Dueling Columns on the Arizona Immigration Law.
[Guest post by Jack Dunphy]
Over at Pajamas Media today, I have a piece in support of Arizona’s new immigration law. A sample:
But even as the law’s opponents are revealed as hysterics, it will still be uncomfortable for those police officers who must now go out and enforce it in an atmosphere of intense media scrutiny. You just know the B-rolls are already being shot, the stories are already being written with the details to be filled in later. Someone will be found, some doe-eyed victim will peer out from behind the bars of a jail cell and become the face of the resistance when he is detained on his way either to school, church, or the hospital bedside of his ailing mother who, having been denied a last visit with her cherished son, passes away a broken woman. I see a 3,000-word tear-jerker starting above the fold on page A-1.
The column is presented alongside one from Ruben Navarette Jr., who, as you might have imagined, takes a different view.
You arrest that dark-skinned, long-nosed guy with an accent, smoking a cigarette across the street, Jack, or I’m suing you for a $1,000.00 per day that you don’t do it. And don’t you think I’m gonna stop calling.
nk (db4a41) — 5/1/2010 @ 6:03 pmYou know, Jack, I like you a little. And now you have a law that says I can sue you to investigate somebody I, just any jerk on the street, thinks it’s an illegal alien and if you don’t you me a thousand dollars, and you think that’s ok?
nk (db4a41) — 5/1/2010 @ 6:08 pmIt doesn’t take a new immigration law to make police officers realize they could get deposed or sued. Defense counsel and civil rights lawyers made that happen a long time ago.
DRJ (d15e92) — 5/1/2010 @ 6:09 pmGood article, Jack Dunphy.
DRJ (d15e92) — 5/1/2010 @ 6:13 pmI’m sorry, but it’s not a good article. It’s a bad law for citizens and a bad job for the police.
nk (db4a41) — 5/1/2010 @ 6:15 pmThe federal government has put border states in a difficult position. We face a violent, armed insurgency and/or civil war that is spilling over the border into our communities, but the federal government refuses to secure the border. Like Eliot Ness in Chicago, we’re experimenting with aggressively lawful solutions.
DRJ (d15e92) — 5/1/2010 @ 6:20 pmMe: Officer, I believe that’s an illegal alien. Could you please investigate him?
nk (db4a41) — 5/1/2010 @ 6:21 pmPolice officer: Sir, I have a situation, here. Please call 911 if you want.
Me: Ok, I’m taking down your name and badge number and calling my lawyer.
nk,
If only that was the worst problem the police officers, Sheriff’s deputies, and DPS agents in my community had to face.
DRJ (d15e92) — 5/1/2010 @ 6:27 pmGood article, Jack.
Patterico (c218bd) — 5/1/2010 @ 6:53 pmWow. There’s even a poster for this debate.
DRJ (d15e92) — 5/1/2010 @ 7:01 pmnk, that’s evidently your opinion. Shame you can’t like … support it with a real argument.
SPQR (26be8b) — 5/1/2010 @ 7:03 pmnk,
I’m still unclear on what you believe the border states should do now, because everyday that passes waiting for the feds to fulfill their responsibilities represents more probable death(s) as the drug war continues to spill over into the states, more direct economic impacts as hospitals, schools and jails continue to be overwhelmed, etc., etc. And certainly, more individual citizens lives put at risk.
What should they do? Now.
Dana (1e5ad4) — 5/1/2010 @ 7:34 pmA PERSON MAY BRING AN ACTION IN SUPERIOR COURT TO CHALLENGE ANY OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE THAT ADOPTS OR IMPLEMENTS A POLICY THAT LIMITS OR RESTRICTS THE ENFORCEMENT OF FEDERAL IMMIGRATION LAWS TO LESS THAN THE FULL EXTENT PERMITTED BY FEDERAL LAW.
nk – If the above is the section of the law you are talking about in #1 and #2 above, which I believe it is, is a police officer not immediately arresting somebody because some asswipe with a chip on their shoulder tells them to equivalent to adopting or implementing a policy that limits or restricts the enforcement of federal immigration laws? An educated guess, no. I would suspect the arrest would be a violation of the civil rights of the person the jerk told the officer to arrest, but that’s just me. Why do you keep making up these fanciful scenarios that aren’t in accordance with the law? It’s clear that you don’t like it, but at least construct a realistic hypo.
daleyrocks (1d0d98) — 5/1/2010 @ 7:48 pmWe don’t need Dodd, Frank, Waxman, et al, to make bad law, nk has the knack to create feces out of whole cloth all on his own.
Perhaps, Counselor, if you were to attempt (just a small gesture would do) to find the positive in having additional boots-on-the-ground to enforce Federal Immigration Law, then we might give more deference to what you say you find that is objectionable.
As it is, you’re just having a hissy-fit.
AD - RtR/OS! (334ea3) — 5/1/2010 @ 8:13 pmThere’s a way to reduce the sting of such articles and, while he’s generally useless otherwise (going after a Twitterer with just 20 followers?) Patterico is somewhere within a day’s walk of the right track. If you want to reduce the sting, you start now, and you work to discredit individual reporters by name and have an impact on their careers.
For instance, for two days a WaPo article has been lying about the law. Not only that, but the false statement they’ve been making is the one that the NYT corrected. I’ve contact a couple people but it’s still there. If I’d gotten some help, the WaPo might be forced to correct it and that would have the impact of further lowering the status of their reporter. Lowering her status – and that of all the others who’ve lied about this issue – would reduce their ability to mislead in the future and write articles like that described in the post.
See my posts here for a very partial list of those who’ve lied, and then see what you can do to help:
http://24ahead.com/s/arizona
24AheadDotCom (62c4c5) — 5/1/2010 @ 8:37 pmI still wonder how long it will be before some resident of Tucson & environs files suit against their own Sheriff to prod him into changing (at least in public) his stance against enforcing AZ law?
AD - RtR/OS! (334ea3) — 5/1/2010 @ 8:46 pm24AheadDotCom,
Your comment is difficult to decipher. Do you think Patterico wrote this post and are you really attacking him while soliciting readers to your website?
DRJ (d15e92) — 5/1/2010 @ 9:03 pmDRJ – 24AheadDotCom usually pimps his own blog when he deigns to visit this low wattage blog to tell Patterico he is doing it wrong even when Patterico didn’t write the post in question. It’s SOP for the tool.
daleyrocks (1d0d98) — 5/1/2010 @ 9:16 pmNot a good SOP.
DRJ (d15e92) — 5/1/2010 @ 9:23 pmI think we should start a “Remember Robert” (Robert Krentz) campaign:
“Robert Krentz was a kind and generous man, so much so that he would offer water and assistance to those not only trespassing in our country, but also trespassing on his land.
But the gay came when one of the trespassers didn’t appreciate his hospitality, and shot and killed Mr. Krentz.
You can take time to debate policy on the people who were thankful to Robert,
we do not have time to debate on what to do with those who abuse our hospitality.
If you want to be a responsible citizen, turn in those who do not deserve to be walking free on our streets. As a witness reporting a crime, your “papers” will not be checked, but you will be thanked.
It really is that simple.”
###################################
MD in Philly (0f793a) — 5/1/2010 @ 9:32 pmAdd to that some of the stats Patterico has about the number of illegals in our jails and how much it is costing each state.
“Not a good SOP.”
DRJ – He uses it all over the intartubes. It does not ingratiate himself to hosts.
daleyrocks (1d0d98) — 5/1/2010 @ 9:44 pmNK, I don’t understand what the standard of proof for those suits is going to be. ISTM that it’s next to an impossible case for the suing citizen to win.
I mean: I’d have to prove that a policeman had reasonable suspicion that some third party was an illegal immigrant.
It’s not enough that I have that suspicion. The policeman would have to have it.
Which means that either I have to prove that he knew what I knew – really only doable if I’d provided him with the information myself, in advance of his refusal to investigate – or come up with some way to impute knowledge to him.
It seems really, really difficult to do this.
[Not that the lawsuits won’t happen; I think this law is just asking for frivolous lawsuits. But the police should just about always win the cases.]
aphrael (73ebe9) — 5/2/2010 @ 9:43 amaphrael – It seems as if both you and nk have trouble with the concept of putting judgement in the hands of sworn officers of the law. In another thread you suggested adding criteria to prevent law enforcement contacts from being random or purely subjective. One problem I have with this is that you wind up with laws such as the one anti-profiling law Obama sponsored here in Illinois which made traffic stops out of proportion to the demographics of the local population prima facie evidence of racial profiling if I an summarizing the law correctly. The law ignores who is committing local crimes and is instead focused on population statistics. nk’s mistrust appears to be based on prior negative experiences with the police.
daleyrocks (1d0d98) — 5/2/2010 @ 10:39 amaphrael – If you are uncomfortable placing any judgement in the hands of local law enforcement, that also suggests you would be uncomfortable allowing federal authorities to exercise any type of judgement in enforcing immigration laws. Do you see any solutions here?
daleyrocks (1d0d98) — 5/2/2010 @ 10:41 amI haven’t heard a peep about Ramos and Conception who legally enforcing federal law and went to jail for it. It would certainly concern me if I was in that line of work that I could act legally and still be found guilty of violating the rights of an illegal immigrant.
Curtis (653a53) — 5/2/2010 @ 2:39 pmSorry, Ramos and Campion.
Curtis (653a53) — 5/2/2010 @ 2:57 pmnk’s mistrust appears to be based on prior negative experiences with the police.
Actually, it’s based on the consequences of No Child Left Behind which was intended to put the pressure on the teachers but instead put the pressure on the kids, with invalid achievement tests and downgrading of gifted children. Legislation is what governments do in place of doing something.
nk (db4a41) — 5/3/2010 @ 7:11 amIt’s not that I’m uncomfortable placing any judgment in the hands of local law enforcement, it’s that I’m uncomfortable with the fact that we have given law enforcement wide latitude to make discretionary calls while at the same time claiming to hold to the principle that certain kinds of discretion aren’t allowed.
We’ve said – both through the 14th amendment and through the actual law in question here – that it’s not OK for agents of the state to treat people differently based on race.
And yet it’s utterly impossible to prevent police from doing that, or hold them accountable when they do, without interfering with their jobs … because it’s impossible to prove that the reason one guy got stopped for speeding while another didn’t was related to their race, and it’s absurd to require the police to prove that it wasn’t.
So even if only 1 in 100 policemen would use racial criteria, there’s no way to stop it, and the experience that racial minorities have of every day life is substantially different because of it.
It’s a conundrum: I don’t see a way out of it. But passing laws which are likely to exacerbate the problem … well, exacerbates the problem. 🙂
aphrael (db0b5a) — 5/3/2010 @ 8:21 amHow does enforcing the law that the Federal government is not enforcing exacerbate the problem?
JD (5e5cad) — 5/3/2010 @ 8:31 amI guess I am directing this to the lawyers and lawyer-types around here … How is the AZ law, as originally written, and as amended, alike and different to the corresponding Federal law?
JD (5e5cad) — 5/3/2010 @ 8:37 am