Don't be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.
I don't buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.
What's new here is not the politicians' fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.
What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote -- and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.
n 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.
Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.
__________________ In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie...
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Beware the Plutocrat Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.
Somewhere in "Darwinian-Galtonian evolutionary tradition" heaven, Prescott Bush weeps a tear of pride.
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
A Latino truck driver outside Phoenix was taken into custody by law enforcement at a weigh station. He pulled in to have the truck looked at, was apparently approached by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and asked for ID. He showed them his commercial driver’s license. They asked him for more ID. He told them his social security number. They cuffed him took him to the central office in Phoenix and called his wife to bring his social security card and birth certificate. The man is identifying himself to media only as “Abdon” and he is an American citizen born in the USA.
The ICE agents said this was all just standard procedure
Note that the new AZ law does not take effect until July or so, these are Federal agents in question, and this is exactly the sort of problem which people are complaining about: The Federal laws on the subject do seem to have similar effect, and the wide authority and discretion of ICE and USBP has been upheld by the courts in the past. I don't see how the courts can continue to uphold the previous rulings in favour of the feds, and at the same time overturn AZ's law on discrimination or process grounds.
The only route I can think of would be along the Fed/State lines, with immigration being a Federal issue, not State. But even at that, there is precedent in certain situations for local law enforcement to carry out immigration enforcement duties.
NTM
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A man only needs two tools in life. WD-40 and duct tape. If it moves and it shouldn't, use the duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, use WD-40.
__________________
Beware the Plutocrat Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.
What a delightful young fellow! And he's famous too. He even got profiled in the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report. A few highlights:
- past president of the Mesa Community College Republican Club
- Maricopa County Republican precinct committeeman
- court-martialed and drummed out of the Marines
- neo-Nazi
- "The truth is that negroids screw monkeys and rape babies in afreaka. Then stupid white man who licks kosher jew rear lets negroids in. … Stop Negroid immigration and integration now!!! Nature will take care of the rest."
- "Though I want to live free and in peace, I am fully prepared to be murdered or falsely imprisoned for what I believe to be true."
- "The Purity of the Aryan Race is the most precious resource Nature has to offer All of Humankind."
And, of course, he speaks at teabag events, because nothing is too insane and fucked up for the teabaggers.
__________________
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
__________________
Beware the Plutocrat Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.
Gonzo makes a broad generalization because that's not what this thread is about:
No wonder those Minneappolis people seemed so, um, communal. Lots of blonde haired/ blue-eyed nutjobs.
Seriously that city is bizarre. We trumped around the streets sloshed-ass drunk with some of the locals when visiting a friend of my brother's and I swear the homeless people are more sane than the residents.
He offered an example of a likely scenario faced by local officials: An Arizona police officer stops a van driving erratically in a remote area known as an alien smuggling corridor.
“You might have a vehicle overloaded, no one in the vehicle has any identification whatsoever. The driver of the vehicle is acting evasively and trying not to answer the officer’s questions, perhaps one person in the vehicle concedes that he is unlawfully present [in the US],” Kobach said.
“At that point the officer would have reasonable suspicion that the other occupants in the vehicle are unlawfully present [in the US], and at that point this law requires the officer to [contact a 24-hour federal immigration hotline] to verify whether the individuals are lawfully or unlawfully present in the country,” he said.
Kobach said mere failure to have a driver’s license is not reasonable suspicion under the Arizona law. “It is two or more of these individual factors, then the totality of circumstances exist” to authorize the federal contact, he said.
I agree that the above scenario constitutes reasonable suspicion, and therefore the new law would not be needed because any cop that didn't investigate in such circumstances would have to be a moron.
This scenario is not even close to what the other guy was talking about; stopping random Mexicans on the street and it's not even close to what happened to the truck driver, who had a commercial driver's license etc.
So, I have no reason to believe that law enforcement will limit their questioning and "papers, please" demands to obviously suspicious situations.
From Arturo Sarukhan, Mexican Ambassador to the US:
"The Mexican Government has just issued a Travel Advisory recommending Mexicans not to travel to Arizona on business or pleasure."
Awesome. The next thing that needs to happen is for Canada to express similar concerns so Arizona can reassure them that their intent is to enforce this law in an explicitly racist way.
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
Re: Arizona: Fuckin' Mexicans, how do they work?
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