Undermining the Constitution

It's pretty amazing how so many who support Arizona search and seizure AB 1070 law don’t understand (or outright ignore) its true ramifications on bona fide Americans as well as everybody else who is entitled to mind his own business without molestation. Yes, it's about civil rights afforded to anybody who sets foot on American soil, regardless of nationality.

My family has resided on what is now American soil since before there was an America, prior to either California, Arizona and Texas Sovereignty and even before there was Spanish Colonization. Every member of my family has prior, native born rights to roam among, reside within and enjoy all the protections of the United States Constitution provided to all among citizen, resident, visitor, immigrant and alien regardless of immigration status. I and my siblings all look like the so-called Mexican, more accurately named Mestizo, native American and European descendant blend. I, who have a longer standing claim to Constitutional protections than any ethnically unmixed peace officer, can be legally stopped, questioned and detained simply for looking as I do. Let's say I'm gardening in my own Arizona back yard and pop around to the garden center for weed killer or lawn seed, but forget to take along my passport, and decide to drive my vintage car, a lovingly restored and maintained 50s era Chevy Biscayne that still needs a paint job. I spend the night in jail because I fit a patently xenophobic (oh, the irony) profile mandated by descendants of European immagrants (oh, more irony). All because I didn't carry my papers with me as I went on a shopping errand. It quite literally could happen to anybody. Like anyone minding their own business driving through on I40 or I10 while some Highway Patrol officer who is a bit bored as he contemplates his stop quota in the hot sun. 

Let’s take a look at historic precedents:
South Africa Aparteid era "pass laws" required all black and mixed race, “colored” residents to carry officially issued identification documentation which included name, birth date, fingerprints (biometric ID) and employment status. Arresting officers were given complete discretion regarding requirements to produce the documentation, even so far as imprisoning citizens immediately outside their residences because they were prevented by the arresting officer from recovering the needed documentation from their home mere steps away. These laws scapegoated black and non-white citizens, effectively isolating them from participation in broad social and economic aspects of society even though they often paid a higher percentage of wages in taxes than citizens not so subject to regulation.

In 1930s Germany, any person who could not prove they were not Jewish were required to carry  identification documents which they had to produce anytime any police or public officer requested them. These laws isolated and marginalized Jews from social and economic participation in society.

Jim Crow: separate but equal facilities laws in the United States.

These are the exact tactics also used in Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, Socialist Russia, Talibanic Afghanistan, Islamic Iran, Baathist Iraq, and almost every totalitarian state without a Bill of Rights. And, now, as well and again, in an ostensibly democratic country wth the Original Bill of Rights. This is a measure purportedly implemented to control illegal aliens. But it also, immediately, effects natural born and naturalized citizens. Bystanders and witnesses to a stop can bring suit against officers’ lenience if they feel the officer hasn’t applied the law correctly. That is, they didn't cart away the guy who isn't one of us. It doesn't matter to all these entitled elite folks with misplaced anger because their packaging, the way they look and the opportunities citizenship has provided, alone, makes them safe. Do you think for a moment unscupulous lawmakers and fickle proposition voters won't extend the 'look like an illegal alien' motif won't be extended to include even lily white Aryan and Nordic types? When are sari and burkha clad women and turbaned men added to the list?

Indeed, this is a very slippery slope we’re dealing with. Already, Arizona’s legislature has handed Governor Jan Brewer a revamped education policy by which schools will lose state funding for offering courses that "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals." Progressive analysts suggest that the target is the Tucson Unified School District’s popular Mexican-American studies department which the state Superintendant says is about “ethnic chauvinism.” The irony is astounding considering that, according to the Wall Street Journal,  the Arizona Department of Education has decreed that teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” (is that not a malapropism?) accents, like those English-as-a-second-language teachers recruited heavily from Latin America under Bush’s No Child Left Behind program for ten years, may no longer teach English. This follows a year 2000 ballot initiative that banned bi-lingual classes. Never mind that these hundreds of heavily accented, fully accredited teachers were hired specifically because they were bilingual.

This is the face of hysteria masquerading as sound public policy. AB 1070 is patently unconstitutional on unreasonable search and seisure grounds. Its intrinsic vagueness is overarching and likewise unconstitutional. It's mean spirited, misguided, as contemptible as it is contemptuous of the Bill of Rights. It was built to address troubles and problems that don’t exist.

Respondents to online reportage cite immigrant crime, public services freeloading, and other unverifiable justifications for these measures. The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit education organization which has collected and disseminated basic information about government finance since 1937, reports that growing numbers of undocumented immigrants, ineligible for Social Security Numbers, are using Individual Tax Identification Numbers to file their federal income taxes. They pay FICA, Medicare and other payroll taxes with every paycheck. USA Today reports that the “tax system collects its due, even from a class of workers with little likelihood of claiming a refund and no hope of drawing a Social Security check” and that “the latest figures available indicate it will amount to billions of dollars in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes this year (2008). One rough estimate puts the amount of Social Security taxes alone at around $9 billion per year.”

The fact of the matter is that illegal immigrants put in far and away  more in taxes and fees than they now or will ever hope to receive under current federal immigration law. The border crime touted by anti-immigrant proponents is perpetrated by smugglers, drug cartels and other organized criminals. That’s a completely different issue and has nothing to do with the hard working, marginalized family breadwinners just trying to make a living. The jobs filled by illegal immigrants are not high profile, well paying positions preferred by more privileged, natural born Americans. They’re the unwanted, literally back breaking, dead end jobs that would go unfilled were illegals not there to do the essential yet menial support without which society's fabric would unravel. Elite citizens' very standard of living would collapse and, in extreme cases, disappear.

The effect of SB 1070 and education policy changes are already apprent. Main street usiness is down, universitys are losing high end students, tourism and the converence trade is losing billions per month in long range bookings.

Outspoken poponents to these measures would do well to study both the Constitution of which they so fervently claim defense, and the verifyable statistics on which jobs and taxes are being paid, while also comparing how many of those same dollars are paid out to these taxpayers as public goods and services.

At the same time, I personally invite all the trolls spewing nonsense and bile to keep it up. The louder you are, the clearer your true nature and corrupt positions become.

Word to the wise: Be very, very careful what you ask for.