Political process can create failure, then success on an issue within a matter of hours. That was th
e case in the Arizona Legislature earlier this week when it comes to immigration.
At stake was a proposal by state Sen. Russell Pearce who wanted to rewrite the laws against trespassing to make it possible for police to apply them to people they had reason to suspect did not have the proper visa or other papers to openly live in the United States.
IN SHORT, THE undocumented worker (which I’m sure some crackpot nativist will e-mail me to say is really the “illegal alien” who ought to be sent back to Planet Mehico).
The local cops could literally start rounding them up by claiming their very presence in Arizona was a crime. And no, I don’t have much faith in the local police in Arizona (even though I realize the long-outspoken sheriff of Maricopa County is a cartoonish exaggeration of what a law enforcement official ought to be) to tell what constitutes a legitimate visa, particularly if they come at it from the mental approach that certain people ought not to be there – regardless of what papers they might happen to be carrying.
Supporters of Pearce’s measure claimed they were literally adding a second layer of enforcement of federal immigration laws to catch people who managed to slip past the Border Patrol outposts on the state’s southern end (which doubles as a portion of the U.S./Mexico border).
No other state is so ridiculous as to think that trespassing laws (which themselves are often vaguely written so as to allow them to be applied to many different circumstances) are in any way related to immigration.
YET THAT DIDN’T stop the Arizona state Senate from going along with Pearce’s bill on Wednesday. It’s a good thing that the state House of Representatives later that same day voted on the issue, and failed to give it enough votes to pass into law.
So for the time being, the issue is dead. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Pearce himself believes in this issue vehemently enough that he will try to resurrect it in the future.
In one sense, I’m a little dismayed. The measure actually got more votes of support (26) than opposition (15) in the Arizona House. But it didn’t get enough votes as required by the Legislature’s rules of operating (31) to be approved.
So I will take a technical victory, even though I would have preferred an overwhelming vote of opposition to this ridiculous concept.
I LABEL IT ridiculous because I think it downright absurd that anyone would think to use trespassing laws to try to deal with an issue as serious as immigration.
If anything, this whole effort in Arizona is probably the evidence we need to see that the local officials don’t have a realistic concept of the scope of immigration law and the issues it brings up.
This is the issue that Congress will have to address, so as to provide a consistent standard across the United States. This most definitely is NOT an issue that we want to have a checkerboard approach of differing laws in all 50 states.
What is most discouraging in one sense is that this happened in a southwestern U.S. state.
I’M NOT TRYING to lambaste Idaho or Montana or Vermont, but I could understand why taking some sort of action like this might cross the minds of those local officials. Although those states also are on an international border, the fact is that U.S./Canada relations will never be as controversial as those with Mexico, and they don’t have the daily contact that the southwestern United States does.
For many people, the whole issue of immigration relates to Latin American nations – even though it really impacts the ability of everybody in the world and their relations with the United States.
I would have hoped that a southwestern state like Arizona (or Texas, California, Nevada or New Mexico) would have had enough daily exposure to the presence of Mexico just over the line in the dirt that the border is along much of its 1,900-plus miles to approach this issue a little more rationally.
Instead, we’re getting hysterical rhetoric about immigration and trespassing from a place that should know better. After all, this was a state that had nearly one-third of its overall 6.5 million population identify as Latino (with 15 percent saying they were foreign-born and 27.9 percent saying they spoke a language other than English in their homes) in the 2000 Census.
THOSE FIGURES ARE only going to go up once we get the figures compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau in next year’s study.
Debating such resolutions as treating immigration as trespassing just seems too much like trying to live in the past – one that has the potential to hold back this country’s further development.
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e case in the Arizona Legislature earlier this week when it comes to immigration.At stake was a proposal by state Sen. Russell Pearce who wanted to rewrite the laws against trespassing to make it possible for police to apply them to people they had reason to suspect did not have the proper visa or other papers to openly live in the United States.
IN SHORT, THE undocumented worker (which I’m sure some crackpot nativist will e-mail me to say is really the “illegal alien” who ought to be sent back to Planet Mehico).
The local cops could literally start rounding them up by claiming their very presence in Arizona was a crime. And no, I don’t have much faith in the local police in Arizona (even though I realize the long-outspoken sheriff of Maricopa County is a cartoonish exaggeration of what a law enforcement official ought to be) to tell what constitutes a legitimate visa, particularly if they come at it from the mental approach that certain people ought not to be there – regardless of what papers they might happen to be carrying.
Supporters of Pearce’s measure claimed they were literally adding a second layer of enforcement of federal immigration laws to catch people who managed to slip past the Border Patrol outposts on the state’s southern end (which doubles as a portion of the U.S./Mexico border).
No other state is so ridiculous as to think that trespassing laws (which themselves are often vaguely written so as to allow them to be applied to many different circumstances) are in any way related to immigration.
YET THAT DIDN’T stop the Arizona state Senate from going along with Pearce’s bill on Wednesday. It’s a good thing that the state House of Representatives later that same day voted on the issue, and failed to give it enough votes to pass into law.
So for the time being, the issue is dead. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Pearce himself believes in this issue vehemently enough that he will try to resurrect it in the future.
In one sense, I’m a little dismayed. The measure actually got more votes of support (26) than opposition (15) in the Arizona House. But it didn’t get enough votes as required by the Legislature’s rules of operating (31) to be approved.
So I will take a technical victory, even though I would have preferred an overwhelming vote of opposition to this ridiculous concept.
I LABEL IT ridiculous because I think it downright absurd that anyone would think to use trespassing laws to try to deal with an issue as serious as immigration.
If anything, this whole effort in Arizona is probably the evidence we need to see that the local officials don’t have a realistic concept of the scope of immigration law and the issues it brings up.
This is the issue that Congress will have to address, so as to provide a consistent standard across the United States. This most definitely is NOT an issue that we want to have a checkerboard approach of differing laws in all 50 states.
What is most discouraging in one sense is that this happened in a southwestern U.S. state.
I’M NOT TRYING to lambaste Idaho or Montana or Vermont, but I could understand why taking some sort of action like this might cross the minds of those local officials. Although those states also are on an international border, the fact is that U.S./Canada relations will never be as controversial as those with Mexico, and they don’t have the daily contact that the southwestern United States does.
For many people, the whole issue of immigration relates to Latin American nations – even though it really impacts the ability of everybody in the world and their relations with the United States.
I would have hoped that a southwestern state like Arizona (or Texas, California, Nevada or New Mexico) would have had enough daily exposure to the presence of Mexico just over the line in the dirt that the border is along much of its 1,900-plus miles to approach this issue a little more rationally.
Instead, we’re getting hysterical rhetoric about immigration and trespassing from a place that should know better. After all, this was a state that had nearly one-third of its overall 6.5 million population identify as Latino (with 15 percent saying they were foreign-born and 27.9 percent saying they spoke a language other than English in their homes) in the 2000 Census.
THOSE FIGURES ARE only going to go up once we get the figures compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau in next year’s study.
Debating such resolutions as treating immigration as trespassing just seems too much like trying to live in the past – one that has the potential to hold back this country’s further development.
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