59. This is What We Were Talking About

I've had mixed feelings about Arizona's new immigration law. I get the part about law & order and needing to enforce laws that the federal government won't. But requiring any number of brown people (and only brown people) to prove they have a right to be here, and giving white officers the power to demand that proof invites a nasty kind of racial profiling.

Since the law was announced, I think most of us have just been waiting for that first instance of a legal citizen being detained so we could say, "This is what we were talking about."

Well now it's happened. In Illinois.

A Puerto Rican man was arrested in connection with a car theft, and police in Berwyn decided it'd be a good time to check his immigration status. Even after he produced a birth certificate, it took 3 days for officials to determine (to their satisfaction) that he was legally in the U.S. An American citizen spent 3 days in lock-up under and was threatened with deportation... to Mexico.

The whole thing is beyond retarded. And it's exactly what a lot of people expected would happen, often, when the law was passed. In an interview on cable news, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona argued that it might be really easy to ascertain who was here illegally because "if they're driving a truck with no license and a dozen people stuck in the back" there's a good chance they're smugglers.

The problem is that it's not really about who's probably here illegally. It's about who police officers with new powers think is here illegally. It's about who looks like an American and who doesn't in their minds. I think the law works in theory. In practice, It's all bad.