I find it unbelievable that people are perfectly willing to sacrifice basic Constitutional rights based on nothing more than fear.  How else to explain the law passed in Arizona a few weeks ago?  Basically it says that state and local law enforcement officers can stop anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant and demand that they show documentation proving that they are in the US legally.

This raises 2 issues in my mind- 1) what does an illegal immigrant look like and 2) whatever happened to the 4th amendment to the US Constitution?

For those of you who are reading this and support the law in Arizona, please explain to me what an illegal immigrant looks like.  Are we presuming that illegal immigrants somehow look suspicious by their very presence?  Or are you okay with racial and/or ethnic profiling?  Which of course implies that Caucasians can’t possibly be illegal immigrants.

One of the rights that we enjoy in the US, that citizens of many other countries don’t, is protection against unreasonable search and seizure, along with the concept of probable cause.  We could go round and round with examples of exemptions to the 4th Amendment (such as sobriety checkpoints and roadblocks to search for a fugitive from justice) and how this new law may or may not be similar to some of those examples.  This law feels like something you’d expect from the old Soviet Union or Nazi Germany- “show me your papers!”- and that’s not how I think of America.

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I have a blog/Twitter friend, some of you may know her as well, though I’ve never mentioned her on here, so don’t even try guessing, you’ll be wrong.  When she was a child, her family illegally entered the US.  Once they were here, her parents applied for and received social security numbers, got jobs, paid their taxes, bought a home, and did everything else that you would expect a law-abiding person would do.  Except they crossed the border illegally.  Many years later, when she was an adult, this friend of mine took the steps to become a US citizen and to rectify the nature of her entry into the country years earlier.

I wonder how many illegal immigrants look like this person- a hard-working, tax-paying member of society.

Who is also white and Canadian by birth.  Until she told me this story, I had absolutely no idea she wasn’t a natural-born US citizen.

Does anyone see the probable cause for randomly stopping her on the street and demanding that she proves that she’s here legally, because I don’t.

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Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a supporter of open borders or of people entering the country only to become a burden on society.  I do think we need to do a better job with border control and dealing with illegal immigrants.  But the law in Arizona isn’t the right way to go about it.  Not at the expense of our freedoms.

For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong. – H. L. Mencken