printThe outrage of it! Imagine giving local police the “authority to check the immigration status for individuals during traffic stops and other minor violations.” Can there be anything more heinous than the “police checking the immigration status of persons who are lawfully stopped or taken into custody”! What next? Take them off the streets if they’ve committed a crime? The mind boggles.
Lawmakers in Arizona, Mississippi, Indiana, Utah, South Carolina and Alabama have successfully passed strong enforcement legislation against illegal immigration … The U.S Department of Justice has moved forward with lawsuits against four of those states, and Arizona’s well-known bill, S.B. 1070, will be reviewed by the United States Supreme Court some time next spring. … The main focus of the DOJ lawsuits are laws that give local police authority to check the immigration status for individuals during traffic stops and other minor violations.
According to the Los Angeles Times, federal judges have responded by blocking these “strict new immigration laws adopted by conservative legislatures in half a dozen states …” However, “legal experts believe the Supreme Court’s conservative majority will take a sharply different approach.”
The high court said it would hear the Arizona immigration case in April, and Eastman said he expected the justices to divide along the same lines as in the May ruling upholding Arizona’s sanctions on employers who hire illegal workers. Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined with Roberts in that case.
(LA Times)
As a legal immigrant, I went through an ordeal to get into the US. About me, Uncle Sam knows, for instance, that I do not carry any dread diseases. (I suspect some of you are relieved to know that the new immigrants at your kid’s school are TB free, right? Oh, they’re illegal?) Would I mind if a cop asked me for my ID, if he had reason to suspect I was up to no good? Why would I? The last time a cop asked me for an ID was when I applied for a license to carry concealed. That seemed eminently reasonable.
UPDATE (Dec. 30): Myron, unchecked crime is no answer. What a terrible position a liberal American is in: He much admit that as an upstanding citizen who obeys the law, he should be left unmolested by those who’ve sworn to protect him, whereas those who are not in this category should be sent packing. The upshot of this hue and cry over checking the immigration status of individuals who’ve broke the law will be that the poor natives will continue to be molested by the homegrown terrorists of the TSA, whereby your average illegal drunk driver, a lethal weapon, will leave the scene of an accident having obtained all the protections the ACLU can agitate for.
Gee, my wife and I drove from Yuma to Houston in our travel van, and were stopped four different times by local cops. They wanted to know everything about us.
Course…we were citizens…
On the other hand, we have constitutionally hypocritical goons molesting even natural born citizens engaged in “normal” commerce 100 miles, sometimes more, inland from the borders of the US!
An honorable mention must be made for the wonderful job performed by the kindly VIPRs,the Neu Schutzstaffel, that is assigned to “protect” the remainder of the interior.
Both getting a procedural pass from the judiciary; that’s LEGAL, but not LAWFUL yet!
America’s Victoria. Sieg heil!
America Ade! Ade!
The prodigal sentiment – xenophilia: niggling the natives with microregulatory impulses and according deference to the alien.
“Bury me on my face, because in a little while everything will be turned upside down.” – Laertius Diogenes
You can always tell which policies are effective against illegals and which aren’t by the amount of opposition they generate among the ruling classes. Arizona’s law and e-verify are fought tooth and nail, while the maginot-like virtual fence is enthusiastically supported.
[Excellent observation.]
I have no problem with limiting immigration to the country because I want to live in a land with freedom and liberty – which includes the 4th Amendment rights. Again, someone coming in from overseas should prove that they belong here and if we need to erect double-layer walls to keep out trespassers, that is reasonable too. However, Americans may not be searched without probable cause such as an arrest for a real crime – not just STOPPED in the course of travel by TSA-style goons asking to see “my papers”.
In my own experience, in compliance with the “Common Access Card (CAC)”, http://www.cac.mil/
I provided the following: 3 federal photo ID’s, my fingerprints, 2 passports, the previous CAC, and a sealed birth certificate and the “officials” said that was INSUFFICIENT TO PROVE MY IDENTITY. Thus, while I don’t want millions of trespassers roaming around the country (they shouldn’t be ALLOWED IN the first place), I don’t want a TSA checkpoint at every Taco Bell.
We currently have the worst of all worlds – arbitrary laws with arbitrary enforcement, contradicted by handing out “benefits” to the trespassers.
Unchecked police power is no panacea.
[See Post.]
Well, you can whine or you can do something about it. Just speaking for myself, if I am ever delayed on my lawful business by a random TSA pullover, I will come out of the vehicle shoooting and get as many of the bastards as I can. That’s how freedom is restored, that’s how revolutions begin.
The flip side of my concern and that of LONERANGER is that the Obama/Holder administration also objects to checking out identification of those who are legitimately ARRESTED (with probable cause) for a real crime against people and property… the same administration that instead justifies searching elderly diapers, children’s flip-flops, and confiscating my yogurt.
It’s old news now; but, recently the sheriff from Tucson that argues with the tough no nonsense ‘check their ids’ sheriff in Phoenix allowed his SWAT team to kill an American Marine that they knew was legal and not even a suspect, they just wanted information about his brother and the news keeps silent, yet Sheriff Joe is in trouble with the Feds and it was all over the news for arresting, not killing anyone, and checking id with probable cause.
What was it that Sean always says,
“A nation is defined by its borders, language & culture!”
I would add that its LEGAL SYSTEM is part of that definition and if we are truly a nation of laws, then the immigration process must be followed.
At dinner last night, one of the young ladies who assisted us to our table mentioned she was Australian and that many SOUTH AFRICANS are relocating to Australia. Does any rational person think this immigration process is done willy-nilly?
If the Illegal Alien situation is so extensive and destructive, then there has to be a simple, equitable procedure somewhere between completely ignoring the situation – completely intruding on honest citizens – and “Rebel Without a Clause”‘s idiotic solution.
Read ATLAS SHRUGGED and find the statement “THERE IS NO WAY TO RULE HONEST MEN”, but is there a way for HONEST MEN to present rational solutions to problems? If so, do it.
We currently have the worst of all worlds – arbitrary laws with arbitrary enforcement, contradicted by handing out “benefits” to the trespassers.
Unchecked police power is no panacea.
This sounds similar to what Sam Francis described as anarcho-tyranny
“we refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny).”
The most damaging of all is that this is probably a legitimate way of handling the illegal immigrant problem, now that it exists. But the truth of the matter comes to light when one considers that the entity that wants to crack down on aliens is the same entity that is hell-bent on allowing them to cross your borders.
If one needs to abandon logical arguments and don the robe of the rhetorician, I believe that is a very useful point.