Discarding the civil rights of others is always a popular idea

What really pisses me off by the racist “papers please” law in Arizona is that conservative bigots who complain about President Obama violating rights see nothing wrong with striping minorities of their rights. We’ve been down this road before and it wasn’t right then and it isn’t right now.

Kelly: Mark, why would the president get involved in this? You’ve got — you know, you’ve already got legal challenges that will be mounted by many other groups — why would the Department of Justice, according to our attorney general, Eric Holder as of May 9, be considering challenging this law on their own when you’ve got these kind of approval ratings of the law on a nationwide basis?

Levine: It’s a fair point, Megyn. Anyone can challenge the law, it’s clearly unconstitutional — it violates Article I, Section 8 — and you’re right that anyone can challenge it. I think the president, though is making clear that anytime you have a majority attack the rights of minority, that’s something where you want the Justice Department involved.

I’ll give you a great example: Jim Crow laws in Alabama and Mississippi were vastly supported by the great majority of people in the 1960s. That didn’t make them right. Anytime you have a majority infringing on the rights of a minority, then that’s usually when the Justice Department does need to stand up.

What we saw in this episode is that it’s very easy for the public, angry and eager for some kind of action to resolve an urgent fear, to embrace some kind, any kind of action, even if it takes away the rights of someone other than themselves. And with a certain segment of the population, there is real relish in taking those rights away.

But much of the population goes along with these kinds of solutions often thoughtlessly, and then when confronted with the very human realities and consequences of them, realizes its mistake, changes course, and then works to repair the damage.

That certainly is the course of the American experience when it took away the basic civil rights of all its citizens of Japanese descent: We wound up paying huge amounts of money to the victims in the end, and the long-held public view is that the internment was a horrendous mistake of catastrophic proportions, one of the true black blots on the nation’s history of protecting civil liberties.

Of course, at the time, it was extremely popular. Most great mistakes are.

Polls on Arizona immigration law remind us of a historic truth: Discarding the civil rights of others is always a popular idea

And then there was this:

Even if you are a U.S. citizen, you will be presumed to be an alien “unlawfully present” unless you have one of the above stated IDs — assuming a cop has “reasonable suspicion” to think you’re undocumented.

Kobach and his pawns in the state legislature later changed the law, which originally stated that a cop cannot “solely consider race, color or national origin.” They’ve since taken the “solely” out, and they claim this means there will be no racial profiling.

This is highly disingenuous to say the least, when the “intent” of the law is to make “attrition through enforcement” the policy of the state. As the nativist Center for Immigration Studies has defined this loaded term, it means making life so difficult for illegal immigrants that they will self-deport.

Since the vast majority of Arizona’s estimated 500,000 unauthorized aliens are from Mexico or Central America, it is reasonable to conclude that Latinos in Arizona will bear the brunt of police scrutiny.

So when someone slaps the “ethnic cleansing” label on the law, a label Nowicki is uncomfortable with, they are essentially correct.

Kris Kobach’s Misleading Statements to the Arizona Republic on SB 1070

The Arizona law explicitly states that an ID from state that requires proof of citizenship is valid proof so if you are from a state that doesn’t have that requirement then you are also considered “to be an alien “unlawfully present””.

Some irony on immigration

Immigration seems to be 2006’s “gay marriage ban” issue for political conservatives. It seems that many US citizens have the same ideas as the GOP when it comes to illegal immigration – like that they should be deported, are taking jobs from native born US citizens, and some talking heads make it seem that next to terrorism – illegal immigrants are a threat to America.

To highlight the issue President Bush wants to send 6,000 troops to the southern border to help police the area and erect a long wall to keep out Mexican and Latin American illegals as that seems to be the biggest problem area.

Now I have no concrete evidence but all of it smells of bigotry and racism.

There hasn’t been any talk of troops or a wall for our northern border with Canada.

40% of illegal immigrants entered the country legally on a visa and never returned home. Two of the 9/11 terrorists had expired visas. The visa loophole still is a low priority at Homeland Security with only $30 million of the $1.95 billion border security request Bush filed last week, going to address it.

Manuel Bartsch, a high school student born in Germany, was detained in Ohio after he contacted the Immigration Service to see if they had any paperwork on him. It seems when he wanted to sign-up to take the ACT and needed a Social Security card, he had none. He called the INS and found out that his step-grandfather had never completed the paperwork to allow him to remain legally in the United States. He was jailed in Cleveland for 16 days for being in the country illegally.

He got out of jail and fought deportation with the help of the Pandora community, the involvement of U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, and U.S. Rep. Paul Gillmor, R-Port Clinton, and Bartsch’s Cleveland attorney, David Leopold. In fact a bill was introduced in Congress that would let Bartsch stay legally.

What if Bartsch had not been white and from Germany. Does anyone really think Congress would fight for him to stay?

For further reading:

Border initiatives miss huge group

Bartsch salutes American Dream