Secure the border and a healthy debate might follow.
The bandits in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” never said this famous line, not at least in the condensed way it’s so often quoted. But the sentiment—disdain for law enforcement and the rule of law—is clear. And it happens to be the same sentiment behind the kneejerk opposition to the Arizona immigration law, which this week may elicit a legal challenge from the Justice Department.
In this, the authors of the law were clever. They knew their law was no solution to the federal government’s failures on immigration. They also knew—perhaps hoped—that the law would be challenged constitutionally, and that this challenge would likely end up in the Supreme Court.
But they knew something else: By writing it the way they did, they would smoke out the “no badges” brigade—those who effectively oppose real enforcement of any immigration law.
That’s because at its core, the Arizona law adds nothing to immigration law. To the contrary, it empowers Arizona police to do their part to uphold that law when they have a “reasonable suspicion” that someone whom they’ve stopped for some other law enforcement reason is in the country illegally. On top of this, legislators added language to prohibit using racial profiling to make such a stop.
The response has been illuminating. In Mexico, President Felipe Calderón declared that the Arizona law opened the door to “intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse in law enforcement.” In the ranks of Congress, members variously invoked—take your pick—”Jim Crow,” “apartheid” and “Nazi Germany.”
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