The rhetorical escalation over the new Arizona immigration law has taken a predictable path toward insanity — or inanity, in the case of Meghan McCain:
I believe it gives the state police a license to discriminate, and also, in many ways, violates the civil rights of Arizona residents. Simply put, I think it is a bad law that is missing the bigger picture of what is really going on with illegal immigration. The concept that a law-enforcement official can stop an individual when “reasonable suspicion exists that a person is an alien, who is unlawfully present in the United States” is essentially a license to pull someone over for being Hispanic.
For the benefit of all who, like Cousin Meghan, are too stupid to pay attention to facts, I will repeat: The law hasn’t even taken effect yet, and we therefore do not have one example — not even one — of this law being abused. And most criticism is based on what Jimmie Bise calls the “Arizona Gestapo” meme of cops as fascist monsters.
The “Fourth Reich” portrayals of this law (e.g., “Saturday Night Live“) as laying the groundwork for an Hispanic Kristallnacht are easily debunked by reading what the law actually says. Jimmie summarizes it briefly:
If a police officer comes into “lawful contact” with a person (because their job as a police officer requires them to do so), and the officer has “reasonable suspicion” that the person is an alien or illegal resident, that officer must make a reasonable attempt to ascertain whether that person is in the United States legally. If, in the course of that “lawful contact”, the person provides an Arizona driver’s license, photo ID, tribal identification, or any other piece of identification for which they had to prove their legal residence when they got it, then that person is automatically assumed to be a legal resident.
Certainly that doesn’t justify the kind of histrionic huffing and puffing we’ve heard from liberals. Rich Lowry observes:
The Arizona law makes it a state crime for aliens not to have immigration documents on their person. This sounds draconian, except it’s been a federal crime for more than half a century — U.S.C. 1304(e). Has the open-borders crowd forgotten that it calls illegal aliens “undocumented” for a reason?
Denouncing the law on the basis of hypothetical abuses that you think might happen is the special kind of idiocy we’ve come to expect from Meghan McCain, who at least has the inexperience of youth to excuse her shallow arguments. But what excuse does Jeb Bush have?
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is speaking out against the new hard-line immigration law in Arizona, becoming the first prominent national Republican to do so.
“I think it creates unintended consequences . . . It’s difficult for me to imagine how you’re going to enforce this law. It places a significant burden on local law enforcement and you have civil liberties issues that are significant as well.”
Yes, of course, there may be unintended consequences, there may be a law-enforcement burden, and there may be civil liberties issues, but shouldn’t we balance these hypothetical risks against the reality of what is actually happening in Arizona? Isn’t reality more important than any hypothesis? Less than two weeks ago, federal agents raided shuttle-bus operations in Arizona that are estimated to have smuggled 80,000 illegals over the past decade. And that is but the tip of a very large iceberg.
Marco Rubio’s criticism of the Arizona law was disappointingly Bush-like in its suggestion that the law “could also unreasonably single out people who are here legally, including many American citizens.” Which of course it could, but it hasn’t yet, and how about we see how the law is actually implemented before we start wringing our hands over imagined abuses that might happen at some unknown point in the future? (As Allahpundit notes, Rubio’s statement is “a comparative model of restraint” in contrast to the denunciations from Lindsey Graham and others.)
What causes conservative Republicans to parrot ACLU talking points? Because liberals have so distorted public understanding of what’s in the law that GOP politicians feel obligated to make at least a few dissenting noises, lest they be denounced as “anti-immigrant.”
This kind of defensive stance by conservatives allows liberals to define the terms of the debate to their own advantage. To surrender that definitional battle in hope of gaining some short-term political benefit by debating the issue on terms acceptable to liberals is to accept defeat as a long-term outcome.
