Please leave Japan and other countries out of this discussion at this point: there are some pretty relevant cultural and legal differences between us and Japan. I have no idea what the requirements for identification are in Japan, but they’re almost certainly different from the ones here.
Age is also an irrelevant comparison, because we have a tradition of allowing legal discrimination between young people and old people in many ways. We do not have a legal tradition of allowing discrimination between people of different ethnic backgrounds; on the contrary, we have a very clear legal tradition of forbidding it. You may not mind it, but your personal feelings on the matter are yet again irrelevant.
Not if they were hanging out on a street corner known for being a location where prostitutes offer their goods, no. Why would I? Mistakes happen. Getting questioned for a few moments by someone trying to protect the law when he has suitable reason to ask those questions is hardly a great horror.
“Oh no mom! The nice man in blue asked me…asked me…QUEEEESTIOOONS!”
Indeed, and as I pointed out I don’t think that judging someone on their ethnicity would count. Judging someone based on their ethnicity and a second factor, on the other hand, is likely sufficient based on real world statistics.
Take for example that you see a black man carrying a sandwich bag of white powder down the street in the poor area of town. You also have seen a white woman carrying a bag of white powder down the street in a nice suburban, residential area. Would a reasonable and non-racist man be justified in suspecting that the former was a drug and the latter was flour being shared with a neighbor? Certainly I wouldn’t advise an arrest. But I see no harm in allowing the officer to take the slightest sample of the material to verify what it is.
You’re arguing - I think - that we should be required to carry our passport or birth certificate at all times. That simply because I hang out in a country with a high amount of illegal immigration that I should cheerfully accept that requirement. I do not agree that the disease of illegal immigration is worth the cure of, “Papers, please.”
Even if it is ruled that there is no preemption by federal immigration law here, this law could still be challenged on 4th amendment grounds. There is a federal minimum level of protection that the 4th amendment provides that the states can’t go under with their laws. This law allows state police officers to stop people if they have reasonable suspicion they are illegal immigrants. The question would be if that’s a lower standard of reasonable suspicion than what the constitution allows.
As Richard Parker mentioned, not all immigration violations are criminal and the general rule is that you need reasonable suspicion of a crime to stop someone. A court could find this law unconstitutional because it allows stops without any suspicion of a criminal offense.
I don’t know the reasoning that justifies federal officers to stop for non-criminal immigration violations, but I suspect that it’s an exception from the general law in order to give federal officers the power necessary to control immigration. A court could take the view that this exception isn’t necessary for state police. This is just hypothetically speaking since I don’t know the exact law here.
Or courts could set the standard of reasonable suspicion required to stop under this law to somewhere above “he looked Mexican.” Unless the law has guidelines for what it considers reasonable suspicion that someone’s an alien, it will be the courts who get to decide the standard.
Hopefully it will be held unconstitutional. I don’t think there is any way courts could limit this law so that it won’t be abused by the police.
That’s also very South African of you (Apartheid era) … SHOW ME YOUR PAPERS KAFFIR!!! Always interesting to observe when fellow humans are willing to deprive others of their rights.
I’m not arguing that. I’m arguing that it is the individual’s duty to prove his citizenship, which is certainly the case. It is not implicit that by standing upon some of the dirt that constitutes the USA, that a person is an American citizen. Whether that person chooses to carry proof around with him at all times or to simply keep it at home is his choice, based on how likely he thinks it is that anyone will ever challenge him versus the relative hassle of having to drive home to get the proof or to carry around a driver’s license or some other form of identification.
If he cannot or will not prove his citizenship, there is no reason to assume that he is.
So you’ll admit you were way off base about this when gross abuses are documented, right? Right?
And on a compleeeetely unrelated note, why is it so god damn predictable which posters are going to come down on the hateful/divisive/racist/xenophobic/us vs. them side of any given issue?
It is not! I have to prove my citizenship in few and special circumstances: entering the country, for example. Other than that, you are flat out wrong.
By the way, you keep bringing up a driver’s license (and other things) as proof as citizenship. Not so. There are only two things which prove my citizenship - my birth certificate and my passport. A naturalization certificate would also do. That’s it, there ain’t no more.
Impressive. I wouldn’t have guessed that a person could be picked up by the INS and be released without having to display citizenship! Glad to hear of your success.
True, but I suspect that most police officers would accept a drivers license from a white guy as sufficient evidence. That might be wrong, but it’s still reality.
There is a presumption of lawful presence and the government always bears the burden of proving an individual is not a citizen and/or not lawfully present in the US. By “clear and convincing evidence” in any immigration proceeding, and “Beyond Reasonable Doubt” if that is a fact relevant to a criminal proceeding.
The only time you have to affirmatively prove you are a citizen or have the right to enter the US, is when you are standing at the border asking to be let in.
You are missing the main problem with giving the police more power to stop and question. Whenever police are given more power, the burden of being stopped and questioned falls disproportionately on minorities. In my city about 90% of the people who are stopped and frisked are minorities. Just 6% of those people are actually arrested. Do you see the problem here?
For one thing minorities do not commit crimes at nine times the levels of white people. The second problem is that large numbers poor minority looking people get arrested for marijuana use while white college kids rarely get hassled.
This is where the real world statistics you mention above come from. If police disproportionately target minorities then minorities will be disproportionately arrested. There is plenty of suburban drug use that goes on with less consequences than inner city drug use, all because no one considers a white woman in a nice neighborhood suspicious.
Do you look Mexican? If you don’t, do you think you will be hassled by this law as much as Latino-Americans will be?
Well, it could be argued that my driver’s license would also prove my citizenship for the purposes of this law. It’s a NY state EDL, compliant with the WHTI and obtaining it required my birth certificate (my passport had just expired, otherwise I would have used that) along with my Social Security card (which I agree does not prove anything) as well as some other proofs for identity and residency in New York State. So the EDL is enough to prove my citizenship to la migra next time I’m coming back from visiting Canada. However, I would not assume (I honestly haven’t looked it up) that just my NY EDL would be enough to prove that I was an American citizen to the Canadian authorities and that I wouldn’t need a passport in Canada.
Based on how I read the “proofs” in the Arizona law, that would work, as I was required to prove US citizenship to obtain the license. However, the New Mexico driver’s license I used to have would not work, as New Mexico does not require proof of citizenship or permanent residency and will indeed issue a license to an illegal immigrant. (This, by the way, is the policy I support. Whether or not you can drive–and I’ve seen plenty of Americans who shouldn’t be on the roads–has nothing to do with your citizenship or legal status.) It’ll be interesting the first time a New Mexican citizen whose family history can be traced back to a Spanish land grant gets pulled over in Arizona and arrested for only having a New Mexico driver’s license. And by interesting, I mean that I hope that’s enough for an automatic lawsuit by New Mexico of Arizona, which would force it directly to the Supreme Court.
Let’s say that I have a requirement that a person be at least 4’ tall to go on a ride. I even have a measuring stick.
Now, in a world where it is not the individual’s duty to prove that they fill a set of requirements, I would have no right to require them to stand up next to the measuring stick. They have no duty to prove themselves, and hence I must simply allow them to ride.
That makes zero sense and I don’t think any court would go for it.
The Fourteenth Amendment lays out requirements. Implicitly, this means that there is some measuring stick. Specifically, that a person must either have either been born in the US or have been naturalized. If a person cannot demonstrate in any way that he fulfills these requirements, why would the natural assumption be that he’s a citizen?
Now yes, technically, it is the government’s “duty” to show that the individual is not a citizen. But all that means is that they will ask him for his documentation. The end result is that it rests on him.