Posted by
Bill Crawford on Sunday, May 02, 2010 10:07:26 PM
Arizona reached a tipping point this year, and now all hell has broken loose.
This has been building for years. The INS has become a joke, and it doesn't seem to matter who is in charge.
The Democrats have their reasons, cynical or not, for supporting relatively open borders. At the very least, they prize the Hispanic voting base even more than their union support, which at this point is so monolothically for them that they take it for granted as much as the African American vote.
George Bush maintained good Hispanic relations as Governor of Texas, and Karl Rove tried to build on that to develop his "durable coalition" in 2004- where they picked up 44% of the Hispanic vote and truly surprised the Kerry people and the DNC.
All that led to a GOP civil war over immigration which goes on to this day. Bush died politically trying to make immigration reform work, and watched it get filed in a trash bin labeled "amnesty". John McCain supported him, and it plagues him to this day.
Well, people are dying in Arizona. Hell, Phoenix is the kidnapping capital of the Western Hemisphere right now. Something had to be done. What they did there was to copy the INS policies, and give local law enforcement the power to carry them out.
They'll never beat a Constitutional challenge, though. Immigration and border security is too clearly a federal mandate. But the odds that Congress will come up with a solution this year is somewhere between zero and hell freezing over.
Attention must be paid to what is going on on the southern border. Arizona is clearly issuing a cry for help.
I have an idea. Why don't we follow Mexico's own policy for their southern border? They play hardball there. If you don't have ID, they send you back over the border by force. If you commit a crime without ID, you end up in prison.
I can't blame the Mexicans for crying over our calls for protection, even with such a intra-border hypocrisy. The second largest economy there is money shipped back from our country. It is what it is.
Arizona is beyond caring about the protests. They are trying to survive. What are we going to do for them?