Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.

"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
  -- Daniel Webster



Sunday, May 02, 2010 :::
 

"Physician, heal yourself," said the founder of the church in which Roger Mahony is a cardinal. He is the Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles, and he should heed the founder's admonition before accusing Arizonans of intemperateness. He says 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."

"Our highest priority today," he says, "is to bring calm and reasoning to discussions about our immigrant brothers and sisters." His idea of calm reasoning is to call Arizona's law for coping with illegal immigration "the country's most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law." He also says that it is "dreadful," "abhorrent" and a "tragedy" and that its assumption is that "immigrants come to our country to rob, plunder and consume public resources."

That's how today's column by George Will opens. I highly recommend reading the rest of it.

Everything factual I've read about the law indicates that legislators were careful in crafting it to avoid the civil rights issues being raised. This doesn't mean those civil rights problems won't arise in practice, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that the law should be allowed to come into force. Obama has already announced that his Justice Department will keep a close eye on the civil rights impact; I have to imagine that the Arizona Republic is also more likely, once enforcement of the law begins, to be on the look-out for overreaching police officers, and is more likely to exaggerate how frequent problems are than to ignore them. At any rate, the legislature has clearly behaved more thoughtfully and temperately than many of its critics.

UPDATE: Since the Mexican government has complained about the Arizona law, it's worth pointing out how Mexico treats illegal aliens. Another thought I've had about the recent boycott talk: I wonder how many of these people buy stuff from China.

UPDATE 2: Mark Steyn opens:
As I write, I have my papers on me — and not just because I'm in Arizona. I’m an immigrant, and it is a condition of my admission to this great land that I carry documentary proof of my residency status with me at all times and be prepared to produce it to law-enforcement officials, whether on a business trip to Tucson or taking a 20-minute stroll in the woods back at my pad in New Hampshire.
This is federal law he's referring to, not state. As usual, he does an impressive job of tying current stories together in the rest of his column.

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::: posted by Steven at 6:11 PM


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Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.


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