The People Say, "Enforce the Law."

Some interesting poll numbers just in on illegal immigration.

With boycotts against Arizona for passage of SB 1070 and daily protests for its repeal, 76 percent of Americans want the number of illegal aliens degreased according to a CNN/Opinion Research Poll conducted May 21-23, this is an increase from the 67 percent who felt the same way in June 2006.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer seems to have re-ignited the illegal immigration debate when she signed SB 1070 into law, pointing out that the federal government has failed to secure the border between Arizona and Mexico.

President Obama promised his supporters during his 2008 campaign for president that immigration reform would be a priority during his first year in the White House, which included a plan to make illegal aliens legal, instead of using the dreaded A word, amnesty. That would be the same as reducing the number of speeders on the highway by increasing the speed limit. If Obama makes illegal aliens legal aliens we wouldn't have as many illegal aliens.

Most Americans are not buying the Obama plan however, 60 percent want the government to put the emphasis on stopping illegal from entering and deporting those already here. Only 38 percent want them to become legal residents.

Senator John McCain of Arizona, must also have been reading the poll numbers. In 2006, McCain was the poster boy for a plan that would provide a path to citizenship for illegal aliens. Now that he is in a tough primary for the GOP nomination for the senate, he has changed his tune and is broadcasting campaign commercials portraying him as tough on border security.

The CNN poll shows that 88 percent of Americans favor putting more Border Patrol and federal law enforcement on the border, which is up from 74 percent in 2006.

54 percent favor building a 700 mile long fence at the border with Mexico, up from 45 percent in 2006 and 2007.

A whopping majority of Americans are for doing what the federal government won't do, turn off the jobs magnet that is causing people to risk their lives in the deadly Arizona desert to provide cheap labor for greedy employers. 71 percent are in favor of imposing fines of tens of thousands of dollars on employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens, this number is up from 58 percent in 2006 and 47 percent would send those employers to jail for hiring undocumented workers, up from 40 percent in 2006. 70 percent are in favor of creating an ID card issued by the federal government that American citizens and legal residents could use to get jobs.

NBC News and Telemundo, the Spanish language network, also conducted a poll from May 20 to 23 that found that 40 percent of all registered voters would back a Republican candidate who supported Arizona's illegal immigration law which, included 19 percent of Latinos, and 26 percent would back a Democratic candidate who opposed the Arizona law, which included 53 percent of Latinos. 32 percent of all registered voters polled said that the issue would not affect how they voted, 25 percent of Latinos said the same.

The questions I have are, "if we are a federal republic of laws, why are our immigration laws not being enforced?"

"If we are a government by the consent of the governed and the clear majority of the governed want the border secured and employer sanctions against hiring illegal aliens, why, after all these years, has it not happened?"

Bob Haran,
American, Conservative, Republican.

"Ich bin ein Arizonan"

"Ich bin ein Arizonan"

A comment from one of our readers to the post, "Proud to be an Arizonan," was so good, I decided to make it a post by itself.

Carl A. Voigtsberger said...

To all Arizonans: I WAS one of the silent majority, but no longer. I support wholeheartedly your new immigration law and the lawful enforcement of that Law. Congradulations to your Governor. She has Guts. Remember when JFK said in Berlin that " He was a Berliner" to show the world that he supported Berliners. Well, "Ich bin ein Arizonan". Every state in the union should be supporting Arizona.

Thanks for being first.

Carl A. Voigtsberger,

Cheyenne, Wyoming

PROUD TO BE AN ARIZONAN

PROUD TO BE AN ARIZONAN.


By Bob Haran;

I'm proud of my state of Arizona, proud of our legislature for passing SB 1070 and of our governor for having the courage to sign 1070 into law.

I'm proud of the majority of the people of Arizona who will not bend under the pressure of the lies and distortions perpetrated against Arizona and our law, good people who are opposed to racism and know the difference between truth and propaganda.

I'm proud to be an American and a citizen of the United States but most of all I'm proud to be a citizen of the Forty-Eights state of these United States of America.

I'm proud to be an Arizonan.

The Fuss over Arizona's Immigration Law

The Fuss over Arizona's Immigration Law
Wednesday, April 28, 2010

By Brit Hume


The president says the Arizona law is "misguided."

His attorney general says it's "unfortunate."

In San Francisco they are talking about boycotting the state.

Al Sharpton is on the way to lead marches and Linda Greenhouse, the esteemed legal affairs commentator of The New York Times, says she will boycott Arizona because, she says, it's now a police state where, "breathing while undocumented" is a crime.

All this is in reaction mainly to two passages of the new Arizona immigration law

One provides when police are engaged in "lawful contact" with someone where there is "reasonable suspicion" the person is an illegal alien, that the police shall make a "reasonable attempt... when practicable" to determine the person's immigration status.

The other provision makes it a crime to be in Arizona illegally. This is the part that Greenhouse says makes breathing while undocumented a crime.

But it's already a federal crime to enter the U.S. illegally. The new law just makes it a state crime, to.

As for the charge police will now make random demands of Hispanics to produce their papers, the bill's authors say that the requirement that there first be "lawful contact" means situations where someone has already been stopped for other law enforcement reasons.

In fact, once you actually read this law, it becomes clear the fuss over it has little to do with breathing in Arizona and a lot to do with hyperventilating in Washington.

— Brit Hume is the senior political analyst for Fox News Channel.

George Will on Arizona's Immigration Law

From the Washington Post

A Law Arizona Can Live With.



By George F. Will
Wednesday, April 28, 2010

"Misguided and irresponsible" is how Arizona's new law pertaining to illegal immigration is characterized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She represents San Francisco, which calls itself a "sanctuary city," an exercise in exhibitionism that means it will be essentially uncooperative regarding enforcement of immigration laws. Yet as many states go to court to challenge the constitutionality of the federal mandate to buy health insurance, scandalized liberals invoke 19th-century specters of "nullification" and "interposition," anarchy and disunion. Strange.

It is passing strange for federal officials, including the president, to accuse Arizona of irresponsibility while the federal government is refusing to fulfill its responsibility to control the nation's borders. Such control is an essential attribute of national sovereignty. America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists "comprehensive" immigration reform.

Arizona's law makes what is already a federal offense -- being in the country illegally -- a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona's right to assert concurrent jurisdiction. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund attacks Gov. Jan Brewer's character and motives, saying she "caved to the radical fringe." This poses a semantic puzzle: Can the large majority of Arizonans who support the law be a "fringe" of their state?

Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy -- judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes -- because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences. The Constitution, the Supreme Court has said, puts certain things "beyond the reach of majorities."

But Arizona's statute is not presumptively unconstitutional merely because it says that police officers are required to try to make "a reasonable attempt" to determine the status of a person "where reasonable suspicion exists" that the person is here illegally. The fact that the meaning of "reasonable" will not be obvious in many contexts does not make the law obviously too vague to stand. The Bill of Rights -- the Fourth Amendment -- proscribes "unreasonable searches and seizures." What "reasonable" means in practice is still being refined by case law -- as is that amendment's stipulation that no warrants shall be issued "but upon probable cause." There has also been careful case-by-case refinement of the familiar and indispensable concept of "reasonable suspicion."

Brewer says, "We must enforce the law evenly, and without regard to skin color, accent or social status." Because the nation thinks as Brewer does, airport passenger screeners wand Norwegian grandmothers. This is an acceptable, even admirable, homage to the virtue of "evenness" as we seek to deter violence by a few, mostly Middle Eastern, young men.

Some critics say Arizona's law is unconstitutional because the 14th Amendment's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" prevents the government from taking action on the basis of race. Liberals, however, cannot comfortably make this argument because they support racial set-asides in government contracting, racial preferences in college admissions, racial gerrymandering of legislative districts and other aspects of a racial spoils system. Although liberals are appalled by racial profiling, some seem to think vocational profiling (police officers are insensitive incompetents) is merely intellectual efficiency, as is state profiling (Arizonans are xenophobic).

Probably 30 percent of Arizona's residents are Hispanic. Arizona police officers, like officers everywhere, have enough to do without being required to seek arrests by violating settled law with random stops of people who speak Spanish. In the practice of the complex and demanding craft of policing, good officers -- the vast majority -- routinely make nuanced judgments about when there is probable cause for acting on reasonable suspicions of illegality.

Arizona's law might give the nation information about whether judicious enforcement discourages illegality. If so, it is a worthwhile experiment in federalism.

Non-Hispanic Arizonans of all sorts live congenially with all sorts of persons of Hispanic descent. These include some whose ancestors got to Arizona before statehood -- some even before it was a territory. They were in America before most Americans' ancestors arrived. Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their back yards at 3 a.m.