The Looming Immigration Showdown (Part 1 of 2)

Finally!

After months of wrangling over health care, immigration is back in the political spotlight. It was only a matter of time, and both Republicans and Democrats quiver before the notion of addressing the issue. Both parties have something to lose in the immigration debate. Republicans who support amnesty and Democrats who do not will both lose votes. Both parties claim to support tougher border enforcement, but they've been pitching that line for decades now.

What sparked the thrust of immigration to the forefront of political debate in the United States? I'm sure a lot of people will point to Governor Jan Brewer signing a tough new immigration enforcement bill into law recently. I argue that another incident is at the root of the immigration debate renewal: the murder of 58-year-old Robert Krentz, a rancher in Arizona, by an illegal immigrant who then scuttled back into Mexico.

Krentz's death is not a statistical anomaly; it wasn't a glitch in the Matrix. Representative Steve King of Iowa released statistics in 2006 which suggested that twelve Americans were murdered by illegal immigrants per day. This would amount to 4,380 murders per year.

What makes Krentz's murder more poignant are the circumstances of his death. Apparently Krentz was checking the water lines and fencing of his family's property when he discovered a lone illegal immigrant. Krentz's brother has mentioned that Krentz had radioed to him that he had found an illegal immigrant, and was going to try to give him some water.

No one knows exactly what happened next, but Robert Krentz was mortally wounded. He managed to drive part of the way back to his ranch house in his ATV, but died with the engine running and the lights on before he got there.

Days before the killing, Krentz's brother Phil reported possible drug smuggling through their ranch property, which led local authorities to find 290 pounds of marijuana and eight illegal immigrants on the property.

Robert Krentz has become the new rallying figure for those in America who want something to be done about illegal immigration and crime. Whether Krentz would have wanted that is immaterial. It's one thing to sneak across our southern border, take advantage of civil services, and speak little to no English all the while. It's quite another to murder innocent Americans on their own private property.

Within weeks, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed the immigration enforcement bill into law, igniting a firestorm of controversy, polemics, protests, riots, and boycotts by civil rights leaders.

So what's all the hullabaloo about? Opponents of the law claim that it will lead to racial profiling, discrimination, and Arizona becoming a police state. Any cursory glance at the law's provisions would quickly dispel such outlandish claims.

As it stands, the law merely provides local and state law enforcement with the legal means to enforce federal immigration laws. If any person with whom the state and local authorities come into contact is suspected of being an illegal immigrant, those authorities have the means to assess their legal status, and if they are found to be in the country illegally and are convicted of the initial offense that led to the authorities approaching them in the first place, then the illegal immigrant is transferred into federal custody.

The clauses in the law with which the law's opponents take issue are those which give local authorities the right to question a suspect's immigration status if there is "reasonable suspicion." Of course, for civil rights leaders like Al Sharpton and several Hispanic lawmakers in Congress, this means a de facto Nazi-Germany-Jim-Crow-police-state.

How ludicrous. A few things to consider:
1) The law gives state and local authorities the means to enforce federal immigration policy. There are no special powers given.
2) Since there are no special powers given in the law beyond what is already written, there will not be Arizona cops roaming the streets and rounding up Mexicans.
3) There are multiple clauses in the law that specifically prohibit racial profiling and which protect the rights of lawful, legal citizens.
4) Any officer proven to have acted solely on the basis of race will be punished, so Arizona cops actually have something to lose if they are guilty of racial profiling.

It's fascinating to watch how opponents of the law (which are comprised of both Democrats and Republicans, by the way) dance around these basic facts. If there hasn't been rampant racial profiling in Arizona beforehand (which we have to assume, since Al Sharpton and his ilk haven't opened their mouths about it until now), then why will this new law, which specifically prohibits and penalizes racial profiling, suddenly turn Arizona into a police state?

It won't. But claiming such gains a lot of political points and rallies the leftist troops.

Another claim by opponents of the law is that it will destroy any incentive that Mexicans had to cooperate with police investigations, since they would then run the risk of being apprehended or deported themselves. Of course, one has to wonder how much illegal immigrants cooperate with American authorities in the first place. My bet is that they don't. Besides, there is another provision in the law which allows a police officer to forgo assessing someone's immigration status if the officer feels that such an action will hamper police investigation efforts for other crimes.

The state of Arizona was forced to pass this law because of the federal government's inability to enforce its immigration laws in the border states. Ask Republicans, and they'll likely agree with that statement; ask Democrats, and they'll say it's a failure of the federal government to come to a compromise on the immigration issue in order to pass effective enforcement measures. Both points are correct, but it's important to realize that Congress hasn't reached a compromise on the issue because pro-amnesty legislators continue to push for "a pathway to citizenship."

"A pathway to citizenship"...that sounds so lovely, doesn't it? It brings to mind the Yellow Brick Road from the Wizard of Oz. But for those calling for such a "path", it amounts to amnesty, pure and simple. Those illegal immigrants put on this "pathway to citizenship" will not be deported or penalized for entering the country illegally; they'd probably be put to work picking vegetables or mowing lawns.

That's not being "racist". Most illegal immigrants find work in those fields, as well as in construction. These stereotypes come from somewhere. But how much more cheap labor do we need injected in to our majority-service economy? We need to be manufacturing and producing more high-quality finished goods. But that's a topic for another article.

Amnesty is the weakest solution to the 11 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States (and that's a VERY conservative estimate; others, like the company Bear Stearns, peg that number at about 20 million). The alternative is deportation, which is lambasted as inhumane, racist, and all other degrees of "bad" by proponents of amnesty. Another alternative, to do nothing about the illegal immigrants currently here, is unsustainable.

So what do we do? Stay tuned for Part 2 of this essay to find out.