Frank Rich: If Only Arizona Were the Real Problem

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/opinion/02rich.html

DON’T blame it all on Arizona. The Grand Canyon State simply happened to be in the right place at the right time to tilt over to the dark side. Its hysteria is but another symptom of a political virus that can’t be quarantined and whose cure is as yet unknown.

If many of Arizona’s defenders and critics hold one belief in common, it’s that the new “show me your papers” law is sui generis: it’s seen as one angry border state’s response to its outsized share of America’s illegal immigration crisis. But to label this development “Arizona’s folly” trivializes its import and reach. The more you examine the law’s provisions and proponents, the more you realize that it’s the latest and (so far) most vicious battle in a far broader movement that is not just about illegal immigrants — and that is steadily increasing its annexation of one of America’s two major political parties.

Arizonans, like all Americans, have every right to be furious about Washington’s protracted and bipartisan failure to address the immigration stalemate. To be angry about illegal immigration is hardly tantamount to being a bigot. But the Arizona law expressing that anger is bigoted, and in a very particular way. The law dovetails seamlessly with the national “Take Back America” crusade that has attended the rise of Barack Obama and the accelerating demographic shift our first African-American president represents.

The crowd that wants Latinos to show their papers if there’s a “reasonable suspicion” of illegality is often the same crowd still demanding that the president produce a document proving his own citizenship. Lest there be any doubt of that confluence, Rush Limbaugh hammered the point home after Obama criticized Arizona’s action. “I can understand Obama being touchy on the subject of producing your papers,” he said. “Maybe he’s afraid somebody’s going to ask him for his.” Or, as Glenn Beck chimed in about the president last week: “What has he said that sounds like American?”

Breakdown by state

They're just angry is utter BS.

The "illegal" problem has been going on for a long time, and only got worse after Reagan's "amnesty" back in 1985. They have never enforced the laws on the books, especially those that targeted employers, who are in my book the ones we need to go after, not the people who simply are coming here because they can not find work in their own country, thanks to things like NAFTA! This has been a way for big corporations to bring in cheap labor and push down wages, and it has worked very well for them, the corporations. Republicans in congress are always "screaming" about the illegal immigration problem, especially in election years, but when they had control of congress they did NOTHING to come up with a solution to this problem!

If we want to fix the problem we need to go after the EMPLOYERS first, and come up with a plan to do background checks on those here, get them out of the shadows, and come up with a plan to get those who really want to work a chance to do so, LEGALLY, and send the criminals back to their home country. It can be done, and if employers are made to actually verify the status of their workers, not that hard with the e-verify system, and those who don't want to get legal status are turned down, and only those who want to go through the process to stay here and work get hired, paid a decent wage, and have safe working conditions things will change for the better, but the key word is "ENFORCEMENT", something that was missing since the last plan back in 1985!

:kick: