Jophiel wrote:
I don't feel too strongly about this law one way or the other. I don't think it straight up forces a police state although I think any of the usual suspects who harps about liberty and freedom and who doesn't see a problem with legislation that allows police to make a call on how "reasonably suspicious" you look and demand that you produce documents proving your citizenship based on that call is a usual suspect allowing his hypocrite flag to fly high.
As I read it, it's a response to some city mayors declaring their cities to be "sanctuary cities" and directing their police forces to not ever ask about immigration status under any circumstances. I can't speak directly about Arizona laws and policies, but this is a problem in some parts of the South West. All this really does is legalize the power for police to ask about immigration status regardless of what some local city government wants.
They had the power to do this already, since being in the country illegally is a crime. Many police departments were being barred from doing so recently though. Can this power be abused? Sure. So can most police powers. I doubt they'll be running down the streets asking everyone to provide papers or be arrested though. It'll almost certainly be used as another tool to pull gang bangers off the streets when needed though.
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I think it's legislation that'll do next to nothing to combat illegal immigration and which will further drive Hispanics away from the GOP but I'm happy with that. I think you guys need to pass even more laws which alienate rapidly growing voter blocs.
I think you grossly misunderstand how most Latinos view this issues in this area. Remember that it's mostly the legal Latinos who's neighborhoods are being terrorized and who's kids are being inducted into Mexico Cartel run gangs. When you get outside of the bubble created by groups like La Raza and Mecha, you'll find that a whole lot of US Latinos tend to support these sorts of legislation. They just don't get seen much on the national news...