, that the law will make Hispanic citizens and legal immigrants needlessly afraid of police, and inhibit their willingness to share information.
Larger concerns involve the trampling of general civil rights because of the inherent racial and ethnic profiling demanded by the law. That seems both self-evident, and intolerable under this nation’s Constitution. Arizona’s neighbors — California on its western border and New Mexico to the east — and Texas are already majority-minority states: fewer than half of their residents are white, and large shares of their minorities are Hispanic. Similarly, Nevada to its north, along with Georgia, Mississippi, New York and Maryland, are now less than 60 percent white.
In these circumstances in Western states, that leaves Arizona police looking at half the state’s population, mostly brown-skinned, and wondering if they are legal or illegal immigrants, or life-long or naturalized citizens. Whom should they stop to demand to see their legal identity/visa/residency papers? What portion of citizens and legal immigrants may be wrongly stopped, and possibly illegally detained?
In short, Arizona’s new law cannot stand, and Americans should not want it to stand, regardless of their views on immigration. America does need comprehensive immigration reform. Brown-shirt, police-state laws that foster racism and discrimination do not qualify under any immigration metric.