jaredwb said:
Hi Chorpipan! We so need to have a beer together...seriously.
In your last response to one of my posts you said you wanted to eat me. I think even for the remarkably loose standards of baexpats.org that's a little bizarre. Thank god I'm not a blond small girl from Scandinavia.
Anyway, I DO agree that stopping people because of their skin is totally wrong.
Glad to hear it. Kudos to you. Seriously.
BUT...the bill CLEARLY reads (but you lefties won't say this), that the police (or whomever) can ONLY ask IF IF IF IF they stop that person during an illegal act (speeding, robbery, murder, etc).
So, again, stop swinging the "anti-immigration" red flag, and the "oh so loved by the left, RACISM" before READING the bill.
You're citing the amended bill, which was passed on April 30 by a panic-stricken Arizona state legislature after a chorus of lefties like me called out the inherent racism of the first bill, passed April 23. The first bill said that cops were required to investigate immigration status if there were reasonable suspicion that a person could be in the country without documentation. Skin color in this context is exactly what they mean by "reasonable suspicion," which is why the law was so ugly - it made skin color evidence of a crime because it can be evidence of another nationality. There was no mention of a precipitating illegal act in the first bill. The whole point of the second bill was to correct that, um, racist oversight before the AZ tourist industry went completely bust.
Anyway, if you had read my original post before screaming gotcha you would have noticed that it's dated April 27 - that is, before the changes of the second bill. This is more than bookish point about timing. It's precisely because millions of lefties and moderates like me (and my new favorite person Alzinho - sorry dude for yelling at you in that other thread) complained about this shit that they reacted and did the right thing the second time around. In other words, it's good to wave the red flag, because sometimes it has an effect, as it did in this case.
By the way, this ridiculous episode reminds me of the Martin Luther King holiday fiasco a few years back, when the state of Arizona refused to comply with Federal law giving us that day off to think about civil rights once a year. It took an NFL boycott to get them to change their minds (no Facebook back then). I suppose you don't think Arizona's little act of state initiative in that case was about race either? And I wonder if you would have been such a big advocate of state level enforcement of Federal laws back then? There's an unmistakable pattern here that no 'Zonie can deny.
My favorite quote about this from an AP reporter, "the bill makes it illegal in AZ to be in the country illegally"...come on now, and I'm the moron??
I'm no fan of the AP either - plenty of morons working for that service - but I think the reporter's point is that it's now illegal in the STATE of Arizona to be in the UNITED STATES illegally. What this suggests is a change in the balance of power between the federal government and the states. Constitutionally, immigration policy is like all foreign policy set at the Federal level; states are left to deal with stuff like public utilities and local law enforcement problems, like traffic tickets. Arizona's move is interesting and new in that they are trying to assert a power we delegated to the Feds a couple of hundred years ago.
