Arizona, Seattle, and Immigration

"The Mexican says, 'You did not ask the Indians' permission to come to America! Why should we follow your laws about immigration?'"

"The White man says, 'Let's go down to the reservation and ask the Indians how well unregulated immigration worked out for them.'"

Agree with the new Arizona law or not, you can't say this quote doesn't make a good point.

 I have only heard one valid argument against this new Arizona law. That argument is as follows: Much of the illegal immigration into the US would cease to exist if it wasn't so ridiculously hard (and expensive) to become a legal immigrant.

No matter where you are from, whether you are getting/are married to a citizen, etc. It will take at least a year in order to get a green card, and that is only the first step towards becoming a citizen.  It also costs at least $1000 dollars to get through the green card process.  This does not make our country more secure, because it is *significantly* easier and cheaper to simply get a visa and stay in the country illegally, or run across our southern or northern borders.  Most of this time/money cost comes from the massive, inefficient bureaucracy that is he Department of Homeland Security.

This does not mean I empathize with illegal immigrants. I do not personally dislike illegal immigrants, mind you. I simply dislike any large group of people that pisses all over our laws, and/or has no obligation to pay taxes, yet causes an enormous drain on public services, such as transportation, law enforcement, and hospitals.

The Seattle city council has no right to criticize Arizona's new law requiring their police to enforce existing US immigration laws. Even a small amount of research will show that an inordinate number of hospitals have been forced to shut down due to the uncompensated use of their emergency rooms for things like the common cold. Phoenix is the kidnapping capital of the U.S. While these cannot be proven to be 100% caused by illegal immigrants, it is a fact that as an area's population of illegal immigrants grows, so does it's crime rate. In addition, when illegal immigrants move to an area, that area provides much less tax revenue than it now requires to maintain it, as there are now a large number of people not paying taxes that would be, were they in the country legally.

This is not conjecture, or opinion. This is indisputable fact.

When the Attorney General of the United States goes before congress and condemns a state law without so much as reading the damn thing, we have a problem. A lot of people are lying about the contents of this law, so lets set some facts straight.

Rumor: The new Arizona law allows the police to stop anyone on the street and demand to "see their papers".

Fact: The new Arizona law specifically prohibits this behavior. The only time the police can ask to see proof of your immigration status is in the course of lawful contact, and only when reasonable suspicion that the person may not be in the country legally exists. This means that in order to ask to "see your papers", the police must come into contact with you while enforcing another law. Pulling you over for speeding, for example, or arresting you for robbing a liquor store.

Rumor: The new Arizona law will cause racial profiling against minorities, specifically Latinos.

Fact: The new Arizona law also prohibits this. Race, gender, religion, etc is not valid criteria to establish reasonable suspicion. Being unable to provide a valid driver's license when pulled over for speeding is.

"Courts have ruled (Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968)) that a stop on reasonable suspicion may be appropriate in the following cases: when a person possesses many unusual items which would be useful in a crime like a wire hanger and is looking into car windows at 2am, when a person matches a description of a suspect given by another police officer over department radio, or when a person runs away at the sight of police officers who are at common law right of inquiry (founded suspicion). However, reasonable suspicion may not apply merely because a person refuses to answer questions, declines to allow a voluntary search, or is of a suspected race or ethnicity. At reasonable suspicion, you may be detained by a police officer (court officer on court grounds) for a short period of time and police can use force to detain you. If it is a violent crime (robbery, rape, gun run), the courts have recognized that an officer's safety is paramount and have allowed for a "frisk" of the outermost garment from head to toe and for an officer to stop an individual at gun point if necessary. For a non-violent crime (shoplifting for example) an officer may frisk while at reasonable suspicion if he noticed a bulge in the waistband area, for example, but can frisk in that area only. In the city of New York, once a person is released in a reasonable suspicion stop, a "stop, question and frisk report" is filled out and filed in the command that the stop occurs."

tl;dr If you don't act suspicious, they can't/won't ask you to prove your immigration status.

Anyone that makes either of the arguments against this law that I listed, have not read the law, or even done preliminary research into it, and are likely just repeating what someone told them.