Yes, it would feasible to have a situation where the governor of California is visiting Arizona on vacation, forgot his wallet in the hotel room, and was deported to Austria for failure to produce ID. While I think that is unlikely given his political and family connections, by the letter of the law that certainly could happen. That alone should demonstrate how wrong this law is.
Would really like to see some asshat Birther in Arizona try to get the sitting President deported to Kenya under that law, too. THAT would be entertaining, now wouldn’t it?
Basically, it allows anyone to accuse anyoneof being here illegally and start deportation procedures even if they are a citizen. That’s just wrong. And you know that this won’t hit the white, the rich, and the famous hardest, it will target the poor minorities. The potential for harassment of not just Hispanics but political opponents and the like is just too great.
Oh, be serious, Broomstick. There is still due process. They can’t bounce your ass back to your homeland on the instant. You’d have plenty of time for your lawyer to bring in your proof of citizenship. Still a hardship, of course, but let’s not make up imaginary scenarios. This is a forum for factual discussions.
Ever seen what a bureaucracy can do to due process when it has a mind to? And this law, if accurately reported, seems to contemplate that one is required to prove American citizenship on demand – not because it has been validly questioned on reasonable grounds, but because someone sees behavior as suspiciious. Remember the case of the black man arrested for driving his own car to a friend’s home in a well-to-do Pennsylvania suburb – he was “acting suspiciously” by being a black man in a luxury car. The law, and good cops, may be colorblind – but rest assured there are people wearing a badge who are ethnically prejudiced. Plus, anonymous tips from people with an ulterior motive would be “probable cause” as the law is apparently written.
That was true in the past and is somewhat true now. However, their was a factory in my town that was caught employing illegals. After the illegals were removed, the factory had no trouble hiring citizens to fill its roster. American workers will do any job there is if the pay is right. I realize that I am in danger of hijacking this thread so I will state that the only purpose of this post was; to point out that the notion that illegals are only doing jobs that citizens won’t is not entirely correct.
For the OP and all other non-Americans, this may be hard to understand.
I think national ID cards issued by the government are commonplace in almost all Western countries. But carrying an ID card is no trivial issue in America .
A year or two ago, Britain had a political fuss about a proposal for new computerized ID’s–but the debate was about the technical issues–nobody questioned the basic concept of an ID card .
But for many Americans, the simple concept that citizens would have to possess a national ID card is Orwellian. Worse than “1984”, worse than Communist Russia, it strikes terror into their hearts, and shakes the very foundations of free society.
(Unlike Europeans, most Americans do not have passports, and have never crossed a national border.
True story: I was once stopped by a policeman in Columbus Ohio, who asked to see my id (=driver’s license), and the ID of my friend, who happened to be a foreign tourist. My friend pulled out his passport, and the policeman had never seen such a document, did not know what it was, or whether he could accept it as official ID)
“When Mr. Brown’s car was vandalized, it was illegally parked.”
Being in this country without the necessary paperwork is a civil violation. They are illegal in the same sense as failure to pay your property taxes on time or breaking a contract without just cause is illegal. This does not mean that they as “illegal aliens” are not entitled to police proection from murders, rapes, robberies, assaults, and the like, or even the courtesies any person is entitled to in a traffic stop.
Blaming everything on Mexicans is a great way for politicians to avoid solving real problems.
The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the 4th amendment has already led to a lot of racial targeting by the police. This law, if left constitutional, will take 4th amendment protections to a new all time low.
The loophole is that under the 4th amendment police need reasonable suspicion of a crime to stop someone and probable cause of a crime to arrest them. Once an arrest is made a cop has the authority to do a full body search for his own protection. If you create more crimes then you can stop and arrest people for the most trivial offenses. In New York that means turnstile jumpers can get arrested and searched. In Arizona it now means that every brown person can be stopped and every brown person without papers can be arrested and searched.
I wouldn’t mind this standard if everyone was targeted evenly, but the laws lead to police suspecting minorities of crime a lot more than they suspect white people.
Keep in mind the present administration is loathe to enforce current immigration laws and wants to flood the country with illegals so they can grant citizenship/get voters/put them on welfare and create a bloc of voters indebted to them. Arizona felt it was necessary to to act because they have to deal with the problems the illegals bring. You will also notice how many people have responded by calling the Arizona government racist and comparing them to Nazis. That is proof positive that they have no case: just bring out the buckets of mud and start slinging and demonizing the people who want to uphold the law by branding them as bigots.
No, the debate was about the concept of being required to carry an ID card. It is a civil liberties issue, not a technical issue (although some of the objections may have been framed in terms of cost and practicality).
Ireland and Britain have the same tradition as the USA - a citizen going about his or her lawful business is not required to carry identification or produce it on demand.
It may be true to say that identity documents issued by the government are commonplace (if you are talking about passports, driving licences, etc.) But there is a huge leap from there to having to carry an identity document and produce it on demand. And this is not a trivial issue in Ireland or Britain any more than it is in the USA. It would represent a basic change in our conception of society and the relationship of citizen and government.
There is, of course, a form of national ID: the passport. But not everyone has one, and nobody who does have one carries it around for everyday business.
Are you kidding? There was and still is a massive campaign against ID cards in general. Heck, I try to actively avoid any discussion of political reforms and even I’ve heard of it—the campaigners put up posters and leave literature lying around everywhere. It’s all over the Internet too, not only on British sites and blogs, but also on political and tech sites like Slashdot.
