Arizona takes chutzpah to new levels:
The Arizona agency tasked with training 15,000 law officers to enforce the state’s controversial new illegal immigration law has asked federal authorities for assistance, but administration officials say it is unclear whether the government will help.
Lyle Mann, executive director of the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board, says federal assistance is “critical” to what he describes as an unprecedented effort to prepare officers as soon as this summer to enforce the law, which gives local police authority to identify and arrest illegal immigrants.
How about this for an answer? NO.
You guys want a police state, pay for it yourself. You probably should have thought about this before you all passed the idiotic bill in the first place. Maybe we can get Bart Stupak to write an amendment to something mandating that no tax dollars can go to insane policies like this?
And speaking of Stupak, look what Arizona has done now:
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer isn’t going to pander just to the racists in the Right wing, she’s also going to target women. Arizona has become the first state to limit abortion coverage in the state’s future health insurance exchange.
And some people get pissed off if you say “American Taliban.”
Kryptik
But only liberals are facists, Jonah told me so, so yeah. This is just Real ‘Merikans standing up for other Real ‘Merikans.
JGabriel
Bwahahaha! Hahaha…
Why the fuck would they think the rest of the country would help them with their racist LOCAL policing initiative?
Assholes.
.
The Grand Panjandrum
Wouldn’t it save quite a bit of money in the state budget if they just outlawed paying for the education of girls? Seems the next logical step to me. I’m sure Sandra Day O’Connor is thrilled with her home state.
ChockFullO'Nuts
All due respect, fuck anybody who believes this.
You other 46 states want an immigration situation that is not an ongoing trainwreck, where the wreckage and twisted tracks pile up in four states while the rest of you argue over ideological bullshit, then FIX THE GODDAM BORDER PROBLEM.
Fix it, or go fuck yourselves. Arizona is getting tired of being a heat shield for the failures of the federal government.
JGabriel
Oklahoma is kicking themselves, “Why didn’t WE think of that first!?”
.
El Cid
Red states begging for fedrul gubmit munnee in order to investigate and arrest people without warrants or probble cause is all about liberty and feedom and the CONSTUSHUN. Reforming health care is Hitler Stalin soshullism and against the CONSTUSHUN.
beltane
Sorry, but I don’t want my tax money paying for the enforcement of their apartheid law. Better yet, Arizona should be starved of funds until it is small enough to drown in a bathtub (of water they took from neighboring states).
JGabriel
ChockFullO’Nuts:
You could always secede.
.
Zifnab
@JGabriel:
You say that now, but if you recall who was in office two years ago today…
Remember that time when Fiscally Conservative Arizona was running a multi-billion dollar deficit and was just about ready to mortgage its State Capital buildings to keep the lights on.
Nice budget you’ve got there, AZ. Would be a damn shame if something happened to it. :-p When can we expect the state to Go Galt?
Lab Partner
If there’s any strategery behind Arizona’s request for Federal help (and that’s not saying it’s smart strategery) I’d bet it’s an attempt to get the Feds’ hands dirty too. I hear the mob does something like this too.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Arizona’s new anthem.
Jesus Christ. That’s all. Just Jesus.
HumboldtBlue
Ummm … because Arizona is certainly not the only bastion of hateful, racist, xenophobic assholes, that’s why. Stop by Cali sometime, we have plenty of folks who would gladly round up anyone who is too suspiciously brown and throw them in an internment camp.
JK
Rich “Starbursts” Lowry and Byron York give thumbs up for Arizona’s new immigration law
“Hitler would be crestfallen. This hardly reeks of extremism. It means the vast majority of requests for documentation will occur in the course of other police business, like traffic stops… Arizona seeks only to enforce the nominal immigration policy of the United States. Perhaps the federal government should try it sometime.’ – Rich “Starbursts” Lowry
http://article.nationalreview.com/432612/hysterics-against-arizona/rich-lowry
“Contrary to the talk, it is a reasonable, limited, carefully-crafted measure designed to help law enforcement deal with a serious problem in Arizona. Its authors anticipated criticism and went to great lengths to make sure it is constitutional and will hold up in court. It is the criticism of the law that is over the top, not the law itself… It’s a good law, sensibly written and rigorously focused — no matter what the critics say.” – Byron York
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Byron-York/A-carefully-crafted-immigration-law-in-Arizona-92136104.html
slag
Free markets = free people. The Bible tells me so.
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts: We could probably have gone a lot farther toward comprehensive immigration reform if so many Red State politicians hadn’t been a bunch of reactionary jackasses blocking any such possibility.
I live in Georgia, a state which basically paid for its bubble-based construction mega-boom and poultry-processing mini-boom with immigrant labor, yet our elected officials are irrational jackasses who demand the ‘fedrul gubmit’ do something and then block every attempt to do something if it’s not some cheap ass macho tuff guy theatrics.
Zifnab
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Man, we’d FILIBUSTER love to b.. FILIBUSTER ..ut something keeps FILIBUSTER holding up the legFILIBUSTERislation process. Perhaps you could ask your wanker Senators, John FILIBUSTER Kyl and John FILIBUSTER McCain what is causing the FILIBUSTER hold up.
beltane
@The Grand Panjandrum: Yeah, if they just barred the girls from going to school and forced them to marry at the age of twelve, Arizona would be teeming with good Aryan Republicans in twenty years.
HumboldtBlue
Fuck off you apologist shitbag. Open the fucking borders to whomever wants a slice of the fucking pie. They want in, set up a Southwest Eliis Island and let’s get to business.
Ah, and fumbledick, when you want to talk about money spent on immigration of any form, get in line, way back in line, you aint got shit on California.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@JGabriel:
Why don’t you secede? Where does a dilettante blogger from a great progressive state like West Virginia get off drumming up blog churn by crapping on Arizona?
I’d like to see the hillbillies in WV deal with the border problems we have here. Seriously. Arizona, by the way, is a mining state. When was the last time you heard about a bunch of miners getting killed in Arizona?
slag
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Because no other states beyond Arizona, California, and Texas have immigrants? Seriously? Is this your argument?
Cacti
The most galling thing about Brewer, as an Arizonan, is the fact that she is an accidental governor. She inherited the position after Napolitano’s departure, yet she governs as though she was swept in to office by a wingnut mandate.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@HumboldtBlue: That’s nice. Where do I sign up to not pay for that too?
beltane
@Zifnab: Republicans who decry the government’s failure to address immigration are like a lactose intolerant person who insists on drinking milk and then bitches about the resulting diarrhea. The world’s smallest violin, it plays for thee.
Jon H
A self-inflicted unfunded mandate. Win.
de stijl
Forget Sinclair Lewis, when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a tortilla and carrying a national ID card.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Open the borders? Sure, as soon as your state sends people to Washington who run on that platform.
What percentage of the population of your self righteous state support the new law? Because the national rate I saw yesterday was 60%.
Fuck you. Arizona is not going to sit here and be a hockey puck in the immigration political game.
Fix the border, or mind your own business.
HumboldtBlue
Because your fucking asshole of a Governor just signed a draconian law that will bankrupt your fucking state, that’s why. Now when you want some Federal help, call on the Republican fucking party to bail you out. This nation would lose nothing if it lost Arizona, just some fucking sand and a few McCain mansions.
Just like the shitbag christians complaining about being mocked by atheists, if you don’t fucking like being ridiculed elect some sensible human beings.
Little Dreamer
While I want to see people who desire to come here and gain citizenship have that ability, I don’t want to jump on a bandwagon that seems to be screaming “boycott AZ until the illegals can come over here unfettered”.
Is there a drug I can take that will transport my mind back to 1993? Is there a way to get a prescription for that?
Jon H
I can’t help but think that, maybe, Obama shouldn’t have appointed Napolitano to run DHS.
Joel
I just wish there were SOME way for Arizona to raise money from its residents to enact the program its residents support by 70%. Surely a state government with law-making abilities could find some loophole in their state constitution for increasing revenue in order to pay for government programs. And since it’s a popular program, it should be easy to get Arizona residents to get on board with paying for it, right?
Oh, that’s right. Raising taxes makes the baby Jesus cry. Never mind, carry on.
Max Power
Does AZ allow you to visit without carrying proof you filed your taxes by April 15?
HumboldtBlue
Oh yes you are, and there aint a damn thing you can do about it except whine on a fucking blog.
J.W. Hamner
@JK:
Well obviously, such a blatant abuse of civil liberties will cause a schism with the movement conservatives and all those principled libertarians out there? Right?
I presume McCardle is prepping a scathing attack as we speak.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@slag:
No, because these four states have the entire Mexican border, and all of its overwhelming, dangerous, and costly problems, and deals with those problems daily, while the people in other states like to sit at their keyboards and post self righteous horseshit.
FIX THE FUCKING BORDER, and pay for it. Otherwise, Arizonans are basically going to tell you to go fuck yourselves.
Washington fiddles while Arizona burns. Arizona isn’t like West Virginia, where the people just pray for Jesus to save them when things go wrong.
JGabriel
ChockFullO’Nuts:
Given that AZ already gets $1.20 from the feds for every $1.00 it puts in, I’m not feeling a lot of fucking sympathy.
Raise your own damn state taxes and stop mooching off the rest of us, fucking wingnut freeloaders.
.
Cacti
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Sorry sparky, but Arizona doesn’t get to play the wounded party in this.
Arizona’s agricultural, construction, and hospitality industries absolutely depend on illegal labor and the State.
And while knowingly reaping the economic benefits of the State’s shadow workforce, the cowboy rednecks of the Legislature also blame them for all societal ills of the State and kick them in the teeth for the benefit of the nativist voters in their home districts.
It’s quite the nice, corrupt little circle jerk they have going on in Phoenix.
Little Dreamer
@Joel:
__
Last time I heard, it was the border of the United States, not just CA, AZ, NM and TX.
Why should the border only be funded by the states that directly abut that border?
What I keep seeing over and over here on these threads today is “sorry AZ, it’s YOUR problem!”
ChockFullO'Nuts
@HumboldtBlue:
No, we aren’t. That’s the whole point of the new law.
Washington doesn’t want to carry out its responsibility? Fine, then we’ll do what the people here want to do.
While you people sit bravely at your keyboards and write about civil rights, people here are dodging vanloads of illegals going a hundred miles an hour down the freeways day and night. Where is our right to have peace and safety and freedom from drug gunfights in our backyards?
Sorry, fuck you. Your argument is not convincing anybody here. The louder the rest of the country screams and sheds their crocodile tears, the more people here are going to dig in.
What is Washington and West Virginia going to do? Ignore the borders, and then send in the National Guard to beat back the legal citizens of Arizona?
I don’t think so.
Little Dreamer
@JGabriel:
Is it up to AZ to build the fence of the federal border?
Are you saying that all the other states are dollar for dollar straight up even?
WTF?
LD50
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Given that you Arizonans have such an independent frontier spirit, I’m sure you guys won’t mind if Washington DC tells you guys to go fuck yourselves, right?
JK
@Cacti:
Obama’s decision to make Janet Napolitano Homeland Security Secretary is looking dumber by the minute.
Tomorrow, Jan Brewer will a sign a bill making German the official language of Arizona.
Citizen Alan
@Jon H:
He shouldn’t have! Why yes, by all means, let’s “elevate” our best chance to beat that pig McCain to a dead-end Cabinet position and let her be replaced by Eva Fucking Braun.
Andrey
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Please, tell me about these border problems you have. Is the Mexican Army driving tanks through your city? Are they sending raiding parties to capture your citizens? Is there a war with Mexico I’m unaware of?
What is it that we should fix? Just having some people in the state who aren’t citizens? No, illegal immigrants are not “Arizona burning”. Right now, they prop up your state’s economy. What exactly do you think will happen if every undocumented laborer disappears from your state? If Arizona ends up “burning”, it will be because of laws like this one.
@Little Dreamer: No, most other states aren’t even. Most of the big blue states are behind, paying the government more than they get back. And most of the red states are coming out ahead, getting more in than they pay back.
LD50
Federal immigration policy is FEDERAL. If you proud white Arizonans think you can write up your own laws on immigration and then go bitching that the Feds won’t pay for it, then you’re even stupider than I thought. Certainly too stupid to be writing your own immigration law.
You want your own special little state laws independent of federal laws? Fine, grow up and raise your fucking state taxes.
Cerberus
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Hey Chock, I grew up in San Diego for my entire life into my early twenties, my parents now live in New Mexico, I’m best friends with several illegal immigrants (none from Mexico, cause the funny thing about quotas and draconian immigration laws is that they fuck over Asian immigrants almost worse, I’ve got one who still doesn’t have his citizenship and he was here at 3 years old and he’s mid-20s now, not for lack of trying, mind).
So, as a person with “just as much skin in the game” as it were about the “MESSICANS OVERRUNNIN’ US WITH NEGROSITY” problem.
Let me say:
Le Fuck You, you racist pile of shit.
Suck on that national ill-will. Maybe you’ll stop buying the racist lies your masters sell you regarding the “scary immigrants” if we beat it into your head enough that that’s what you’ve done. Or just beat you.
slag
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
OK. This totally made me laugh out loud. People speeding on your freeways and gunfights in your backyards do not a national emergency make. In fact, they’re pretty much all-American activities last I checked. They love guns and speeding. Hell, give these people citizenship right now.
Amazing you had time to sit bravely at your own keyboard to tell us all about the vans and bullets flying over your head. Don’t forget to duck.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Are you fucking serious? The border states down here ARE THE WOUNDED PARTIES. What do you know about the problems being caused in these states by a flood of criminal immigration activities, drug wars, and a porous border?
If you want the problem solved, why don’t you send people to congress who will actually debate a bill instead of threatening to filibuster every time a real problem comes up on the radar?
What’s the support rate for Arizona’s law, in West Virginia? The national rate was being quoted as 60% yesterday. Are the hillbillies ready to march on the WV capitol to support hispanic civil rights? I’ll wait until I see the news footage.
You stupid chest thumpers out there are rapidly turning even Arizona Democrats into Joe Arpaio voters.
Send us all the money you other states waste on sending people to congress who won’t do anything, and we will take care of the borders for you. People here basically see it as 46 against 4. That’s not a situation that makes Arizona voters want to do what “progressive” people on cable tv tell us we should do.
JGabriel
@Little Dreamer:
No, I’m tossing wingnut logic back onto CFoN’s whiny pro-racist Arizona apologetics.
Obviously, immigration is a federal responsibility, per Article I Section 8 of the Constitution. But it’s not our responsibility to fund training for AZ’s irresponsible and xenophobic new “Card That Spic!” initiative.
.
beergoggles
In 2009 Arizona pulled this shit: http://www.towleroad.com/2009/09/arizona-governor-takes-away-state-domestic-partner-benefits-says-god-has-placed-me-in-this-powerful-.html
And y’all wonder wtf is happening there now?
JGabriel
ChockFullO’Nuts:
That sounds suspiciously like Dixie telling America they’ll take care of the negro problem.
No, thanks.
.
EJ
One positive thing:
It looks like from the pictures that pro-immigrant-rights protesters might have finally figured out that waving Mexican flags around at your rallies doesn’t exactly send the message you want to send.
Midnight Marauder
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
You seem woefully misguided in your rage.
Ah, the good ol’ Rasmussen numbers. Because nothing says “We The People” like flooding the market with bogus poll numbers.
Ooooohhhh, now you want some of that sweet federal teat, eh? Nope, no teat for you!
ChockFullO'Nuts
No, they an Arizona emergency make, Yoda.
That’s the whole point. The feds tell Arizona that they own the immigration and border laws, and then they sit around and argue and threaten filibusters instead of fixing the problems.
Fuck that. Arizona is going to fight back. This law is a throwdown to the rest of the country, and what will end up happening is that the rest of the country is going to have to step up. Whenever you guys get weary of standing on your soapboxes and actually do something useful, then the situation will change, and not until.
bemused
I thought AZ law said employers have to E-verify employees citizenship. Gosh, does the state not enforce that law or do employers not follow it? I can’t imagine why the state or employers would want to ignore the law.
El Cid
Wait — is there an assumption here that this populist right wing approach forcing cops to bust people for driving while brown is “fixing the border”?
‘Cause, no, it’s not going to stop the billion dollar Mexican narco-gangs and their hired military leaders from running drugs through AZ.
Donald G
@Little Dreamer:
Here in New Mexico, we think Arizona’s solution is draconian. unconstitutional and horribly inconveniences the innocent. The privileged white folks in Arizona and Texas are the ones who are obsessed with with keeping Latinos on the other side of the border.
New Mexicans have plenty of other problems to worry about. Certain Arizonans won’t be happy unless the local police establish their own border patrol checkpoints on the routes into and out of every major city.
So far, I only have to deal with Border Patrol checkpoints coming out of Las Cruces. I’m white, blond and don’t speak spanish, so I don’t have the fear and apprehension that even a legal immigrant or hispanic resident may have in such circumstances, but as an ex-Virginian and ex-Mountaineer accustomed to traveling without let or hindrance through this great country of ours, it’s unnerving.
Besides, no one seems to get so outraged over the Canadian border.
Cacti
@Andrey: @Andrey:
If the State was even halfway serious about purging undocumented workers, they’d be making a bee-line for every farm in Yuma County.
Andrey
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Why don’t you tell me all about these problems. So far, you’ve given ridiculous assertions that have no basis in fact. You talk about “speeding truckloads of immigrants”. Your vehicle fatality rate is barely above the national average, well below many other states like, say, Idaho. You talk about “drug gang shootouts”. Your violent crime rate is, again, slightly above the national average, below states like Maryland and New York.
beltane
@slag: Where I live, all the speedin’ and the shootin’ and the drug dealin’ are done by WASP rednecks. Maybe they should be rounded up and shipped to Arizona.
terry chay
@ChockFullO’Nuts: GFY and your righteous BS.
For the record, California has 13x the number of immigrants as Arizona, was the first majority-minority state in the union (Arizona isn’t there yet), and 10x more immigrants from Mexico (and that’s just the documented ones, given California’s agriculture and numerous studies of cash-based economies, Arizona’s illegal population is a joke in comparison to this state). Texas has nearly the same percentage of Mexican immigrants as Arizona and they’re far more numerous (5x). Finally, New Mexico is far less diverse than Arizona in terms of immigrant population (over 70% of immigrants in New Mexico came from Mexico).
Yet none of them passed that stupid law.
In the end you’ll get what you deserve and I’ll laugh. Prop 187 was declared unconstitutional for the same reason the Arizona law will be (immigration is so obviously a Federal jurisdiction) with the added difference that Prop 187 wasn’t as obviously discriminatory as this one is (this is so clearly a case of racial profiling, that the only question is which injunction will hit first). This will allow Jan Brewer and Republicans to hold on to their seats for another year (Pete Wilson managed to eek out a win, and the Republicans took back control of the State Assembly in 94).
You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind, fucker.
LD50
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
You know what you sound like? You sound like a fucking teenager: “oh, yeah, fuck you mom, YOU can’t tell me what to do, I’m gonna do whatever I want! Give me twenty dollars.”
And BTW, I’m from California, so quit talking like every last citizen from your four aggrieved border states believes in your cowboy bullshit.
Midnight Marauder
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
I mean, who are you even lashing out at right now? The people that you are accusing of “standing out your soapboxes” and not doing anything useful, are the people who would welcome and support comprehensive immigration reform. They are the people who voted to put the Democratic Party into the majority, precisely so they could handle issues like immigration reform (That other party is too busy preventing anything and everything from even coming up for discussion, if you hadn’t noticed). If this law is really Arizona’s “throwdown to the rest of the country,” I have to say picking a piece of legislation that is sure to not only bankrupt, but actually increase your violent crime rate certainly has to be one of the stupidest ways possible to provoke action at the federal level.
Arizona is going to bankrupt itself even more, while hampering its law enforcement’s ability to fight real crime, all in the name of inspiring action at the federal level?
L.O.fucking.L.
JGabriel
If Nina Simone were alive today, she’d be re-writing Mississippi Goddam as Fucking Arizona.
.
El Cid
By the way, this law also makes things difficult for cross-border business contacts. Mexico’s foreign relations office issued a warning to all Mexicans visiting Arizona, including business persons going for legitimate purposes, that they may be subject to harassment, imprisonment, or other punitive sanctions at any time.
ItAintEazy
Little Dreamer:
Lol, you simple little pissmire you. Build the fucking Berlin Wall if you want, they’ll still come. Because do you know why?
1.) Your corporate class you subsidize with your tax breaks just love all the cheap illegal labor that allows them to avoid paying fair wages. There wouldn’t be so much supply of illegals coming if there wasn’t the demand.
2.) You can never stop all the vehicles at the border crossing, not unless they want to shut down all their commerce. Sure, you might catch a few coyotes, but they’re always more where they come from.
Cacti
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Arizona can cry with impunity about the border situation, the moment it stops profiting with a wink and a nod from the billions of dollars that undocumented migrant labor contributes to its economy.
slag
@beltane: Exactly. Send them to patrol the border. It’ll be just like West Side Story only with too much cowbell. Except the Puerto Ricans will have to be played by Mexicans because the southern border states are now the only states left in the union with immigration issues. Yay progress!
Montysano
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Fine. I got the simple fix right here. The penalties for hiring undocumented workers shall be onerous, and shall be enforced with extreme zeal. No jobs, no immigration problem. Easy.
What’s that wailing sound I hear? It’s DC lobbyists who represent retail, and the construction industry, and the hotel industry, and the agriculture industry, who are on the ground every fucking day, lobbying against immigration reform. That’s the strategy: put out a virtual welcome mat, a “ya’ll come”, but bust a few heads and hassle some brown-skins for the sake of the “optics”.
sukabi
@HumboldtBlue: It’s a self-inflicted hockey puck right in the kisser to boot… wonder if that makes it hurt more?
JK
@JGabriel:
And if Phil Ochs were still alive he’d be rewriting Here’s to the State of Mississippi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IFbJU0VWhE
“Arizona find yourself another country to be part of”
Fuck Jan Brewer and Boycott Arizona
Donald G
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
You’ve convinced me. I’m going to try to persuade New Mexicans to fight back. I’m going to ask my representative in the Roundhouse to introduce legislation that will require all New Mexican law enforcement agencies to to pull over and check the immigration status of every occupant of a vehicle bearing Arizona license plates.
Your driver’s license won’t be enough to establish identity and legality. You will have to provide your birth certificate and the birth certificates of everyone in the vehicle. Only your original birth certificate issued at the time of your birth will do. No replacement copies. If you ever had the misfortune to lose or had stolen the document or and had to get a replacement from your states Department of Vital Statistics, well it sucks to be you. You’re a “person without a country”. That’s how tyranny starts, my friend.
El Cid
@Montysano: Businesses who depend on cheap immigrant labor do not want those immigrants to have any rights which might make them more likely to bargain for better wages or conditions. They’re more than happy to have them work and subsidize their industries via cheaper-than-market wages, and they don’t want to threaten this advantage with workers not constantly in fear.
El Cid
@Donald G: You mean the triple vault copy long form burf certifat from the one and only office of Vital Statistics in the true Bircher soul?
Citizen_X
@ChockFullO’Nazis:
SPEEDING ILLEGALS! GUNFIGHTS! YOU DON’T CAAARRRE!
Gee, I don’t remember that Mad-Max lifestyle when I was living on the border in south Texas. Of course, that was nearly two years ago. Hmm, maybe the numbers of Mexican immigrants have gone up since then? Oh, no, they’ve DROPPED 18%, on a counta that recession thing.
What then explains your pouty rage? I’m going to go with scared little Fox-watching thumbsucker.
LOOKOUT! A MEXICAN!
Cacti
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Some nice bravado you’ve got going on there, but here’s what will really happen.
The rest of the country will curtail the tourist dollars they spend here that our State so depends on. Since the real estate collapse, we can’t even afford to keep the crappers open along the highway.
If losing the Super Bowl brought the State to its knees in the 1990s, it will be a happy memory in comparison. In the current economy, a large scale tourism boycott will shove this State into the abyss.
JGabriel
ChockFullO’Nuts:
Oh. Well then, here’s a simple solution.
You want the filibusters to end? Elect a Democratic Senator.
.
JGabriel
@Citizen_X:
You should see the movie. It’s like Tarantino meets The Keystone Cops.
.
terry chay
@Little Dreamer: The other states that get more money than they put in are nearly universally Republican—the same states that block immigration reform, along with the two Republican senators from, what’s that, Arizona?! How can this be?
Exceptions that leap to mind are Texas (puts more than they get back, votes Republican), and New Mexico (puts less in than they get back, votes Democratic). In Texas case, I suppose they could pass this law and request funds with a straight face (they wouldn’t, the areas that have a majority Hispanic population are already Democratic districts) and New Mexico certainly isn’t passing this thing.
(BTW, D.C. while not a state, receives more money than it spends in taxes and votes Democratic. I also think Hawaii, Maine, and Maryland were on there too.)
Source: http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/22685.html
Bubblegum Tate
@LD50:
Witht he amount of unfiltered stupidity coming out of Arizona of late, I’m wondering the state is trying to become South Carolina West. What’s the Arizona version of the Appalachian Trail?
Jon H
Arizona comes down to one thing: all the stupid affluent people down there who bought overpriced houses during the boom.
Now they’re all butt-hurt, and they’re taking it out on, well, everyone they don’t like.
Warren Terra
Re Chock Full O Nuts:
Anyone dumb enough to think we have a “border problem” isn’t worth arguing with. Arguably, we have an “undocumented immigrant problem”. Maybe even an “illegal immigrant problem”. But we aren’t going to fix this by more border enforcement – the last person to propose a workable solution to a big border problem was was Douglas MacArthur, when the problem was Chinese immigration in North Korea. His proposed solution was to use nuclear and radiological weapons to render the border area unsurvivable, and he was rightly sacked for it. Unless we create a killing zone along the border – correction, given the death toll exacted by the desert heat, make that unless we create more of a killing zone along the border – we aren’t going to address illegal immigration by calling it a “border problem”. Expanding the “border” to include the whole state of Arizona and turning it into a police zone with papers checks isn’t going to help, either. Though it will give a bunch of poor white folks with guns some unjust privilege and the illusion of meaningful power.
If we really wanted to address illegal immigration, we’d do more to support workers’ rights here in the US, to penalize those that employ undocumented labor here in the US, and to reduce the crippling poverty abroad that drives people from all over the world to assume enormous debts, to leave all they know and all they love, and to risk life and limb in pursuit of wages we’d consider crappy doing scut work in the US (unless you believe in John McCain’s $50/hr tomato pickers). Making this a “border problem”, and making all of Arizona part of that “border”, isn’t even a serious attempt to contemplate the real problems – it’s just more scapegoating, misdirection to prevent the rubes from realizing the real sources of their discontent.
Cacti
@Bubblegum Tate:
Arizona is the Alabama of the Southwest. Our distance from the East Coast media is why this usually escapes their attention.
trollhattan
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
I know how to “fix” your “BORDER PROBLEM”: withhold all federal water.
There, fxd.
You’re welcome.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Andrey:
The problem is that all of that activity is crammed into a strip along the border. Between the southern end of the Phoenix metro area, and the border, the whole zone, which includes Tucson as well as the near-border towns of Nogales, Douglas, Bisbee, most of the open space is a no man’s land these days. This is not Sahara desert we are talking about. It’s pretty green and rather scenic ranchland out there.
This is the area we are talking about. I can tell you from personal experience, people are scared out there. The border is now a toxic and out of control zone, and that is not Arizona’s fault. Nor is it something that Arizonans are inclined to just grin and bear.
As usual, the Balloon-Juice snarkorama factory is completely useless in a situation like this. Useless, and embarassing. News flash, all you self righteous buttheads, it isn’t YOUR call how bad things have to get before Arizonans take action and call a halt. It’s Arizona’s call, and Arizona has made that call. The ball is in your court. And while you type, what is going to happen is that people who can actually do something are going to have to get together and figure out how to do something, and that something is not going to be to declare legal war on the people of Arizona. Sorry. What is going to happen is that the US Government is going to have to take ownership of its own border in some useful way that has political viability down here.
In case you have taken a few minutes away from your bullshit scapegoating of Arizona, you might have seen that rather mild mannered sheriff talking to Chris Matthews a few minutes ago? He basically said, the new law doesn’t require his people to do anything they don’t already do, which is to ask for identification when they stop somebody. All law enforcement officers do this now. He also said another interesting thing, that 90% of people here illegally just say so when asked if they are here illegally. The LEO people along the border are pretty used to this situation, it’s not something new.
The new law doesn’t take effect for another 90 days or so, I forget the exact date. Plenty of time for the posturing and speechifying to die down and for people in Washington to do something actually useful. If they want to. You could spend your time writing to them if you really gave a flying phuck about the issue.
Little Dreamer
@Donald G:
Look, TZ and I aren’t saying that we like the immigration initiative, just that the problem exists because at the federal level they took the ball and went home and decided that if we want to play, we have to use our own ball.
I’m not a fan of Arpaio, or these right-wingers who are in complete support of the bill that just got enacted, but, the rest of the country can’t just wash their hands of this and talk about boycotting the state (which will only hurt those at the bottom, not at the top where they actually want to see people effected) – there is more to this than just “stop racial profiling”. This situation exists because of a problem that isn’t being addressed by the federal government and hasn’t been for a long time.
I’m so glad that NM doesn’t have the problems that AZ seems to have. Would you please cite for me which city in NM has over 3,000,000 people in it’s metropolitan area? Oh, yeah, I forgot, there aren’t that many people in your entire state. The fact is the reason why you aren’t dealing with a huge problem is because less immigrants (both legal and illegal) are going there. End of story!
LD50
Yes, and our court says ‘go fuck yourselves’.
If you Arizonans love this new law so much, why won’t you raise your own taxes to pay for it? You didn’t ask for DC’s blessing before passing it, why do you think you deserve federal money now?
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
So what are the new provisions for sending the employers of illegal workers to jail?
You know, the people who are actually committing the crime here? The ones who are knowingly hiring illegal workers? Surely this law has much stricter penalties for employers who have illegal workers on their payrolls, right? I mean, it must be at least a 30-day jail sentence for the employers of illegal workers and not another bullshit slap-on-the-wrist fine, right?
Hello? Bueller?
ChockFullO'Nuts
@trollhattan:
I see that you know as much about water law as you do about the border situation.
Water rights go with the land, and with historical use. There is no federal water out here. Most Arizona water comes directly from Arizona watersheds, and that includes Colorado River water. Arizona has, if I am not mistaken, the second largest watershed complex feeding the Colorado, after the state of Colorado. Most of the water used in Phoenix comes from the mountain watershed north and east of Phoenix, right here in Arizona.
slag
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
OK. Let’s try this a different way. You seem to want us to do something other than point and laugh. And yet we’re already on board with immigration reform that doesn’t involve racial profiling or other discriminatory tactics. We’ve made that clear six ways to Sunday. Obviously, that isn’t enough. So, I’m just going to ask. What can we do to help you?
sacman701
Immigration laws are similar to Prohibition in that as long as there’s a market, people will find ways to get around them. Workers will come here as long as they can make more money here than at home, and employers will hire them as long as they can generate more revenue than it costs to pay them. Illegals generally pay about as much in taxes as they use in services, and enforcing draconian laws such as the one AZ just passed would be brutally expensive and disruptive to the economy.
A completely open border wouldn’t work either. I don’t know what the best policy would be, but I don’t think it would look much like what AZ just did.
Little Dreamer
@LD50:
Why should AZ residents pay for your federal border?
ChockFullO'Nuts
@LD50:
That’s right, Arizona should raise taxes to support the control of an international border that the United States basically treats as a nuisance on the ground, but as a huge threat when there are speeches to be made in Washington.
That kind of asswipe stupidity is exactly why Arizona passed this new law and is going to watch while the rest of the country goes through its foot stomping and arm waving phase and eventually gets to work to solve the real problems.
Whenever you get tired of passing the buck and want to write something useful, let us know.
LD50
@Little Dreamer:
Why should AZ pass their own laws and expect the rest of the US to pay for it?
ChockFullO'Nuts
Write to your Republican members of congress and tell them to stop using immigration and border control as a political football, and listen to the border states and solve the real problems.
Mnemosyne
@Warren Terra:
But that’s haaard work! It’s so much easier to scream “close the border!” than to actually deal with the problem, which is that local, state and federal authorities look the other way while businesses hire masses of illegal workers.
I’ll make my proposal again: pass a law that says that any business that’s found to have even one illegal worker on the payroll has its owner or CEO sent to jail for one (1) full year, no exceptions, no appeals. That would fix our “immigration” problem right quick. But, gee, no one ever seems to think of that solution. Funny, that.
Heck, even just setting up a sting at Home Depot and writing a ticket to everyone who tries to hire a day worker there would go a long way. But we can’t dare penalize the white, middle-class lawbreakers when there are brown people that can pay the price on their behalf.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@LD50:
Because it’s your border we are trying to control here. The federal government wants to claim that it has jurisdiction, and then it turns around and shirks the responsibility.
Not a good combination. That is the entire problem.
LD50
CFON, I notice that you keep studiously avoiding responding to the posts here suggesting that it makes far more sense to stop US employers from hiring illegals, rather than your apparently more gratifying, homegrown, arrest-the-beaners policy. Why is this?
Mnemosyne
@Little Dreamer:
Because AZ residents are paying illegal workers to do work for them and then whining about there being too many of them.
Enforce some laws like Colorado passed and you might get a little more sympathy. Right now, though, you’re providing jobs to people and simultaneously complaining about too many of them being there.
Either stop illegal workers from being hired in your state or STFU. End of story.
LD50
@ChockFullO’Nuts: If you come up with your own probably-unconstitutional laws independent of the feds, you have no right to insist the feds pay for their enforcement. I can’t imagine why this seems so hard for you to understand.
If you want Washington to do something on immigration, elect saner congressmen. And that doesn’t mean putting that loon Arpaio in charge of anything (which, given AZ’s political climate, sounds pretty likely).
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Republicans like Mitt Romney, employer of illegal workers? Yeah, he’s going to help you out.
Oh, and that border fence you love so much? It’s being built by illegal workers. Too bad they just couldn’t seem to find any American citizen workers to build it and were forced — forced, I tell you! — to hire illegal workers instead.
John Cole
There is nothing snarky about pointing out that you all passed a state law without the funds to support it, and are now asking the feds to help train you to do something that a lot of us find deeply contemptible. What you have done is basically a reverse mandate. There has been de facto driving while brown in this country for sometime. You all went the extra step and made it illegal to exist while brown.
And now your excuse for this deeply disgusting law is to scream “It’s your fault. You made us do it.”
Piss off. I’m all in favor of the feds shifting more resources to deal with a longterm solution to our border issues (which are not just illegal immigration, but also closely related to our war on drugs), but I’m not in favor of spending one god damned dime on this hideous law you are now apparently defending.
John Cole
@LD50: THIS.
terry chay
@Little Dreamer: “They” are “the Republicans” included in “they” are your two senators: Kyl and McCain. If just one of them would flip, then the immigration problem would be “dealt with” forthwith.
As for the other criteria. While New Mexico doesn’t have a metropolitan above three million, San Diego County, alone has over 3 million people of which 31% are Hispanic (and that’s just the citizens, if you included undocumented… well… let’s just say there’s a reason that the Immigration actually sets their checkpoint on interstate 5 north of San Diego). To which I ask, are there INS checkpoints north of the Phoenix-Scottsdale area?
You might say, “well Phoenix has 34% Hispanic whites, not 31%” to which the snorts of increduality will reach a cacophony. Not only because San Diego has a phenomenal level of undocumented immigrants (and from not just Mexico, mind you, but from all over). Los Angeles, after all, is closer to the border than Phoenix is, has over 9 million persons, of which 48% are Hispanic or Latino. Since I have a residence in San Diego for over 15 years and went to school just outside Los Angeles, I know where of which I speak.
And, by the way, in your “city of three million” is when you expand to include the metropolitan. The city, itself is 1.8 million. If we are talking the metropolitan area of the Los Angeles basin…
ChockFullO'Nuts
@LD50:
Because the majority of the illegal drug and immigrant traffic that uses Arizona as a staging area doesn’t serve the drug and illegal labor market in Arizona. The demand is countrywide, but the brunt of the physical impact is here.
Again, this is why Arizona is fed up. Millions of people come across this border, do you guys out there really think that they are all seeking employment here in Arizona? They are heading out to find work in 48 states.
Do you really think that all that drug traffic is heading for Arizona? It is serving a national and seemingly bottomless market that is mostly outside of Arizona. Keep an eye on Juarez and El Paso, for an example of what can happen along a border when this situation gets totally out of control. I don’t know what Texans are going to do, but I promise you that Arizonans are not going to sit here and do nothing in the face of this disaster.
Sure, the new law is poorly crafted, it was written by rightwingers. But as bad as it is, it is better than the status quo, and you can take that from a lifelong Democrat. It is better than the status quo. If you don’t think so, I dare you to get in your car and drive the back roads out here. Be sure to let somebody know where you are going and when you expect to be back!
slag
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Well, since I don’t personally have any Republican members of Congress, that makes my life easy. But rather, I think I’ll do what I can to ensure that I don’t wind up with any Republican representatives after this upcoming election. And I will encourage my Democratic representatives to come up with an immigration reform bill that works for the entire country.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Uh, Arizona has eight congressional districts, you idiot. We are not exactly a power on capitol hill.
Why don’t YOU elect better congressmen, or better yet, call the ones you have now and tell them to get off their asses and fix the US border?
Maybe you buck-passing WV hillbillies can do the same thing? Come on, WV has a strong sense of national civic duty, doesn’t it? What could be more valuable to that duty than taking care of the hottest international border in the Americas?
AhabTRuler
@slag:
Total fucking WIN.
LD50
Yeah, send a bunch of rednecks out to arrest anyone brown, then demand the gummint pay for it. How could anyone object to that?
You’re not worth arguing with. All you’re doing is repeating yourself about how this rotten new law deserves federal funding and ignoring all the counter-arguments.
LD50
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Yeah, and last I heard you poor guys only had two senators!!!!!
ChockFullO'Nuts
@slag:
Thank you, that is exactly where I would start.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, try to imagine a contest between a pretty ordinary Republican governor who signed this bill, and a very bright but cerebral Democrat Attorney General who will be her opponent, and opposes the bill. How do you think that will work out? The Democrat will do what I am doing, which is plead for national action, and get back the kind of response that Balloon-Juicers are famous for: Go Fuck Yourself messages. Great, I know how to write those, done it many times.
So how does that play out here in the Intermountain West? Hmm, Gutsy Gov Sticks Finger In Federal Eye, versus Dem Challenger Says We Should Grin and Bear It.
Sigh. No wonder people out here don’t trust government.
Citizen_X
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Oh yeah? Well you still owe us 1.65 billion dollars for the Central Arizona Project, “the largest and most expensive aqueduct system ever constructed in the United States.”
You’re welcome.
ChockFullO'Nuts
You have several chances to watch Hardball later, be sure to catch that Arizona sheriff on today’s show, and then write back and tell me which part of his interview was the redneck part.
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
So that’s your excuse? Because they don’t all find work in Arizona, there’s no need for you to crack down on local employers because, what, they’re already there anyway so you may as well let people hire them?
And, again, I notice you aren’t calling for the federal government to crack down on employers. You aren’t calling for other states to crack down on employers. All you want is to somehow magically keep the illegal workers you already have without having other ones migrate through your state to other employment.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Citizen_X:
Yeah, I think the CAP is funded largely through the sale of water. More use, more revenue. I also recall that this water is deliberately priced higher than the Salt and Verde watershed water, so as to tilt use toward those closer watersheds, a pretty sensible thing to do since, over time, those watersheds are a pretty reliable source. Right now, if I am not mistaken, the lakes and reservoirs on those watersheds are full to overflowing.
Remember that the rights to water are based on ties to land and historical use. We are buying back our own water.
Little Dreamer
@terry chay:
Your red/blue example doesn’t work. New Mexico is not true blue (think Heather Wilson and Pete Domenici, it’s not like NM residents don’t vote Republican). Granted NM is more blue than AZ (I don’t think anyone can say otherwise) but, your shiny example of true blue NM just doesn’t hold water.
The reason why AZ accepts more federal money may not have so much to do with Republicans needing handouts and probably has a lot to do with other things. Show the correlation, will you, please?
You also cannot say across the board that Republicans accept more money than Democrats. While the trend may hold mostly true, singling out AZ simply because the governor has enacted this immigration policy here and calling out the federal dollars involved in the running of this state and blaming it on Republicans as a result of this new policy is shameful.
Show your work, do the math, show where the state is so awfully Republican that the federal dollars here are because of Republican gamesmanship.
I think what you’ll find is that there are varied and valid reasons for at least some of those funds and the reasons have nothing to do with our Republicans screaming for handouts. But since you are stating it’s due to AZ being such a Republican heavy state, you have to prove the argument. The onus is on you to show your argument.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Mnemosyne:
You’re making a silly rhetorical argument. Arizona is a relatively compact economy, it cannot support millions of illegal spanish speaking work seekers, so I don’t know what point you are trying to make. I am not aware of Arizona having a worse enforcement record in this area than those of other states, are you?
(About 2/3 thirds of Arizona’s population is in Phoenix IIANM, and the bulk of the remainder is in Tucson).
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Because you can’t “fix the border.” Until you throw employers in jail and strictly enforce labor laws, “fixing the border” is putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound. It will only continue the cycle of employers re-hiring illegal workers every time they get raided.
If every time you walk into a local restaurant, you check to make sure that all of their workers are legal before you sit down, then you may have a leg to stand on. If you check to make sure that your building contractor, your gardener, and/or your cleaning service only employ legal workers, then you can complain. But as long as you’re complicit in the system, you get to STFU about how evil illegal workers are until the day you start calling for employers who hire illegal workers to be punished more severely than the workers.
Warren Terra
F’god’s sake. These people – and remember, that’s what undocumented workers are, they’re people – assume huge debts, leave behind everything and everyone they know, and risk life and limb dealing with murderous traffickers and drug dealers in order to do our scut work. Given everything they’re willing to face to come here, does anyone think we’re going to reduce this flow by slightly increasing the chance that they’ll be picked up in Arizona and shoved across our southern border? And useful idiots like CFON, even as they concede that these undocumented workers end up at destinations thousands of miles from the border and work in every part of the country, nonetheless claim that it’s a “border problem” and that the solution is more and more intrusive patrols and papers checks not only at or near the border but across the whole 114,000 square miles and 6.5 million people of a US state that stretches for 400 miles north of the border.
Meanwhile, those of us who ask why these people undergo such ordeals to get here, and how we can change the structural incentives – in other words, people who insist that the problem is that employers are not merely permitted but positively encouraged to exploit their workers, including but not limited to their undocumented workers – are ignored by all and sundry. And included in that, we are ignored by the posturing petty would-be tyrants who purport to want fewer undocumented workers, the charlatans who try to sell the more fearful of our fellow citizens the snake oil of more enforcement to address what they insist is our “border problem”.
numbskull
@Warren Terra: Best writing I’ve seen all day.
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Other than the point that you, yourself, are supporting the illegal worker economy and simultaneously whining about how evil they are?
Gosh, I have no idea what my point was, then, if you see absolutely no connection between massive, society-wide use of illegal workers and complaining about there being too many illegal workers. I guess those illegal workers just showed up at that restaurant or that construction site and forced the owners to hire them. Damn those sneaky illegals!
ChockFullO'Nuts
Well my posts are here to examine, I think I have called for federal action, and immigration reform, not funding. But there are four states that border Mexico, are you suggesting that the other 46 leave it to us to handle the border?
Create a funded mandate. Give us the money, let the four states form a border management compact, and we’ll handle it our way, and the rest of the country can just be happy with what we do.
Sound good? Meanwhile you can play the video of Chris Dodd on the Senate floor yesterday, basically saying, why do we have these 100 seats here? What is the point, to send people here to make speeches about how we are NOT EVEN GOING TO DEBATE one of the most important issues of our time? He was talking about Finance Reform, but it might as well have been Immigration Reform.
We’ve had a Dem congress for three plus years. Where is that concern about the borders again? Where was that concern while BJers were arguing over whether gays would get their pony in Obama’s first year?
Comrade Kevin
@Mnemosyne: Yes, but in Arizona they have vans full of brown people intentionally causing 100mph car crashes on the freeway! They make it take longer to get to the golf course.
JGabriel
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
In Manhattan, I probably pass more undocumented immigrants on the street each day than you’ll see in a year, possibly in a lifetime. I don’t have a problem with them.
And I think most of the undocumented immigrants came here by plane rather than trekking through an Arizona “staging area”. Of the ones that actually cross the border by foot, I believe far more are going through California, New Mexico, and Texas combined, than through AZ, but none of those states have made “Breathing while Brown” cause for “reasonable suspicion”.
And I don’t think MILLIONS of people are crossing into AZ by foot from Mexico each year. Tens of thousands, maybe. Possibly even hundreds of thousands. But no way is it in the millions.
So, ultimately, I think you’re exaggerating an administrative problem into criminal crisis, and that you’re full of shit.
And quit using “drugrunners” as an example – if you want to go after drugrunners, arrest them for fucking running drugs, not because they’re doing it without a fucking visa.
.
Little Dreamer
@terry chay:
Look, it’s not my fault that CA has lost the ability to fund their state and they accept the situation as is. The crime in S. CA is much worse than it is here. If residents don’t want to do anything about it, that’s their prerogative. CA accepts “East LA” and that’s their problem. I’m simply stating that NM doesn’t have the problem that AZ does. NM doesn’t have a whole lot south of I-10 except signs stating “stay in your car, do not pick up hitchhikers”. Our 1-10 actually goes THROUGH the state. We can’t just fence off everything south of I-10.
NM’s answer to the problem was make it so no one gets across I-10, so the coyotes don’t take their people through there so much, they head into AZ or TX instead.
Warren Terra
@Mnemosyne:
It’s easier than that. If workers’ rights were strenuously enforced, if employers couldn’t exploit their workers’ undocumented status, we’d have many fewer undocumented workers. If they knew they had no choice but to treat and pay all of their workers decently, regardless of documentation status, they wouldn’t have the incentive to employ undocumented labor, and the jobs would be more attractive to citizens and legal immigrants.
Sure, our lifestyles are subsidized by the low wages many of these employers pay – but we don’t see all that much of the savings; the employers’ profits, or the profits of the middlemen who use the employers as subcontractors and suppliers, are where the real effect is seen. Consider for example farm laborers: they often receive pitiful pay (as indeed the farmers who employ them quite often do), but only a few percent of the price we pay at the supermarket goes to farm labor; if the farm laborers’ pay doubled we’d hardly notice.
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
So, in your mind, which part of “immigration reform” encompasses throwing employers in jail? Or are you going to claim again that it’s a total co-inkydink that these workers are being illegally hired by millions of American citizens and companies and what they really came here for was to drive fast and sell drugs?
ChockFullO'Nuts
How am I doing that any more than you are?
Are you out there picketing your local chicken processing plant or hotel chain for hiring illegals?
I don’t see your point. The truth is that the federal government has shirked its job here, and until that is fixed, things are only going to get more like they are now, whether you like it or not.
Even Barack Obama understands that. Maybe even the WV hillbillies can eventually catch on to it.
Gotta run, but this is where this is headed, the Arizona bashing is fun for bored and ineffective bloggers, but not very useful. Here is the money talk on this subject:
Ottumwa, Ia. – A woman at an event here told President Obama that she has friends who are undocumented workers before asking him what should be done about the ongoing immigration problems the nation faces.
Immigrants must follow laws to become legal citizens, Obama told the crowd. The challenge is to reform a system to allow for legal immigration that is fair, he said.
He said his administration has been harder on companies that hire undocumented workers. He called Arizona’s new law on immigration, “poorly conceived,” noting concerns on racial profiling.
Obama repeated similar ideas of dealing with immigration as he did when running for president. The millions of undocumented residents need to register, pay a fine and learn English but they should still be given a route to become a legal resident. Building a fence is not the answer, he said.
Obama additionally said the issue is one that requires political cooperation.
“It can be exploited for political purposes and the only way to rise above the politics and actually solve the problem once and for all is to make sure it’s a bipartisan effort,” Obama said.
Datelined today.
JGabriel
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
No, not really.
AZ has already shown us how they think border management should be handled with their “Card That Spic!” law. Forgive me if don’t think Arizona’s “Our Way” is really the way we want to fund this.
.
ChockFullO'Nuts
The entire last section of my post at 127 should be in italics.
Thanks to the fine work of the Word Press creators, I can’t edit the post due to some glitch. I like to think of this as West Virgina Software. Nothing really works.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@JGabriel:
I don’t know why you are talking about funding. Arizona is like a lot of states, struggling mightily to pay its bills in the aftermath of the Bush Economy. It’s a relatively poor Red State, with a huge Hispanic population and a huge border problem. Who will pay those taxes people here are suggesting, the people who clean the hotel rooms and park the rental cars?
if you think funding is key, then by all means, work to get congress to fund effective border management and immigration reforms.
Cynicor
It quite interesting to see this debate framed as four brave border states against illegal immigration. Note that there are also 11 states with international borders to the north, and plenty of ports about, both air and sea. Pretty much every state either has a border, companies whose business models are built on cheap labor, or both. I also like the implication that people in, say, New York have no clue what happens when undocumented workers live in an area.
It’s the Fox News effect, making people feel as if they’re under constant siege, helped out by an Arizona-sized rash of mortgage failures. It all leaves people looking for someone down the line to kick to make themselves feel more worthwhile.
Xecky Gilchrist
Gotta run
Uh-huh. How many more posts after that?
And what about penalizing employers of illegal immigrants, again?
Little Dreamer
@Mnemosyne:
Funny stuff, considering that you don’t know TZ’s personal take on illegals (he supports the idea of people coming to this country to better their lives and hopes they find reason to stay and a desire to become citizens).
You are making an argument that is completely unfounded.
The problem isn’t the illegals for TZ, it’s the fact that our border isn’t just the border of AZ, it’s the federal border and people from other states (and on this blog) don’t want to treat it as a federal border in this argument.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Oh yes, those Canadian hordes coming over to pick french fries and work in dry cleaning plants, and all that Canadian cocaine … just as big a problem. That’s why North Dakota is overrun with Canucks in vanloads running the Interstates.
( rolls eyes )
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@JGabriel:
If AZ wants to do their own thing on immigration then let the assholes who want it fund it.
I hope the crazy fucknuts who love this bill go gonzo on the people who employ illegal immigrant labor and get all the cheap labor fired. If the local law plays footsies with the local businessmen and looks the other way to avoid seeing any illegal immigrants working you can bet the local fucknuts will sue to get them removed. If they succeed in purging the state of illegals then you can bet there are going to be a lot of job openings that are not going to be filled because the pay is shitty and the work sucks. You can bet the businessmen are not going to want to increase pay to attract workers, that’s for damned sure.
This is cutting off your nose to spite your face taken to a whole new level. Being that AZ is a snowbird state, you can bet there are going to be a lot of retirees who are pissed because they are going to have to pay more for ‘legal labor’.
If anything, this mess is going to put the Repubs in AZ into a tight place between the voters and the businesses who need cheap labor. If the businesses have to turn to the Democrats to get a sane immigration policy that gives them the people who will work for low wages then the Repubs in AZ are going to be hurting.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Xecky Gilchrist:
Call Joe Arpaio, I think you want to talk to him.
Midnight Marauder
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
If you want to know why people aren’t taking your nonsense all that seriously, you need look no further than this “scenario” you’re describing here. So the Democratic candidate for governor in Arizona is going to plead for federal help and action on immigration reform, and be greeted by…a President who continues to push for action of immigration reform right now, a Senate majority leader equally dedicated to the cause, and a Speaker of the House also on board?
It should be pretty clear why you are full of shit on this point.
JGabriel
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Are you insane? In one post, “@you say “Give us the money”, then, when someone responds, you say “I don’t why you are talking funding.”
Because YOU brought it up!
Jesus H. Islamofascist Christ. (That epithet should be sung to the tune of “John J. Jingleheimer Schmitt”.)
.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Also, too, moreover, some wag or politician said this the other day: Immigration reform is a nonstarter until the border is sealed. It does no good to deal with the illegals already here, while millions more are pouring in.
I can’t disagree with that assertion. And there is no way, whatever, that Arizona can seal its own border. The same goes for California, New Mexico, and Texas. Only one entity can do this.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@JGabriel:
I said give us the money and let us do what we want to do with it, or else do it yourself. It’s not our job to raise this money. We are sitting on an international border. Where is the support from the 46 states that don’t support this border? Years of immigration and border management neglect. This is not exactly news.
What do you mean when you talk about “funding?”
Midnight Marauder
And for crying out loud, this bill does not to strengthen or protect the precious border you’re so fucking worried about. It makes it illegal for you to even know or talk to an “illegal” immigrant, sure. But it doesn’t do a goddamn thing about “fixing the border,” whatever the fuck that shit means.
Cynicor
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
How many convicted terrorists have attempted entry across the Canadian border? One. How many from Mexico? None.
Comrade Kevin
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Seal the border? Impossible. And you expect anyone to take you seriously?
Little Dreamer
@Cynicor:
May I ask you, what is south of Arizona? That’s Mexico!
Are you trying to deny it’s a federal border?
Why is it AZ is responsible for taking care of a federal border?
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@JGabriel:
Get Michael Bey to toss in some explosions and it’ll make millions!
@ChockFullO’Nuts: “He also said another interesting thing, that 90% of people here illegally just say so when asked if they are here illegally.”
You must be a Republican to be making up a number that the guy never stated. Republicans are good at pulling facts out of their ass. To be honest, the officer didn’t give a percentage at all, did he? He did indicate that a good number of them did admit that they were here illegally but he never stated a percentage.
You are a fucking liar.
ChockFullO'Nuts
He’s going to be greeted here by a chorus of catcalls, saying where has the reform been? Why have we been stuck with this shit all this time while the feds play ideological political games with each other?
It’s the Joe Arpaio syndrome. The guy wins reelection every time, making this exact argument. You can criticize me for being rough and crude, but the feds are doing nothing to help you, whereas I will go out and arrest illegals. He’d love to run against the pointy headed Dem. Compared to the dithering and inaction of progressives, reactionary response looks pretty damned good.
Cynicor
@Midnight Marauder:
One thing that really caught my eye when I read the bill was that it defines trespassing for undocumented workers (or as the bill calls them, “illegal aliens”) as being on any public or private property. Doesn’t this effectively create a new “taking” by limiting what people can do with their own property?
ThinkBlue
@Little Dreamer: Apparently, AZ feels responsible enough to pass this ridiculous law.
ChockFullO'Nuts
I don’t have the transcript yet, but I think that is what he said. I was driving and listening at the time. If not, he said its equivalent. He clearly stated that the easiest way to find out if the subject is here illegally is to ask, because they usually just say so.
And when you hear him say it, you will realize that he is not some wild eyed redneck sheriff, at all. Which is the point.
I’d hardly have deliberately made up a lie and then invited you to listen to the original material. Perhaps I made a mistake? In any case it’s not material to my point. Listen to the interview yourself and draw your own conclusion.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@ThinkBlue:
Arizona feels responsible enough to its own citizens to try to protect them from a shitstorm. It can’t control the border, so the next rung of the ladder is everyday law enforcement.
ThinkBlue
@ChockFullO’Nuts: So “protecting them from a shitstorm” means causing another one by stripping people of their rights and racial profiling? This false choice of “the Fed didn’t act so whatever we do is justified” doesn’t work for me.
Even if your intentions are pure, this law is absolutely ridiculous and will protect no one from anything.
Turbulence
ChockFullO’Nuts or LittleDreamer:
Can you cite any crime statistics showing that AZ has a significantly higher crime rate than non-border states with comparable wealth?
Little Dreamer
@Cynicor:
1. How would anyone know if they were talking to an illegal or not? One would have to know that fact before they could be charged with harboring an illegal. I think this is a misrepresentation of what was actually supposed to be accomplished by the law.
2. Do personal rights trump state’s rights. Do State’s rights trump federal rights? I think we live in a top down society where federal outweighs those considerations below it. That is not to say I want the federal government to base decisions on whether it has the right to strong arm states and individuals, but federal should be the top concern (as the states and individuals are contained within) and federal should hold the top responsibility.
So you are saying both that a person’s personal property can be used to harbor an illegal simply because someone owns that land (whether it’s within the border of the state and federal boundaries seems to be a moot point for you), and states have to be financially and physically responsible for maintaining a federal border?
Excuse me?
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Mnemosyne:
Crazy you. Everyone knows that you don’t arrest the drug dealer, just the addicts. The drug dealer is just doing business and minding his own business, there is no need to punish an honest businessman. How could he have known that he was selling to addicts?
You people…
JK
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
I disagree with you 100% on this immigration law, but I love your coffee.
El Cid
Again, the immediate situation here isn’t the illegal immigration crisis in Arizona, it’s that the Arizona legislature passed and the Governor signed a law which won’t solve the immigration crisis and which is very likely flatly un-Constitutional and which over-burdens police to make magical judgments about who seems and who doesn’t seem to be a legal citizen, and now Arizona wants us taxpayers in other states to pay for their shitty, irrelevant, un-Constitutional, and blow-back laden policy…
…and this means that people in other states are somehow shirking their duties on mending the immigration crisis because Republicans have for the last decade and a half refused to allow anything to pass on this matter.
Do I have that right?
If a state passes a shitty, harmful, un-Constitutional law which in no way helps to solve a real problem, we people in other states have to help pay for this shitty, harmful, un-Constitutional unhelpful policy otherwise we’re hypocrites somehow?
ChockFullO'Nuts
Because it is not a Jesus Loving State like WV (you know, those damned Mormons) …. and it hasn’t won Six Super Bowls?
By the way, I am the most vocal ACLU card carrier on the blog, and I have no doubt that the famous law is going to be severely tested in court, and may fail those tests. I’d vote to strike down the profiling aspects of the law, myself. I don’t see how that’s enforceable.
But it serves a useful purpose in the meantime. It stirs up activity in Washington, and apparently scares Republicans since they are running away from immigration reform as fast as possible. Works for me.
ChockFullO'Nuts
It’s not intended to solve that crisis. It’s intended to address a law enforcement and public safety crisis.
How well it does that, another question. But it does address it.
John Cole
@ChockFullO’Nuts: You’re right! You guys passed this shitty law you couldn’t afford to implement and it is ALL WEST VIRGINIA’S fault!
And I notice you conveniently keep ignoring this, which is where the problem lies.
ThinkBlue
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Vocal ACLU card carrier who supports a law that violates pretty much everything the ACLU opposes? Interesting.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Somehow shirking? Are you fucking kidding? How is the federal government not abjectly and totally shirking this responsibility for decades?
How can it do so without immigration reform that works? How can that reform work without a tightly closed border?
Seriously, how?
I’m for closing the border and giving amnesty to the people already here. Who has a better idea, and how would it work?
Little Dreamer
@El Cid:
Uh, no! Arizona wants the federal government to take responsibility for it’s federal border, which it didn’t do previously and which created this situation (more illegals crossing, more violence and death, more people in Arpaio’s jail) and ended up with some Republicans in Arizona deciding to turn this into a race war.
That Arpaio has been doing this schtick now for decades, it should come as no surprise to people of other states that something like this would happen when the federal government dropped the ball. I remember reading about Arpaio’s tactics almost two decades ago.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@ThinkBlue:
I said on day one that it should not be signed. That isn’t exactly support.
But it was. And so, it’s time for congress to step up to the plate.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
I watched the interview the first time and listened to it in the background the second time. Nice interpretation of yours though.
Of course, you are always right so I guess I’m left.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@John Cole:
I think the governor’s call for this support is a rather clever rhetorical device, really. I have no respect whatever for WV types or people from any other state telling Arizona what it has to do here. It’s your border, John. If you don’t like the way we are addressing the problem, then send resources to handle it some better way.
Otherwise, as they say, GFY. Arizona is not inclined to sit here and take it in the ass for you.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@ThinkBlue:
I heard the zipper being unzipped but nothing hit the floor. No thump.
I am not impressed.
KRK
Funnily enough, another naive dilettante who just doesn’t understand that Arizona’s new law is “better than the status quo” and absolutely necessary because otherwise reasonable Arizonans simply can’t take it any more is…Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik:
I guess Dupnik is just another yahoo who has no idea what the law enforcement situation is down there on the Arizona-Mexico border.
(Link thanks to commenter Calliope Jane in tonight’s Open Thread.)
JGabriel
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Oh, it’s not that you’re insane. It’s that you understand English, which, given your views, is kind of ironic.
“Funding” = Giving you money.
.
Little Dreamer
@Mnemosyne:
I’m not doing anything of the sort. I’m just a lowly newspaper carrier, Anglo-Saxon, American citizen. I have been hired to do jobs since I came here (one as a temporary receptionist, one permanent job doing background checks, one as a contracted independent agent delivering newspapers) and all three times I had to provide my proof of citizenship.
I don’t know who is hiring these illegals and keeping them hired, but, I agree that it is a problem. At the same time, since there are some people hiring illegals here, that means the federal government doesn’t have a responsibility to maintain it’s border? I just don’t understand that argument at all. The border needs to be maintained AND the people hiring illegals need to be sought out and punished.
By the way, the problem of having a bunch of illegals lined up for daily work daily pay at the local walmart is a problem that also exists in other states (it was a problem in FL when I was there). Don’t single AZ out as the only problem and then tell us that we have to pay for maintaining the federal border with our own taxes.
Who pays for the United States Coastguard to police the waters off Miami and Key West? Florida residents? I don’t think so.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
Well, I’ll post the transcript when it’s up. If MSNBC puts it up. I’ll try to catch the rebroadcast later.
I am only absolutely “right” about one thing here, which is my central point, which was that the man was reasonable and seemed to be pretty nonplussed by the whole thing. Taking it in stride, and not a wildeyed redneck or racist xenophobe or fascist or any of those things. Just a competent sounding cop doing his job. Sounded to me like Matthews was egging him on, but ended up without much to say, but again, I was driving in afternoon traffic.
Cynicor
@Little Dreamer: I’m referring specifically to the wording in the bill:
This removes the “invitee” exception for trespassing from private lands. Therefore, this bill limits the use of private land in some way.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@JGabriel:
Are you suggesting that Arizona should not be “given money” to manage an international border, if left to manage that border?
Or, what? We should raise our own taxes to manage your border?
Then I guess we get to set our own foreign policy too. Okay, then I guess Joe Arpaio will be our Secretary of Foreign Affairs.
anonymous
Arizona has written its law, now let Arizona pay for it.
Cain
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
I read somewhere that the gunfights are coming because of the lax’d gun sales law in Arizona. Basically, drug dealers buy all the guns here go back to Mexico and fight with the mexican army. The army then traces the guns back to some gun shop in Arizona. Sounds like you’re fighting the fire while feeding the flames.
Change your gun laws, get a way to for immigrants to get a path to citizenship, have a more liberal immigration platform that allows migrant workers to come here and work and are protected and actually pay minimum wage instead of undercutting everyone because they are so desperate and you might see some change.
But at the moment, all red politicians want to do is just kick the lot of them out, unfortunately it’s all show because the businesses want to keep them because it keeps their profit margins high. Have fun, because your state just took the express train to bankruptcy. You won’t be able to stop shit.. The whole damn state will need a bailout which I hope we don’t give until the laws are changed.
cain
ThinkBlue
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Defending it by saying “it serves a useful purpose” isn’t exactly a flaming indictment, either. You can’t really have this one both ways.
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal): I was trying to keep it in my pants.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Cynicor:
I don’t write laws, but without that provision, what would stop property owners from basically setting up sanctuaries for illegals and claiming exemption as a property issue?
El Cid
@Little Dreamer:
The Arizona state government did not pass a law demanding that the ‘federal government take charge of its border’.
It passes a law ordering cops to fuck with people for no reason other than they ‘look illegal’ and arrest them if they are stupid enough to carry their birth certificate around and it’s calling for all us other taxpayers to fund this shitty, ineffective racist un-Constitutional program.
That’s it.
Further, the racist, Pioneer Fund-funded right wing jackasses who pushed this shitty hysterical legislation through are the same ultra-right Republican fucks who have blocked federal legislation on the matter.
It’s the same worthless Republican shits who block any sane moves toward real immigration reform legislation in favor of the ineffective, bullshit macho fantasy crap like building 1,000 foot high walls vulnerable to any $1,000 bill a coyote or narco-trafficker floats its way, and of course this fantasy that this sort of tuffguy repression controls migration.
Hint: Mexico used to arrest anyone they thought was a Guatemalan crossing into Mexico, and it didn’t stop Guatemalans from migrating into / through Mexico.
Sly
Except that what you’re asking for is unconstitutional.
The states only have limited jurisdiction within the criminal provisions of immigration law. The federal government has full jurisdiction over the civil provisions (including deportation). If a state authority finds someone who is a suspected illegal immigrant, they are prohibited from deporting that person themselves or imposing any other kind of civil penalty.
Arizona’s law fails this test by making it a misdemeanor for anyone to be unable to prove lawful residence in the United States. Asshole supporters of this law incorrectly point to state laws on employment of illegal immigrants as “proof” that the law is, in fact, constitutional. Except that they have it backwards: those laws impose penalties against American business owners, not the illegal immigrants who work for them.
Cain
@EJ:
I’ve always wondered about that. I found that kind of objectionable that you’d wave some foreign flag while asking for immigration rights. Aren’t you supposed to be a fan of this country?
cain
El Cid
“The Federal Government needs to enforce its border! But we jacktards will oppose any effort to really do so! In exchange we’ll call for magic fences and a million border patrol agents and for arrest while looking brown laws! We won’t do shit against all the businesses who employ them! Also, the fedrul gubmit is evil and soshullist and un-Constushull when a black Democrat is in office!”
Little Dreamer
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
__
Yes, honey, that is what they appear to be saying. Crazy, isn’t it? It’s OUR border, all of us who are Americans, it’s a FEDERAL BORDER, but AZ residents should have to pay for maintaining it.
Little Dreamer
@El Cid:
Well, El Cid, I’m here in AZ and the message here is that nothing was done to maintain the border and that’s why this law came about.
If you want to spin it some other way, don’t tell me what AZ intended, I’m here and watching the debate locally.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Right. Drug dealers coming over the border carry guns because of Arizona law. Makes perfect sense.
Yes, all of the latter being federal responsibilities, right?
I can indict the defective details, but I can’t indict the intent of passing the law. The intent was to stick a finger in the eye of the flaccid federal government, and I think it will end up serving that purpose well. My original posture, and I think I used pretty much these exact words, was that we were trying to achieve a good purpose with a bad law. Well, the good purpose still needs to be served, and trying to bash Arizona does not address that issue. The law was written by some rightwing buttheads, so of course it is draconian. We have uber draconian drug laws in this country and I don’t see the tidal wave of crocodile tears on the blog for that all the time.
People in AZ are, if you take the man-in-street interviews on tv to mean anything, concerned about the rights violations but convinced that doing nothing is not an option. I don’t find that to be wild eyed redneck response, I find it to be a pretty rational response.
El Cid
ARIZONA RESIDENTS SHOULD HAVE TO PAY FOR SHITTY INEFFECTIVE LAWS THEY PASSED WHICH IN NO WAY IN THE SLIGHTEST CONTROL THE FEDERAL BORDER
John Cole
This is like arguing with wingnuts- “Shut up you WV people. And give us money. Oh, and mind your own business about our shitty law that I allegedly oppose, but give us money to to implement it. Besides, it is all your fault we had to pass this shitty law I oppose but am defending. Also, you are from WV, so shut up, that’s why!”
Fucking moron.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Well then, let the Fed do something constitutional, that works.
I don’t that is asking too much.
ThinkBlue
@Little Dreamer: This law isn’t about “the border”. It’s about people ALREADY IN ARIZONA. This law isn’t about stopping people from getting into the country, it’s about harassing people who look like they might be in the country illegally. This law calls for STATE police to enforce it, not federal agents/agencies.
So, again, why should FEDERAL funds go toward this STATE law?
John Cole
Shut up! You’re probably from West Virginia, too!
El Cid
@Little Dreamer:
Good for you, but I don’t give the slightest fuck what Arizonans think is a rationale for passing a shitty expensive law which doesn’t control a problem that they think it ought to control.
Any more than if Georgia passed some shitty law creating magic elf summoning patrols to make sure interstates are protected from narco-trafficking trans-shipments, and then demanded that Arizona taxpayers among others pay for the new elf-summoning agents, and if they don’t like it OMG WHY HASN’T THE FEDRUL GUBMIT FIXED THIS ALREADY.
Cynicor
@ChockFullO’Nuts: That clause doesn’t change the immigration status of any individual, and I assume that agents can still enter private property (with warrants) to make arrests. The new clause adds an extra offense to “being undocumented” by saying that if you’re undocumented, you are always also committing trespass wherever you are, taking that legal decision out of a property owner’s hands. I wonder if it’s meant to always have a state-level charge against someone they catch.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@ChockFullO’Nuts: “Well, I’ll post the transcript when it’s up. If MSNBC puts it up. I’ll try to catch the rebroadcast later.”
You do that. Be sure to get back to me on it when you do. :)
“I am only absolutely “right” “
You should have stopped there. You have an opinion, just like I do. That’s it. If you think otherwise then that means that I am right too and I completely disagree with you.
Right?
@ThinkBlue:
I was talking about the guy you were responding to thats all Nuts (or is that Nutzi?) pulling out his ACLU meat. I was just letting you know that I wasn’t impressed by some weenie waving his peenie on the internet.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@John Cole:
Making your usual contribution to solving a problem, right John?
I made a pretty reasonable suggestion and invited others to do the same. (Seal the border, and amnesty for those already here).
What’s yours?
This is a big problem down here. What would you do?
Cynicor
@John Cole:
If you knew just how West Virginian you sound right now.
MattR
@ChockFullO’Nuts: The strawman is that federal government is not managing the border. The issue is that they are not managing it as stringently and effectively as you would like. So why would you expect anyone else to pay for it when you decide that the federal standard is not enough? If West Virginia decided that federal mining standards were not sufficient and passed more stringent regulations would you, as an Arizonan, be willing to pay for their implementation?
Wile E. Quixote
@ChockFullO’Nuts
Here’s my solution Chock, old buddy, old pal. We mobilize the 82nd Airborne and a couple of Marine divisions and send them into Arizona. Once in the state of Arizona they will have the authority to investigate all employers in the state of Arizona. Any individual suspected of hiring illegal immigrants within the last five years will be tried by military courts-martial and if found guilty will be summarily executed by firing squad. Any corporation that is determined to have hired illegal aliens within the last five years will have its corporate charter revoked and the corporate officers and the employees responsible for violating the law will be summarily executed by military firing squad. Any property of any individual or corporation found guilty of hiring illegal immigrants will be immediately forfeited to the federal government and auctioned off with the proceeds going to pay for our new immigration enforcement strategy.
You want to get serious? Then go after the employers who hire the illegals and go after them hard. Of course that means that under my policy a lot of your neighbors are going to get two in the head and be dumped into a mass grave, because hey, that guy who was providing their cheap landscaping wasn’t legal. But this will be a small price to pay for winning the war on illegal immigration. Come on you whining little punk, you’re either with me, or you’re not really serious about solving this problem.
ThinkBlue
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal): Oh, I thought you were talking about MY genitals. My mistake. Carry on.
El Cid
Yeah. Just “seal the border”. It involves snapping your finger and a magic fence.
There you go.
See? Problem solved. Everyone knows how to do it. Just “seal the border”. Just have Ziploc make those cool side zippers with one yellow and one blue and zip them together to make green!
After all, we all know that the federal government could seal the entire U.S. – Mexico border if it wanted, by sending millions of troops and all sorts of magic equipment into the unoccupied territories and shutting down all traffic.
Just “seal the border”. There you go. Done. The Pentagon has easy plans to do so, and could just do it all for us and keep commerce going and not let anyone be bought off for the thousands of dollars offered by human traffickers and narco-traffickers.
Next, onto cars 100% running on solar power which never lose their charge and never have to have their batteries changed.
ChockFullO'Nuts
I didn’t stop there, I invited everyone to listen to thing themselves and draw their own conclusion. Listen to what the man says and decide for yourself what it says about him, and the issue.
You disagree with me that the man does not sound like a redneck, but rather like a pretty rational cop? Okay. So let everyone listen to him and decide for themselves. I think I am right, the guy sounds reasonable. YMMV.
Pointing to my history of support for civil liberties is hardly a weenie peenie, whatever that is. It’s just a fact and it’s relevant here. Further, I have not given this law a pass on the civil liberties aspect, I declared that the law should not be signed on the first day of its mention on these pages. However, that doesn’t change the fact that action was necessary, and this problem doesn’t go away until that issue is resolved. All the rest of this is just churn.
ScottRock
@Little Dreamer: What Arizona actually did was order the creation of a 15,000-strong slave patrol, expecting the rest of the country to pick up the tab. So excuse us if we’re not in lock step with your stupid law.
I can’t speak for everyone here, but quite frankly i don’t give a shit about whatever ‘intentions’ you have behind an awful piece of racist legislation. We’re not judging you for your intentions. We’re judging you for the substance of your actions.
KRK
So we’re just going to ignore Sheriff Dupnik’s remarks that the law is “unnecessary” and “disgusting”? I mean, it’s not like he would have any interest in law enforcement or public safety in southern Arizona.
I guess he did make the remarks in an email to the local news channel, so we can dismiss him as “sitting bravely at his keyboard and writing about civil rights.” I bet he’s originally from West Virginia, too.
Kira
Christ on a crutch. I really wish we hadn’t lost Napolitano to the Department of freaking Homeland Security.
Can’t possibly raise taxes. This is Arizona! If the feds won’t pay for us to lock up all the brown folk who go out to buy milk without carrying their birth certificate in their back pocket, why, we’ll just have to fire more teachers.
(It’s nice, though, that our state government is trying so hard to make me happy about moving to Ohio.)
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@El Cid: “Next, onto cars 100% running on solar power which never lose their charge and never have to have their batteries changed.”
I heard the tires last forever and the power company pays you for the extra electricity the car generates.
ChockFullO'Nuts
I have not asked for a fence.
However, I quoted an assertion I recently heard: You can’t have immigration reform with an open border, unless you are going to somehow fashion a permanently open border. It’s a nonstarter. There is no political will in this country for an open border. If you disagree, make that argument, I’d like to find a reason to believe it. But I don’t think that’s remotely possible.
So if the border must be closed, how do you close it? What’s your suggestion? I don’t see that anyone here has one, but has plenty of keyboard for bashing Arizona for trying to take some self protective action. I have no respect for that whatever.
Midnight Marauder
I think there was a very astute point made a bit ago that really breaks down what we are talking about here.
@El Cid:
Really, that is the bottom line.
And that guy sure as fuck knows what I’m talking about.
+5
MattR
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Believing that infringing on the rights of Americans is “just churn” is exactly what I expect from a vocal, card carrying member of the ACLU.
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
I can’t speak for everyone, but I have no problem with Arizona taking self protective measures if they are reasonable and Constitutional. I am bashing Arizona for taking draconian measures that don’t actually protect anyone while claiming that they are self protecting.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Janet basically made the same recurrent call for federal action that a lot of us are making. Nobody listened.
If BJ is any example, nobody is listening now, either.
Turbulence
So ChockFullO’Nuts and Little Dreamer, I guess you don’t have any cites showing that AZ has a much higher crime rate than comparable non-border states? Is that right? Because you seem to have no problem responding to other posters, but I didn’t see any response to my request for stats yet. If your huge crime problem doesn’t show up statistically, does that mean it doesn’t exist?
El Cid
The Fedrul Gubmit is failing its responsibilities to fix the border problem! That’s why President Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona and John Kyl of Arizona have to vow to filibuster any immigration-oriented legislation!
And if that Kenyonesian usurper Obama and Janet Napoleano Bonaparte say they’ll do something by Executive Order, we’ll vow to engage MASSIVE RESISTANCE to their fedrul intrusion into STATES RIGHTS!
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts: I don’t have a suggestion for “closing the border” because no one has suggested a non-fairy tale way of doing it.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Yeah, I am seeing a lot of gratuitous bash rhetoric and not much in the way of real concern for anyone’s rights.
So here is a rancher down here in this country, saying, where is my right to be protected from this shitstorm, while the feds argue over what color stationery to print the law on? What do you tell him? Just hang in there? Try that approach in Hillbilly WV and see how far you get.
Oh I forgot, we can’t snark on WV here. My bad.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@El Cid:
Then what do you propose? Doing nothing? Because that is exactly what got us here.
Little Dreamer
@El Cid:
Get it in your thick head, we are making a chicken and egg comparison here. The lack of federal funding and oversight on the FEDERAL BORDER is what created the need for this stupid law. I don’t like the law any better than you do, but if AZ residents are going to be responsible for policing our own section of the FEDERAL BORDER this is what you are going to get.
The FEDERAL GOVERNMENT has to take care of the FEDERAL BORDER!
El Cid
This is starting to sound like discussions about health care reform in which some state representatives are screaming about “tort reform” and “crossin’ state lines” which would in no way whatsoever address the health insurance crisis in any substantive way, and BY GOD those same types will go to the wall screaming about Obama Hitler Alinsky to stop anyone trying to get some more comprehensive reform passed.
And then those types went and passed a law commanding police round up all people who looked like they might publicly exhibit symptoms of communicable diseases and then demand the federal government pay for the program.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@ThinkBlue:
Nope. Should we be talking about them? ;)
@ChockFullO’Nuts: “You disagree with me that the man does not sound like a redneck, but rather like a pretty rational cop?”
You agreed with what he said and how he said it, I didn’t. You think what he said and how he presented it was rational, I don’t. We agree to disagree, ok? You threw in the “redneck”, I didn’t.
Nice try though.
oliver's Neck
@Little Dreamer: @ChockFullO’Nuts:
Hey, what about those crime statistics to support your claims of “shitstorms”? We’re all waiting with ‘bated breath for that non-anecdotal support for your arguments. Thanks in advance.
MattR
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Unfortunately, the solution to ensuring the rights of that rancher cannot be to infrige upon the rights of millions of other Americans. Just like the police cannot go door to door looking for illegal drugs or guns in an inner city project to protect the rights of the residents.
Yutsano
I’m predicting 400 comments before midnight PST. Any takers?
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts: What do you mean “What do I propose”?
I keep advocating for comprehensive immigration reform, over and over and over.
I don’t give a shit how many times you or millions of people scream to ‘control the federal border’ if not one shred of evidence exists that there is any feasible way of doing so which in any substantial way affects immigration while continuing the bilateral trade that businesses and politicians demand.
Here are some other slogans to yell and demand people take care of:
STOP ALL THE DAMN GRAVITY HOLDING OUR SPACECRAFT DOWN!
MAKE THE HIV STOP INFECTING PEOPLE!
MAKE ALL THE TV SHOWS BETTER!
ThinkBlue
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal): Is that what “Balloon Juice” means? hehe
@Little Dreamer: So your solution for fixing the border is allowing the same party that’s obstructing any progress at the federal level to produce a racist law that will do nothing to solve the problem? Gotcha.
El Cid
How is there a “need for this law” when the law in no way addresses the very real problem it supposedly addresses?
Why didn’t Louisiana just pass a law declaring storm surges to be shot on sight and for levees to grow higher and stronger by themselves? After all, there was a need for that law.
California ought to pass a law saying everybody needs to work harder and earn twice as much as they do. It may be unrealistic, but it’s not California’s fault that the budget crisis needs to be solved.
Little Dreamer
@El Cid:
Well, I agree your outrage over the idea of federal government funding and maintaining it’s own borders does sound pretty silly.
JohnR
@ Chock: You think you’ve got problems? I live in Baltimore MD. Our problems, that I live among, are obviously much worse than your problems, which are far away. But at least we’re not lazy-ass whiners who make half-assed decisions and then demand the Feds cover our losses. And we’re not quite stupid enough to pass laws like that fascist BS you’re trying to pass off as “Arizona reluctantly solving a Federal problem”. Hell’s Bells – why don’t you just shoot anyone who looks like an illegal and be done with it? It would sure be a lot cheaper and more effective. I’m surprised that hasn’t been brought up in your legislature yet. I note that you used the phrase “self-righteous butthead(s)”. Does the term “irony” mean anything to you?
MattR
@Yutsano: What kind of odds are you giving?
@JohnR: But at least you live in a city that reads :)
Faux News
We can always give AZ back to Mexico. Texas and Oklahoma too while we are at it. We won’t miss your shit hole racist state of AZ at all. Buh bye!
El Cid
@Little Dreamer: WELL GET YOUR GOD-DAMNED ELECTED OFFICIALS TO STOP BLOCKING IMMIGRATION REFORM EFFORTS INSTEAD OF MOANING AND GROANING THAT BULLSHIT FANTASIES WON’T WORK.
Yutsano
@MattR: Beer (or favorite alcoholic beverage is good, a Marine I have fun with is partial to scotch), think it’s a sucker’s bet since 400 might be an underguess. But I’d call it 5/2 going over 400 by midnight.
MattR
@Faux News: How about we give Arizona back to the Indians and then let them deport all the white folk?
@Yutsano: Sorry, no bet. I am pretty sure that you are right.
JohnR
@MattR:
I liked the old motto better. Nobody reads in this town. Even the grafitti is pictographs anymore.
Rosali
@Little Dreamer:
We agree that the federal government, and not the states, should deal with illegal immigration.
The AZ bill doesn’t deal with manning the borders. It states that local law enforcement should stop and ask for papers from people who appear to be illegal aliens. What does an illegal alien look like?
El Cid
By the way — I’m the fucking “federal government” taxpayer who would have to pay for your Arizona bullshit fantasy schemes, so if I have to pay for it can you please come up with something applicable to this world instead of things you learned from “Walker: Texas Ranger”?
I need to figure out how to get Georgia to come up with some total bullshit scheme and make Arizona taxpayers pay for it and then when they don’t want to whine about ‘why don’t you want the federal government to fix a problem’.
A few years ago we had a really bad drought.
We should have passed a law hiring millions of rain dancers and then demanded that other states’ taxpayers pay for them else OMG the federal government isn’t managing federal waterways!
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@JohnR: “Hell’s Bells – why don’t you just shoot anyone who looks like an illegal and be done with it?”
The sad reality is that there are people in this country who would happy for that to be the law of the land. Hell, I’m sure that some would love to have the government line the border with illegals dangling from nooses.
Arresting everyone who doesn’t have their papers in order is the next best thing. Wingers love this kind of authoritarian shit, especially when it probably won’t be used against them.
Color has it’s privileges in Arizona, it’s the law.
Comrade Kevin
@Rosali:
Good question.
Does
this person look like an “illegal alien”?
Little Dreamer
@ScottRock:
It’s not my stupid law. I don’t want racial profiling to happen if it’s happening. As I understand it, a person cannot be asked to produce proof of citizenship without being stopped for other reasons first (suspicion of commission of a crime).
I have to prove I’m a citizen each time I go to work, how is that not a chance to prove citizenship? I am not saying i don’t want people to come here seeking opportunity and finding it, I do, but, I also don’t think that AZ should be expected to put up with shitty border protection when there is a huge violence problem along the border and if we aren’t happy with border security, we’re wrong to try to find ways to resist allowing that problem to grow in AZ. I don’t agree with racial profiling, but I agree we need to do something about the situation.
The fact is, there is violence along the border, and unless you are living here and see the reports, you don’t believe it.
We hear about gun battles raging in Juarez with several people dead almost every day. A Cattle rancher was killed recently due to an illegal immigrant. The violence is pouring over the border now. Increases in violence in Phoenix. This is NOT a strawman. You people just aren’t hearing about it the way we do here. That Republicans would get angry and fearful (isn’t that what they always do these days) and target hispanics as a result should be expected. The problem isn’t with whether to fund this “state law”, but for the federal government to take care of the border so we don’t need one.
Little Dreamer
@Rosali:
I’m not saying I’m in agreement with this law. I don’t believe in racial profiling and if that is what will happen as a result of this law, I don’t support that at all. I am merely saying that without the federal government taking care of it’s federal border, this is what you’re going to get in “votes mostly red AZ”.
Turbulence
Little Dreamer, can you cite statistics? I’m not asking you for a list of anecdotes. But statistics. Which is different from anecdotes. Do you understand the difference?
If you can’t cite statistical data, just say so. Why is it so hard to answer this one simple question?
LD50
@ThinkBlue: I think ”fucking liar” is the likeliest explanation.
“Hey, I’m as liberal as the next guy, but why can’t we get rid of all these beaners?”
LD50
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Why do you Republicans resort to anal sex metaphors so often?
KRK
Little Dreamer: “The violence is pouring over the border now. This is NOT a strawman. You people just aren’t hearing about it the way we do here.”
Sheriff of the largest county on the Arizona-Mexico border: The law is “disgusting” and “unnecessary.”
ChockFullO'Nuts
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
My redneck reference was in response to somebody’s use of the word in reference to our law enforcement. Don’t know if it was you or not, my point was that this guy was not a redneck. I am not claiming that you called him a redneck.
Turbulence
Also, I’m still waiting to hear exactly what the federal government should be doing to “take care of the border”…so far all I’ve heard is “give AZ lots of money and don’t ask questions”, but that’s not a real plan. So what exactly would you like? A giant wall? 300,000 border patrol agents? 10,000 helicopters? What, specifically, do you want the federal government to do?
JohnR
@Little Dreamer:
wait – Juarez is in Arizona now?
as for the violence – if it gets much worse, it might begin to approach the levels in my own neighborhood, which is nowhere near as bad as big swaths of the city. You’ve got problems. Up here in Baltimore we’ve got problems too. Thank God we’re not in Michigan, and they don’t even have ilegal immigration to blame. Get real; you’re focused so closely on your own little patch that you think it’s the whole country. That’s no excuse for that crap youall just pulled. You want to be a good National Socialist American Workers Party state, you pay for it yourselves, and see how far you get.
Little Dreamer
@Rosali:
__
who is “we”? Do you speak for El Cid and others here who ARE indeed saying that they will not fund anything in AZ simply because this law was passed? The problem is that without funding of this FEDERAL border, this is what you’re going to get. AZ is mostly red, I can’t control what people do here. You have to make it worth the while of those that would have this law otherwise. Funding and maintaining the border and treating it like it IS a federal border and not a state border is the only way this is going to get solved.
I also have to say, the outrage I’m seeing here today is putting me off to accepting the idea that Dems are rational people, because I’m not seeing rational reasoning today, I’m seeing outrage and crazy talk and pick and choose arguments over whether actual border violence exists.
I’m a blue voter. Why am I being treated like a red voter simply because I’m not getting outraged at the idea that the federal government has to maintain it’s federal border? I’ve not come out in support of this stupid law, but, you’d think I did simply by the way people are treating me here.
Step back and look at yourselves people, you’re going off the rails.
jackie
There is no way to “seal the border”. I’m trying to be kind, I know the drug wars are scaring people. But please stop pretending you are the only area of the country terrorized by drug dealers or dealing with deperate undocumented workers. Yes they transit through your state to all the other states Which means they are driving on all our roads. I do not believe they are the only speeders or uninsured folk out there for gods sake. Yet your state, judging by the representives you send to congress and this magnificient piece of legislation has no interest in immigration reform or a sane drug policy. If you support this law and think it is justified you are insane. It won’t work , it will bankrupt you and you deserve all you get. The rest of us will not send money so you can train your police to figure out how to look at people and decide whose rights it is ok to trample.
MattR
@Turbulence: Fix it, obviously.
El Cid
In addition to a serious degree of comprehensive immigration reform which not only includes path to legality and serious crackdown on employers hiring illegally — and this will all be filibustered too, by Arizona Republicans — there will be no solution to the Mexican narco-para-state forces creating the sort of dancing-with-government chaos seen in rural Colombia if we do not decriminalize drugs.
I don’t care how many millions of troops and how many thousands of feet high you want your wall-fence to be: our drug economy will merge with the narco-para-state massive drug production / trans-shipment economy of Mexico unless we remove their profitable market.
And I don’t think there’s a chance in hell of that happening, and states can pass all the laws they want about who can be arrested at what time and it will be just as effective as Mexico sending the army in to shoot whoever the hell they want (the Mexican Senate just passed a law requiring soldiers to be tried in regular courts for abusing civilians) and as Colombia was with massive U.S. aid in keeping cocaine & drugs production roughly the same while the U.S. celebrated its victories against leftist narco-guerrillas.
The border states can deputize every citizen and give them all Uzi’s to carry and all it will get is shoot-outs between various factions hired by different narco-traffickers or paid-off military or border patrol officers.
If we don’t do these two major reforms, you can pass all the repressive laws you want and make all the demands you can imagine — it won’t matter.
Yutsano
@Little Dreamer:
(Can’t believe I’m wading into this)
Umm…no. What the state of Arizona is requesting is federal funding for police training in order to enforce a state law. In other words, this is a totally separate issue from border enforcement, which if you can find a method of securing a 300+ mile long stretch of open desert constantly I’d like to hear it. Short of absolute militarization of the border, it’s impossible. Comprehensive immigration reform needs to address all these issues. But stop talking as if border security is the be all and end all of this problem. Oh and why doesn’t the law punish employers? Answer that fact first.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@El Cid:
Well, then constructive reform and better border controls would defeat their purpose, no? And you apparently already are in favor of such things (we haven’t argued over the details, so I am talking generalities). If so, then we probably are in general agreement.
The law may suck, but if it serves the purpose of spurring action to fix real problems, and then gets struck down, that works for me.
LD50
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
THAT’S CAUSE WE’RE ALL FROM WEST VIRGINIA!!!111!!!
Citizen_X
@Little Dreamer:
Nobody said anything about not funding “anything in AZ.” They were referring to extra funding for the costs of this Arizona law. This is all helpfully explained at the top of this page, in what is referred to as “the post” to which people are “commenting” below.
Seriously, are you drunk or something?
MattR
@Little Dreamer:
Yet you want the rest of us to somehow control the Republican and conservative Democratic Senators who are holding up any serious solution from being discussed?
El Cid
@Little Dreamer:
The federal government should not fund anything to directly support this idiotic, harmful, un-Constitutional piece of shit policy which in no way addresses immigration or border issues.
That’s what I’m saying.
Arizona is not requesting federal funding to help state agents enforce federal programs or border control. Arizona’s government is requesting federal funds to put more state cops out to harass people without warrant and without probable cause.
Because it apparently is needed, I’m going to repeat that.
Arizona is not requesting federal funding to help state agents enforce federal programs or border control. Arizona’s government is requesting federal funds to put more state cops out to harass people without warrant and without probable cause.
I’m saying that I, as a citizen of Georgia, shouldn’t have to pay to subsidize some Arizona lunatics employing a state-level policy that in no way controls either the border or immigration.
The federal government — which of course means me, the taxpayer — should continue to fund whatever legal (and hopefully effective) programs it has been commanded to do by federal law or which have been ordered by the relevant federal agencies in accord with those laws.
Comrade Kevin
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
and, in the meantime, if a whole bunch of brown people’s rights get trampled, so be it!
You’re a fucking monster.
LD50
@oliver’s Neck: @Little Dreamer:
Well, I guess the idea of AZ passing its own unfunded unconstitutional laws to arrest Mexicans and asking the feds to pay for it is even sillier, but CFON would say this must prove I’m from West Virginia.
Yutsano
@El Cid: Took 251 comments, but THIS.
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
There is always that means / end debate.
In which case, I don’t understand why people were so mad at Bill Ayers.
ChockFullO'Nuts
I’m not screaming. I’m typing, just like you.
I fail to see how ANY immigration reform can either work, or be passed in the first place, without a controlled border. Unless you are going to propose an open border (open to immigration, not to criminal activity and drug dealers).
I can’t find any political support for an open border, which to me takes it off the table. Without that, the border has to be closed to a much greater extent than it is now. How does that get done?
I’m shopping for useful suggestions, not finding many. Just a lot of, er, hot air, which of course is anathema to a blog named after hot air, I realize.
mds
Could people shut up already about “losing Napolitano”? Never mind her lack of authority to force the legislature to enact budget-balancing measures that aren’t insane; she was term limited, and Arizona politics is currently in the grips of racist teabagging lunatic thugs. Even a successful veto would have only bought time before these deranged pantswetting cowards successfully “did something” about the subhuman beaner swarm and their 100-mph Mad Max re-enactments inside white people’s churches. I swear, it’s apparently a wonder I made it out of Willcox middle school without being run over by a Mexican drug dealer’s van in the cafeteria. I guess I have either Jimmy Carter’s scary demeanor or Ronald Reagan’s border-blocking scrotum to thank.
MattR
@Comrade Kevin:
Sorry. You are wrong. He is “the most vocal ACLU card carrier on the blog”
Turbulence
Little Dreamer and ChockFullO’Nuts, again, what specific actions do you want the federal government to undertake? And why do you think those actions will help? And again, can you just say whether or not you have any statistics to point to indicating that AZ has a significantly higher crime rate than comparable non-border states?
Are my posts totally invisible to you? Are these questions really that difficult to answer?
Little Dreamer
@Turbulence:
I don’t want the federal government to give AZ money and not ask questions – that wasn’t a suggestion, it was an over the top remark replying to an over the top assumption.
The federal government needs to figure out how to man and maintain the border, perhaps close it for a while and go through the process of getting citizenship to those who are here now. We need a real fence, we need real patrol officers with real funding to take care of the problem so vigilantes don’t feel the need to do it themselves. One thing we really need is heavy law enforcement close to our border near Juarez, because that area is getting scarier by the day and quite a lot of the violence is coming from there and migrating north.
Are you aware of the deaths happening in Juarez everyday? Our newscasts are recounting this violence almost every night.
Barry
@ChockFullO’Nuts: F*ck you, *sshole – your GOP senators are among the guys causing trouble. If you stopped fillibustering like whiny-*ss titty babies, maybe something productive could get done.
In the meantime, I’ll just laugh at you racist teabagging wh*resons making sure that Latinos vote the same way as African-Americans for the next forty years.
Comrade Kevin
@MattR: I bet some of his best friends are Mexicans, too.
LD50
@Little Dreamer:
Soooooo…. because of a high violent crime rate in a Mexican city across from Texas, the cops in AZ need the ability to arrest anyone brown without sufficient papers. And the feds should pay for it.
Sure. That will ‘fix the border’.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@El Cid:
Well, I can’t disagree with that. But it misses the point I think. The point here is that the rightwingosphere slipped in this dumb bill, and inadvertently opened to door to a glaring opportunity to do something useful. That’s what Arizonans really want, and what the rest of the country should really want, and what Barack Obama is apparently comfortable with wanting.
So we can waste our time letting John Cole play Let’s Shit of Arizona Because It’s Good For Traffic, and let the keyboard militia write their bashomatic rhetoric, or we can do something actually constructive. Like fashion a pair of policies (border, and immigration) that would actually work and have some kind of political viability.
And the proof that this is a good idea is the speed with which Republicans seem reluctant to tackle this openly. I think they fear it, and realize (as most here are not smart enough to do) that if we respond to this constructively, we can really fuck them with it in the upcoming election season.
Or, we can piss the opportunity away.
I vote for seizing the day and doing something constructive.
Yutsano
@LD50: The man, full of straw he is.
/Yoda
Little Dreamer
@LD50:
__
Prove to me that people are going to be arrested simply for being latino. This is the real strawman in this debate. The law hasn’t even taken effect yet. People are not supposed to be asked for identification without having being suspected of a crime. it’s exactly what is being done now. If people start getting deported simply for being latino, I’ll agree with you, but you are making assumptions based on a law that hasn’t even taken effect yet.
I have to prove I’m an American citizen every time I apply for a job. I have to do it each time I go to the MVD, each time I cash a check, each time I get pulled over by a cop and I’m white. Should I be outraged that I have been asked numerous times in my life to show my ID? Why is it that this shouldn’t be expected of a latino as well?
If legal citizens start getting deported simply for being latino, I’ll agree with you, but you have to prove to me first that it is happening.
El Cid
You know, if the Congo authorities had done more to control illegal Rwandan and Ugandan migration, then Kinshasan men wouldn’t have been forced to hunt down various people accused of witchcraft based on the belief that the witches put spells on them to steal or shrink their pen_ises.
colleeniem
@Little Dreamer: It’s funny, because the same Senators who will leap over each other to fund Ft. Huachuca, could not be bothered to stop demonizing the ending of a tax cut that could, hypothetically, be used to hire more border agents (not that this would eradicate the problem, as others have effectively stated). Oh, and grow the size of government (as CBP are definitely not part of the official “national defense” exception in funding duels in DC.)
As ye sew, so shall ye reap, motherfuckers.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Comrade Kevin:
The law doesn’t go into effect until about August, and I seriously doubt that its implementation will be any different from what Joe Arpaio has been doing all along. It’s ugly, but it opens the door to an opportunity to do something useful, which nobody on either side seems interested in doing.
Continued inaction just reinforces the political support for bad policy. This is all about bad “do nothing” policy, the real culprit. Attack that, not me.
If saying that gives you the idea that you should call me a monster, then go ahead, I think you are full of shit.
KRK
And now we’re in Doughy Pantload/McMegan territory.
The point of the post misses the point!
Little Dreamer
@LD50:
No, I’m not in support of a bill of racial profiling. Quit trying to paint me as a supporter of the bill, I’m in support of actual border security.
MattR
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Do you remember your first comment on this post about Arizona asking the rest of the country to pay for enforcement of their new law? Here is how it starts (block quote in the original):
All due respect, fuck anybody who believes this.
Turbulence
@Little Dreamer:
Thank you for finally attempting to answer one question. Now, could you please flesh out the answer? How many more border patrol officers are you asking for? 1? 100? 100,000? And how much additional money do you want the federal government to put into this effort? $1billion? $200billion? What?
When you talk about a real fence, do you mean a fence that covers the entire border? And how exactly can the federal government possibly close the entire border?
What you’ve described isn’t a plan that anyone can implement, let alone put a price tag on. It is just vague aspirational wish fulfillment. No matter what the federal government does, you’ll be able to point to this vague “plan” and say it wasn’t enough. What I’d like to see from you is a place that we could actually put a price tag on.
Are you aware of the deaths happening in Juarez everyday? Our newscasts are recounting this violence almost every night.
Are you aware that there are violent deaths happening near every city in the country everyday? Why are those deaths less significant than deaths near Juarez?
Look, if there are so many violent deaths in AZ (um, Juarez isn’t in AZ…), they should show up in the official FBI statistics. Unless you’re exaggerating the death toll.
Comrade Kevin
@ChockFullO’Nuts:You’re assuming it will be struck down before it goes into effect. There is no reason to assume that. You are willing to live with the consequences of it going into effect before it is struck down.
You’re a monster.
LD50
Sooo… my argument falls apart unless I can PROVE that something WILL happen, before the law takes effect. Gotcha.
As mentioned above, the Mexican govt. is plenty concerned about it, tho I doubt you find that compelling:
Hey, didja hear about how violent JUAREZ is???
oliver's Neck
@LD50:
Hey, why’d you rope me into that comment?
It’s clear by their refusal to provide anything but anecdotes and adjectives (“shitstorms!”) that neither Little Dreamer nor ChockFull are serious interlocutors here.
Not that me pointing that out will be revelatory to anyone.
Just doing my part to help Yutsano’s side of the bet.
Yutsano
@KRK: Technically true, but collectively nonsense?
@oliver’s Neck: Your check is in the mail good sir.
LD50
@Little Dreamer: Then what the fuck does Juarez have to do with anything?
KRK
@Little Dreamer:
So why does the guy who should know say that enforcement training will require an “unprecedented effort” and be so burdensome that Arizona needs federal money to get it done?
What was that you were saying earlier about a lack of rational reasoning and crazy talk?
ChockFullO'Nuts
Not mine. I have been voting since 1968 and have never voted for any Republican candidate for congress. Or governor that I know of. Or any state office that I can think of. I think I voted for Gerald Ford, I am not sure. I changed my mind about ten times in the voting booth and can’t remember if I winced and pulled for Carter or not.
Anyway, Arizona Dems put up the good fight, if you look at state offices we do pretty well in a Red State. We have 5 of the 8 US House seats at present, too.
Kyl and McCain are horrors, we’ve said so here for years. Nothing can be done so far. They’re entrenched.
Rosali
@Little Dreamer:
You talk about the need for manning the border. Your AZ law does NOTHING about manning the border. It is all about harassing people who are driving and walking along the AZ roads simply because some UNTRAINED local law enforcement officer believes that person looks like an illegal alien. Again, what does an illegal alien look like?
If you were really concerned about the lack of federal inaction, you’d hound McCain and Kyl about why they refuse to move on an immigration bill. You’d post comments on Red State and Freeper blogs about how the GOP is obstructing and not doing anything to solve the problems that Arizonans face. You’re preaching to the choir here on immigration being a federal issue. Now get to working on your representatives if you want real change.
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts: I don’t see any political support for an open border. I don’t see anyone with any realistic plans for a closed border.
I see some people with some ideas about how to spend a god-awful amount of money on efforts mainly meant to look like the immense border is being controlled while in no way interrupting the massive trade required by U.S. megabusiness, but sure, okay, go for it. Put up the night vision cameras and monitoring software and the dirigibles and whatnot. Maybe ask the COIN guys who are having such outstanding successes in Afghanistan how to do it.
“Open borders” is a fantasy phrase used by people who simply want to believe that there is some sort of at-hand solution to close the border. The Great Wall is pretty big, but it wasn’t too effective, either.
The point is that the effective control will not be at the border, and it won’t involve random police harassment of people who look funny somehow, and it will have to involve large scale solutions.
It also ought to involve re-working trade agreements so they don’t necessarily involve throwing tens of millions of people past our Southern border out of work and into desperate poverty, including peasant farmers who now thanks to NAFTA’s final agricultural chapter against any controlled or subsidized basic food crop markets now have no income whatsoever, and there are no jobs in the cities they’re flooding into, and there are a hell of a lot of narco-traffickers roaming around rural Southern and Southwestern Mexico waiting to satisfy their U.S. customers.
Little Dreamer
@Barry:
CFoN votes Democratic. I’m sure he’ll be happy to have your support.
Mnemosyne
@Little Dreamer:
Really? If you do absolutely nothing to support the system of illegal labor in this country — which is your claim — that means that you:
– Never eat in a restaurant
– Never eat produce grown in the United States
– Never eat chicken (chicken processors like Tyson are some of the worst violators of laws against hiring illegal workers)
– Ensured that every worker who built your house/condo/apartment building was a legal worker
– Ensure that every maintenance worker at your office is a legal worker
– Ensure that none of the subcontractors hired to fix your city’s streets used illegal workers
– Ensure that any housecleaners or day laborers you use at your home or are used by your apartment/condo management have work permits
– Research where all of your clothing came from to ensure it wasn’t sewn by illegal workers
If you do all of the above, then I will agree with you that you don’t do anything to support illegal labor in this country. If not, then, sorry, you too are living off the illegal labor of other people and benefiting from that system. That labor may be sufficiently invisible to you that you can lie to yourself and pretend you don’t benefit, but you should at least be aware that you’re lying to yourself.
jackie
@Little Dreamer: You keep saying that. The republican state rep kept saying that. There is nothing that I have seen that says you can only check if the person is arrested for something else. I have never had to prove my citizenship for anything but a passport. I show my drivers license and vehicle registration at traffic stops to prove I am entitled to drive. I cash checks with that same drivers license. My drivers license does not prove I am a citizen. The law would not accept my license if I were in your state. I know you are upset about the violence but the law does not say what you think it says. Your local media is having fun with if it bleeds it leads and seems to be skipping over the actual facts. Shocking, I know. That people keep insisting that we can’t do immigration reform without “sealing the border” are making sure there will be no reform. How in the world would you close the border for awhile? Short of the immediately closing down two wars and putting those troops shoulder to shoulder?
ChockFullO'Nuts
@LD50:
People here pretty much think Mexico is out of control, and I can’t find any reason to disagree with them.
I’d like nothing better than for Mexico to solve its own problems rather than exporting them here, but I don’t see that happening any time soon. Tourism to Mexico seems to be falling off a cliff, and now people here are basically getting ready to flee the area on our side of the border.
Little Dreamer
@Rosali:
Funny how I’ve been a contributor on this site for over five years and now all of a sudden people think I’m a wingnut.
I’ve had it with you people. You’re not serious in the least.
Go ahead, play your phony outrage game. I met a wonderful man on this website, I moved to Arizona to be with him. We’re both Dem voters and we really don’t need to be here, we were here because we enjoyed the debate. But, less and less, this place entertains reason and he and I have both noticed it.
I’m sure he’ll probably stay on and harass you people with logical reasoning, but, I am done. I don’t have time to play games with people who don’t know me and assume I’m a freeper after posting on here for over five years. Fuck you Rosalie (and the rest of you who all of a sudden have lost sight of who I am and what I’m about). I don’t need your brand of crazy.
Rosali
@Little Dreamer:
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/scarce/az-truck-driver-forced-show-birth-certifica
It’s not a strawman. It’s already started.
ScottRock
@Little Dreamer:
We’re pretty much on the same page here, save for the fact that you’re still standing behind the law. As for the last part, it’s debatable at best. You can find the text of the law here. Make of “lawful contact” what you will, but keep in mind racial profiling is still racial profiling when it’s in the context of a traffic stop.
As for your hand-wringing about strawmen, well, everything you said after that was a strawman. You are simply not going to convince me that the state of a fence is sufficient justification for federal funding of state-legislated slave patrols.
Little Dreamer
@jackie:
As far as you know. You sure they’re not also verifying your citizenship?
Turbulence
You know, I can’t imagine going through life so fracked up that I am literally unable to say the words “I don’t know.” Because I’ve asked Little Dreamer and ChockFullO’Nuts over and over to either cite some crime stats showing that AZ is significantly worse than comparable non border states or admit they have no stats, and they can’t even say “Sorry, I don’t know.” When you can yell and scream at random people on the internets for hours but you can’t say “I don’t know”, that’s…that’s just sad. I hope you guys get over whatever deep seated issues you have that make admitting ignorance so unthinkable.
anonymous
@Little Dreamer:
And nothing of value was lost.
KRK
@ChockFullO’Nuts at 8:11 p.m.:
@ChockFullO’Nuts at 11:18 p.m.:
I believe that’s known as RFYRMOCWYDVF-FTANFM, or “responsibility for your Republican members of Congress whom you didn’t for” for thee and not for me.
Little Dreamer
@ScottRock:
I’m not standing behind the law. I’m standing behind the idea of federal border security at a federal border.
I am not either for or against this bill, so long as people don’t start getting deported simply for being latino. If that happens, I will be against it. As the law hasn’t taken effect, what we have right now is a bunch of balloon-juicers (and lefties everywhere) shouting at a silly outrage meme that hasn’t happened.
I am not in support of the law, I am merely in support of securing our border.
Montana
Arizona can pass race base laws, pass Birthers laws, pass no permit conceal weapons laws and the state boycotted Martin Luther King Day, well the rest of the Country can boycott the state of Arizona and spank them where it hurts them the most their pocket book. Their phony patriotism is sickening, they are just racists going by another name. We all know you are just itching to put a sheet on their head? Let’s face it the Republicans had eight years to deal with health care, immigration, climate change and financial oversight and governance and they failed. It appears that the Republican Party is only good at starting wars (two in eight years, with fat contracts to friends of Cheney/Bush) but not at winning wars as seen by the continuing line of body bags that keep coming home. The Republicans party will continue turned inward to their old fashion obstructionist party (and their Confederacy appreciation roots) because they continue to allow a small portions (but very loud portion) of their party of “birthers, baggers and blowhards” to rule their party. I will admit that this fringe is very good at playing “Follow the Leader” by listening to their dullard leaders, Beck, Hedgecock, Hannity, O’Reilly, Rush, Savage, Sarah Bailin, Orly Taitz, Victoria Jackson, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the Blowhards and acting as ill programmed robots (they have already acted against doctors that perform abortions). The Birthers and the Tea party crowd think they can scare, intimidate and force others to go along with them by comments like “This time we came unarmed”, let me tell you something not all ex-military join the fringe militia crazies who don’t pay taxes and run around with face paint in the parks playing commando, the majority are mature and understand that the world is more complicated and grey than the black and white that these simpleton make it out to be and that my friend is the point. The world is complicated and people like Hamilton, Lincoln, and Roosevelt believed that we should use government a little to increase social mobility, now it’s about dancing around the claim of government is the problem. The sainted Reagan passed the biggest tax increase in American history and as a result federal employment increased, but facts are lost when mired in mysticism and superstition. For a party that gave us Abraham Lincoln, it is tragic that the ranks are filled with too many empty suits and the crazy Birthers who have not learned that the way our courts work is that you get a competent lawyer, verifiable facts and present them to a judge, if the facts are real and not half baked internet lies, then, and only then, do you proceed to trial. The Birthers seem to be having a problem with their so called “facts”. Let’s face it no one will take the Birthers seriously until they win a case, but until then, you will continue to appear dumb, crazy or racist, or maybe all three. I heard that Orly Taitz now wants to investigate the “Republican 2009 Summer of Love” list: Assemblyman, Michael D. Duvall (CA), Senator John Ensign (NV), Senator Paul Stanley (TN), Governor Mark Stanford (SC), Board of Ed Chair, and Kristin Maguire AKA Bridget Keeney (SC), she wants to re-establish a family values party, that’s like saying that the Catholic Church cares about the welling being of children in their care, too late for that.
jackie
@Little Dreamer: It would be a hell of a trick. I didn’t have to prove I was a citizen to get that license or that registration.
elaine
@Little Dreamer: You keep talking about violence, but won’t provide statistics. You keep talking about border problems, but won’t discuss comprehensive immigration reform. You keep saying this law is not good, but it is necessary because the “feds aren’t doing anything.” And every time a commenter says, well what about enforcing existing laws requiring employers to hire legal workers, you ignore that.
And when the sheriff of the county on the border says this law isn’t helping, you don’t respond with a counter argument, you ignore it and then shout at everyone for not listening.
If you aren’t going to engage people and answer their questions (like why the rest of us should pay to enforce a state law), then you’re not exactly going to win over people who aren’t already in agreement.
And oh, yes, without statistics, don’t talk to other Americans about gun violence and immigration issues. It’s a pretty common national problem and Arizona isn’t on the list of states with cities with the biggest gun violence problems…
Just sayin’
ChockFullO'Nuts
@El Cid:
Hmm. I don’t know. It sounds like you are suggesting that improvements at the border will come from indirect effects of relevant policies. I don’t know the extent to which that will actually work. It sounds a little like an experiment.
The political problem here is that patience has run out. Arizonans are convinced that the US is perfectly happy letting Arizona swing in the wind while the rest of the country talks about these things and does nothing. If you are looking for a reason why this law got passed, that’s it. If we are looking for a real solution, I don’t an alternative better than clamping down the border.
I realize that a border clampdown sounds …. ugly, but the alternative is an out of control border, and the political turmoil (for example, what we have today) that goes with it. Part of what bothers me about the policy stuff you mention is that it would require cooperation from Mexico, and I have very little faith in their leadership at this point. I am inclined to think we have to act unilaterally.
Meanwhile Republicans are banking on the idea that immigration reform is DOA unless there is control at the border, and I don’t see how that gets bypassed politically …. so even if I agreed totally with you I could not design a way to get to that from here with the political scenario we have now.
It’s pretty challenging to say the least. But I think Arizona is right on one aspect of this. It’s the Feds’ border to control, first and foremost. They are not doing it. They are outmanned along the border.
Little Dreamer
@anonymous:
No matter. I don’t need to be where assholes create fake outrage.
TZ, I’m outta here. I’ll see you when you get home. I see no reason to play with these idiots anymore. Five years on BJ, it was a great experience, but I think it’s time that BJ and I come to a parting of the ways.
Mnemosyne
@Little Dreamer:
Here you go. Here’s another one.
Because if American citizens are already being wrongfully deported, what makes you think that your state will be magically protected from making the same kind of mistake after passing a much broader law than any of the ones that led to American citizens being deported from their own country?
Turbulence
@Little Dreamer:
I am not in support of the law, I am merely in support of securing our border.
No, you’re only in support of pointless chatter unless you can point to a plan that is (1) specific and (2) has a price tag attached. If you can’t point to such a plan, that means you’re not serious about this issue. I’m not saying you have to have personally figured out a plan, but surely by now someone in AZ has come up with a plan, put a price tag on it and shopped it around. 3 million people can’t all be clueless, especially if ZOMG THEIR LIVES ARE IN DANGER EVERYDAY! So link to a real plan with a pricetag or stop whining about the government should come and do “stuff” to make everything “better”.
KRK
Still crickets on Sheriff Dupnik?
If this law is regrettably necessary because there’s a violent crime shitstorm in southern Arizona that the rest of us here are blindly discounting, why did the sheriff of the largest county on the Arizona-Mexico border say today that he won’t enforce it because it’s “racist,” “disgusting,” and “unnecessary”?
ScottRock
@Little Dreamer: Look, i’m sorry we offended your tender sensibilities, but your fundamental assumptions about the relationship between immigrants and crime are really, really fucked up. For all the violence in Cd Juarez, you sure don’t see a lot of that “spilling over” into El Paso.
Simplistic generalizations are a hallmark of the crazy wing of the right. Don’t act surprised when you’re called out for entertaining similar views.
Little Dreamer
@elaine:
No, I provided links to the stories, idiot. I didn’t have to provide statistics, I provided journalistic proof.
Corner Stone
@Yutsano: Juarez is directly across from El Paso.
I’d ask anyone here to visit El Paso, any hours, any day.
One of my best friends in the world lives in Juarez. He has a family, wife, couple small boys.
It isn’t understood what happens there every day.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@KRK:
I have written these guys. But you know, this is Goldwater country. I am outnumbered here by a huge margin. See the second paragraph of my post. I don’t see how we can do a lot better here in a Mormon, Republican state. Gratuitous bashing of Arizona Dems doesn’t seem all that helpful to me in this context. We’ve been fighting these assholes for 75 years, we win some and lose some. Immigration and border issues are kicking our butts. We need the rest of the country to step up. Mishandling of this can cost us our Dem seats, and stick us with another term with a GOP governor and maybe even JD Hayworth as your new senator. Hayworth is licking his lips over this thing.
Sanka
Wow. The brilliance is stunning. Really.
I could be wrong, but I thought it was the job of the Federal government to defend the country’s borders. So when 70% of the citizens of Arizona vote to enforce laws that the Feds should already be doing, now it’s “their” problem.
Brilliant!
The echo chamber here on the Left is certainly getting smaller. The lack of air to the brain cells is causing some delusions.
El Cid
@Little Dreamer:
I am also in support of controlling who enters the nation, but I refuse to be interested in fantasy discussions based on visions of a 2,000 mile long border being controlled like it was the entrance to a mall.
The subject of the post at the top of this thread was whether or not the federal government (i.e., taxpayers) must subsidize a new level of Arizona state police staffing in order to carry out a pointless policy of random harassment in the fantasy notion that the example set by such intimidation will control Latin American migration into the USA via the Mexico-U.S. border.
The answer is still “of course not”, and also that it would be nice for ‘the federal government’ to pass needed reforms such as comprehensive immigration and hiring reforms, trade agreement reforms, and drugs decriminalizations.
All of these efforts will be blocked and filibustered by Republicans and/or conservative Democrats from conservative states such as, well, Arizona, and the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a single word.
And this is who you’re talking about when you complain that “the federal government” isn’t creating the policies you would prefer.
KRK
This just keeps getting better.
Corner Stone
@ScottRock: Radley Balko?
El Cid
@Sanka:
No such thing was voted upon. The Arizona state government in no way passed a law to enforce Federal laws.
The right can indulge any number of fantasies about how they gon’ damn kick them dam imgrints out by actin’ all tuff, but a few years of this shit yielding no results except a blizzard of lawsuits and a number of legal citizens getting harassed by jackasses and a few other fun examples will see Arizonans’ dedication to this awsum initiative. Have fun with it.
MattR
@Corner Stone: From the article ScottRock linked to above
Little Dreamer
@ScottRock:
No? Well, we see it every night on our Phoenix news.
And, we have a recent murder in Southern Arizona that has everyone here scared to death.
ChockFullO'Nuts
I would like that to be totally true. However the first problem is that the Mexican government doesn’t seem to be able to control its own country and borders. The second is that the border is a staging area for at least two gigantic industries of criminal activity, the sale of people and the sale of drugs, over the frontier into the US.
I agree with Mayor Cook philosophically, but when I can’t drive my car out into the hills beyond this picture for fear of running into an army of criminals who have a whole nother agenda from mine, I think there is a big problem. This shot is about 15 mins north of the border, if my internal GPS is right.
I think you’d be safer driving into East LA at night than out here in the daytime. And yeah, I went down there and researched it before I arrived at that conclusion. The locals there are plain: The land out there is out of control, enter at your own risk.
Little Dreamer
@KRK:
Yeah, when you can’t even read a couple of fucking news articles and suspect that I’m the idiot, it only proves how far down the drain we’ve swirled, but keep using that tactic Einstein, I’m sure it will gain you lots of converts.
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Do whatever you fantasize. Send a million troops to stand beside each other over 2,000 miles. Drive vehicles really fast up and down roads. Have guys wear mirrored shades. Set up lots of cool night-vision Barrett 50-cal gun emplacements. Fly blimps up and down the border. Send up flares a lot.
What I’m saying is that there isn’t anyone suggesting that (a) we can do this, and (b) it will work.
What do you not understand about this? What’s so difficult? Why do you have to hope and pray that anyone not giving into ‘seal the border’ rhetoric is ideologically opposed to people fantasizing that you can do it?
What I’m proposing isn’t “an experiment”, it’s what every god-damned commission and academic and law enforcement study group says ever time they’re asked how to significantly cut down illegal immigration to the country, which includes both the U.S.-Mexico border and other methods of entry beyond.
But, no, I’m the experimenter — we have a huge and long history of closely guarding our 2,000 mile border, right? I mean, we had that thing covered until, was it Nixon? Carter? Clinton? Did Honest Abe have that thing on lockdown?
When did this non-experimental sealing of the border take place? When have we done it before? When has it been proven to be feasible and a real world solution and not a blue-face painted FREEDOM rallying cry?
Rosali
@Little Dreamer:
MattR
@Corner Stone: Do you dispute the stats that Balko cited? Specifically this one about the number of murders in 2008
I saw the populations listed elsewhere as about 612K in El Paso and 634K in Baltimore, but the basic point remains.
Little Dreamer
@Rosali:
I don’t care if it made you laugh. You are wrong. You don’t know me, and you assume that I’m a freeper simply because I’m not buying into the outrage – and you know what? I really don’t think I’m going to be here much longer if that’s what is considered serious debate on BJ these days. Oh, this site has made me laugh a lot too, but not at the expense of serious debate. That you don’t know the difference is the sad part.
Corner Stone
@MattR: MattR – I’m not arguing against good people finding good common ground.
That is so true no one can deny.
But man, I am honestly saying that most people who don’t live there, or don’t have vital contact with people there – just don’t know.
A border doesn’t change who we are, or what we feel or know to be true. Good, honest people are on both sides.
I can tell you I’ve been at the apartment of my friend’s grandma in EP when we got word not to leave the complex – for over 12 hours – because there was a battle coming.
For almost 8 hours cartels waged a running gun battle on both sides of the border. They shot almost 3 dozen civilians blitzing through marketplaces and major streets.
And this happens all the time. College kids will tell you about cars with windows being shot out by stray auto gun fire. Lots of other data points.
I’m against the AZ nonsense because it doesn’t help anyone or anything. But a lot of people here have no idea what they are talking about.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Until two giant criminal activities reared their heads and took up camping on that border, man. Big drug traffic and big coyote traffic was not an issue until the last few decades.
I’d be in favor of ending the war on drugs as we know it, that would be a start. I’d be in favor of a much more effective immigration policy and system. But you know as well as I do that these are experiments, nobody knows exactly how they would turn out. And what’s more, there’s no political viability to them right now, unless I am missing something. Even among Democrats.
Comrade Kevin
@Little Dreamer:
Entertain reason? You and your idiot partner are the ones who are pretending to not defend this abomination of a law, while doing exactly that.
Go to hell.
dc
But everybody is packing heat so they can shoot back …no ?
oliver's Neck
@Little Dreamer:
You provided anecdotes. Anecdotes, by themselves, do not constitute proof of anything. A very great number of validated anecdotes might add up to meaningful data, but a handful of news stories doesn’t remotely do it.
Ah, so you have finally shown yourself to be the typical easily-manipulated right-wing moron who wets themselves over media anecdotes (“shark attacks!”) that feed their tribalistic prejudices.
Bravo. I’m sure you and Chocko are very happily terrified together. You must do a staggering bit of laundry, however.
How’m I doin’ Yutsano?
Donald G
@Little Dreamer:
Eyeballing it on the map, it looks like Ciudad Juarez is about 150 miles from the Southeastern corner of Arizona. Juarez is at the point where Texas, Mexico and New Mexico meet. Border Patrol has a decent presence along that part of New Mexico. It would be easier for the illegals you’re worried about to come in through Douglas or Nogales.
Yes, there is horrible, horrible drug-related violence in Juarez, which has spilled over into El Paso. Yes, there’s also significant drug trafficking between Mexico, Houston, Dallas, and Albuquerque. Perhaps we should rethink our drug policies rather than further militarizing the border or enabling a scared populace’s addiction to easy fix solutions and vigilante impulses.
We need to come up with creative solutions because the civil liberty eroding war mentality we’ve had since Reagan just hasn’t worked.
oliver's Neck
@Corner Stone:
No you haven’t.
No they didn’t.
Turbulence
@Little Dreamer:
No, I provided links to the stories, idiot. I didn’t have to provide statistics, I provided journalistic proof.
Look, we get that you’re scared. But “is Little Dreamer scared?” can not be the basis of public policy. Policy has to based on objective stuff, you know, statistics. People are scared of all sorts of stuff that isn’t really a threat to them. Some people are terrified that the world will end in 2012, or that aliens are going to eat them, or that their microwave will give them cancer or that illegal immigrants are going to kill them. Statistically, those things aren’t much of a threat. Illegal immigrants commit less crime than the average American citizen.
I’m sure you’ve seen some terrifying stuff on the TV news, but you have to understand, TV newspeople manipulate things to make you scared so that you keep watching. That’s not reality. Reality can be measured objectively, with statistics. And the statistics just don’t show the massive danger that you’re feel exists. Being an adult means separating what you feel is true from what you can prove is true — and a bunch of anecdotes is not proof of anything.
If you think we should make public policy based on your fears, without looking at any data, then shouldn’t someone arrest the President? I mean, millions of people fear that he’s going to create death panels or take away their guns or setup FEMA extermination camps. Why are your unsubstantiated fears more valid than theirs?
Little Dreamer
@Corner Stone:
Yeah, Cornerstone, it doesn’t help the majority of people here making the argument that the border really isn’t that bad when you bring up the reality of what’s going on in Juarez.
I posted a link to an article about Juarez, and I’m being told that I didn’t prove enough data. They don’t realize the violence and death that is happening there everyday (because their tv stations aren’t covering it, apparently – while Phoenix TV is showing this nightly) so, we’re not supposed to talk about it, because that would create a real problem that undercuts their fake outrage.
What I’ve learned today:
1. The border is secure (except that it’s not)
2. The AZ bill wasn’t in reaction to an insecure border, it’s just racial profiling for Republican shits and giggles.
3. AZ residents should pay for the securing of the border, because it’s just an AZ border, not a federal border.
I’m hugely disappointed in the antics on BJ today.
KRK
@Little Dreamer:
Didn’t you GBCBJ at least twice already in this thread?
You keep coming back to make potshots, kind of missing the point that you’re the one who needs converts if you’re going to get that border closed.
As for thinking you’re an idiot. No, I don’t. The murder of that rancher clearly has you and that other guy shook up since you keep pointing to it as a justification for this ridiculous law. But your comments in this thread haven’t done that position much credit and you lose more with each new swipe.
And I’m still waiting to hear why it’s wrong to think as a non-Arizonan that Sheriff Dupnik might be a better source on the necessity, reasonableness, and racial-profiling tendencies of this “unnecessary, disgusting, and racist” law than you are.
SGEW
This thread gives me a sad.
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Well, lets repeat the question.
When have the borders been guarded? When has the U.S. ‘sealed the border’ before?
Saying that it was not needed before doesn’t answer the question.
You’re calling for something we’ve never ever done and nobody has a clear idea of how we’d do it and how effective it would be.
But when I mention the solutions suggested by everyone who systematically studies the issues, suddenly I’m recommending some massive and weird social experiment.
Again, there is as of yet no evidence that the U.S. possesses in the near or medium term the capacity to lock down its 2,000 mile border with Mexico.
What evidence do you have that ‘closing the border’ is something other than a massive, untested social experiment?
You have none. You just want to keep reiterating the need for something which is unproven and has never been done as though it’s the obvious solution and the path is clear and anyone doubting it is somehow avoiding obvious truths.
Little Dreamer
@Turbulence:
__
WTF? I’m not scared. I’m talking about what’s happening at the border. I’m a couple hundred miles from the border. I go out in my car and deliver newspapers at night. TZ is scared that something is going to happen to me on my route and I tell him “I’m fine”. I’m not one to scare easily.
What scares me is that so many people here today are worried about a strawman regarding latinos being sent across the border just because they’re latinos (and since the law hasn’t taken effect yet, we don’t know this, do we?) – but, if I bring up real border insecurity, I’m the one who is breaking up the party.
So you go ahead, you play your fake outrage game, and you call me scared if you want. The fact is you’re not living in reality.
Comrade Kevin
@Little Dreamer:
You have only yourself to blame for your “antics”.
MattR
@Little Dreamer:
You are completely misreading the arguments of most people here.
I have not seen anyone arguing that the border is secure. If anything, I have seen people asking how the heck it would ever be conceivable to completely secure a border that long.
No, people are saying that Republican racists used the the boogeyman of an unsecure border to enable the racial profiling they want to engage in.
No, AZ residents should pay for enforcement of an AZ state law that goes above and beyond federal statues (especially since it does not actually address the problem it is supposed to)
Yutsano
@Corner Stone: I’ve been to El Paso. Granted this was before the current troubles, but I can say at least I’ve seen the area. Not a bad place really. The reason why it’s a strawman is because it has nothing to do with the law in Arizona.
Corner Stone
@oliver’s Neck: Yes. You’re right. And your concise rebuttal convinces everyone here.
I don’t live in TX, I don’t have a decades long good friend who’s from Juarez – and I certainly have never posted anything here at BJ about that issue for ooohhhh, the last 2 years+ – and drug cartel bad guys have never killed any innocent people on the US side of the border as they randomly kill people.
And my dad absolutely does not live South of Tucson. So I know nothing at all about what is actually going on.
Moran.
oliver's Neck
Apparently Little Dreamer isn’t reading Little Dreamer’s own posts, as in when Little Dreamer said:
Hmm.
Mnemosyne
@Little Dreamer:
Please tell us which comment said that.
We’re not saying it wasn’t a reaction to an insecure border. We’re saying it was a childish, useless reaction that will do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to secure the border. You would get the same amount of border protection by carrying a rock in your pocket that keeps tigers away as you will from this law.
Again, this law will do ZERO to secure the border. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. All it will do is cause a bunch of high-speed car chases as housekeepers and gardeners try to get away from the police for fear of being deported.
But it makes Arizonans feel like they’re totally doing something to strike against The Illegals, and apparently that’s the important part.
Little Dreamer
@KRK:
Yeah, I’ll admit, since BJ has been my home for five years, I have a hard time putting it down. But, since I see you calling me a supporter of the law, I guess you’re right. I see that the commentariat at BJ has now jumped the shark and it’s no longer a place where I can find real debate.
By the way: when the rancher murder occurred, I didn’t flip out, and I haven’t gone overboard with fear about it (TZ and I have actually never even discussed it at all). I am telling you WHY ARIZONANS IN GENERAL are effected by this, not me personally.
Thanks for helping me to make that decision.
Note to TZ: you coming home soon? I’m done with this place, so email me if you need me for anything.
El Cid
@Little Dreamer: Who argued that the border was secure?
Also, who argued that the border could be made secure?
I mean, a lot of people demand it, and it sounds nice. So who is it who has the plan?
oliver's Neck
@Corner Stone:
Pretty sure you could have provided some links to support those claims (given their striking nature – 8 hour gun battles?! 3-dozen shot?!) were they true. Since you didn’t, they didn’t happen.
dc
Little Dreamer :
“And, we have a recent murder in Southern Arizona that has everyone here scared to death.”
Also :
“WTF? I’m not scared….”
Both can’t be accurate.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
This one made me laugh:
I’m a pasty white DFH and I can’t begin to count the number of times I have been pulled over (while walking and even riding a damned bicycle!) because the police were ‘looking for someone who fits your description’, ‘your vehicle looks like one we were looking for’ or ‘your traction bars are too low and illegal (no they weren’t). I have been hauled in (while out for a walk) for not having ID (in Spokane, Washington) because I pissed the cop off when he made a big deal about it. I was later released but the cop got to enjoy making my day a bit more miserable. He did tell me that he was taking me in because for all he knew I was Kevin Coe (an imprisoned rapist from Spokane).
Real nice cop, eh?
Get real, if a cop wants to pull you over they will do it. To pretend it’s otherwise is just ignoring reality. Some cops are going to abuse this and to pretend otherwise is beyond stupid. There are some real fuckheads who hide behind a badge and they are going to love this law.
Corner Stone
@Yutsano:
I’m simply stating that it’s very easy for a lot of people here to casually state how disgusted they are, but at the same time have no idea about actual context for all peoples.
MattR
@Little Dreamer: But you seem to be justifying their fears as acceptable. People in other cities are just as scared of gang violence. And if they react out of fear and pass ridiculous lawsthat go completely overboard or which dont solve the actual problem, they get mocked here as well.
Rosali
@Little Dreamer:
What I’ve gathered from the comments above:
1. The border is a serious problem that should be addressed by the federal govt. Let’s push for immigration reform by Congress and the Obama administration.
2. The AZ bill may have been in reaction to an insecure border but does NOTHING to address the insecure border. It will result in racial profiling and harassment of legal residents and citizens.
3. If AZ passes a law that does nothing to secure the border but harasses law-abiding citizens and results in racial profiling, AZ should pay for it itself.
dc
New post up over at TBogg’s……here’s a snip…
“I have pretty much stayed away from saying anything about the Arizona “If They’re White, They’re Alright. If They’re Brown, Flag Them Down” law because I don’t think it is going to survive the tsunami (which is not a Mexican word) wave of lawsuits to come. But it looks like the Zonies have really stepped in it this time, and it’s time to roll out the Big Guns: ……”
ChockFullO'Nuts
@El Cid:
Im really sorry, I have no particular desire to have an unproductive argument, but your tack here is not convincing to me.
First of all, you deride the Closed Border as an experiment … whereas, in history, more tightly controlled borders are not unheard of in the relations between adjacent countries. I would not call that an untried experiment. Unless you are suggesting that no borders anywhere can be closed.
Then you propose … a giant socio-economic-policy experiment in which we try to reduce the atmospheric pressure at the border, with no idea exactly what the actual result would be.
I think the answer lies somewhere along a line between these two ideas. Yes, we can cooperate with Mexico and reduce the pressure at the border, both in the realm of human traffic and the realm of drug traffic. If we can get Mexico to cooperate and step up. They seem to be afraid of their own country down there, from what I can see. Then, we can tighten the physical border to whatever extent is feasable and practical.
According the numbers I heard the other day, twice as many illegal immigrants are coming today over as were doing so only a few years ago. That’s pretty daunting. It can’t go on while the federal government sits by and basically does nothing, then jumps all over the states for trying to deal with the problem. The political ramifications of that are just all the wrong kind of news for Dems. In case nobody noticed, considerable gains in the West helped provide the Obama electoral landslide a couple years ago. My opinion is that failing to deal effectively with this problem can erode or destroy those electoral gains out here.
I said the other day, the thing we are really up against in this country is a pervasive lack of faith in the capacity of government to solve problems. This situation is a fork in that road. Will government step up and do something that is seen as being effective and prudent, or will it hide in the corner until the people in the border states flip out?
BTW, Hardball fans, the famous sheriff interview is just a few mins away on the Hardball rebroadcast as I write. Listen to this guy and see if you think he is a redneck or just a reasonable person trying to do his job. I took him to be the latter when I heard it earlier today. Let’s see if I read it right.
Also, LD? This is BJ, nothing has changed here in the five years we have been here. Once the hyena pack starts its braying, anybody who opposes them is going to get his or her ass chewed off, that has never changed and never will. Don’t let these guys wear you down. Remember some of those old flame wars? Heh.
Turbulence
@Little Dreamer:
WTF? I’m not scared.
Eh? Are you the same person who wrote And, we have a recent murder in Southern Arizona that has everyone here scared to death. What about Are you aware of the deaths happening in Juarez everyday? Our newscasts are recounting this violence almost every night.? Did you write that? Or was that someone else? What about that area is getting scarier by the day and quite a lot of the violence is coming from there and migrating north or even the fact is, there is violence along the border, and unless you are living here and see the reports, you don’t believe it?
I’m talking about what’s happening at the border. I’m a couple hundred miles from the border.
Well, some commenter named Little Dreamer was really worried about violence near Phoenix. She even wrote the violence is pouring over the border now. Increases in violence in Phoenix. This is NOT a strawman. You people just aren’t hearing about it the way we do here. Maybe you should talk to her — she sounds pretty worried. I mean, I’d be worried if non-strawman violence was pouring over the border into Phoenix, wouldn’t you?
I’m not one to scare easily.
If only Little Dreamer was as courageous as you are.
So you go ahead, you play your fake outrage game, and you call me scared if you want. The fact is you’re not living in reality.
I haven’t said a damn thing about the bill or latinos. So I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been focused on trying to figure out if there is a real problem (based on data, not scary news stories) and how the federal government could “fix” the border per your request. On both counts, you’ve shown that you’re not serious about this issue. People who care about issues learn stuff about them. You don’t know anything, and you’re too cowardly to admit your own ignorance.
Corner Stone
@oliver’s Neck: This wasn’t what I was referring to, but if you think sustained and incredible violence doesn’t occur across into EP? You’re an idiot.
http://www.elpasotimes.com/newupdated/ci_11672249
ScottRock
@Little Dreamer: If the goal here is to compare situations ‘on the ground,’ so to speak, you’re right: i cannot speak to the southwest. I can, however, speak to where i live.
Phoenix, Arizona had ~106 murders in 2009, for a murder rate of ~7/100k. Cincinnati, Ohio had 60 murders in 2009, for a murder rate of ~18/100k. It was a good year for Cincinnati. Still, both cities returned very low murder rates, historically speaking.
Here’s another ranking [pdf]. Phoenix ranks 92nd; Cincinnati 19th. Needless to say, our Hispanic Immigrant population is basically zilch.
That you see murder “every night” on the news is a function of the fact that you are a bigger city than Cincinnati, and the fact that your primary source of information is the fucking nightly news. There are more total murders. The nightly news loves murders. This doesn’t speak to how safe your city is, on the whole.
I’m not saying that a murder rate of 7/100k is a good thing. But you don’t see people in Cincinnati adopting a bunker mentality (at least in the same ways that you are). Your response–allowing for the institution of slave patrols in order to “send a message” regarding a vaguely defined ‘threat’–is entirely disproportional to the actual, not perceived, threat of violence you experience. Your reaction is more indicative of the paranoia xenophobes can induce in a population than any grounded threat that immigrants pose.
Little Dreamer
@Rosali:
__
Okay, let me try this one more time:
Well, with the exception that we don’t KNOW if it will result in racial profiling except that if Joe Arpaio has his way it will probably happen (and I agree that would be the case, but the law hasn’t gone into effect yet, so we can’t say absolutely without a doubt that it will) I totally agree with all you said.
At the same time, the way to get rid of this stupid law is for the federal government to take responsibility for it’s own border and not leave it up to Arizona to do it.
As to the other replies that happened before this one:
I have seen people saying that the violence in Juarez isn’t really that bad (Cornerstone took up the cause and tried to set them straight as well), I have seen people stating that Arizona should pay for border security of a federal border and I have seen many people on here absolutely stating without a doubt that this law didn’t come from the failure of the federal government to secure it’s own border.
I’ve provided links to stories about the violence, I’ve stated that we see the pictures and stories out of Juarez nightly on Phoenix news. I stated a general feeling in Arizona that the border violence is scaring the general population (and just because I said “the murder [of a southern AZ rancher] has everybody scared” doesn’t mean I meant absolutely every single individual, but in general it is a consensus. I’m personally not scared, but, I have a tendency to walk into places where angels would fear to tread).
KRK
@Little Dreamer:
Wow. You’re right. I mean you’re nothing if not up for real debate.
I didn’t call you a supporter of the law. I have REPEATEDLY asked for some comment on today’s remarks by Sheriff Dupnik of Pima County that the law is “unnecessary” and “disgusting” and “racist.” This seems to pretty starkly contrast with both your skepticism in this thread about the negative impacts expected by those who oppose the law and your arguments that the law is an understandable, if not supportable, reaction to the federal government’s failure at controlling the border. That doesn’t give you pause? If not, why not? Is he some corrupt yokel? Does he have senile dementia?
As for the murdered rancher, you mentioned it repeatedly and said that it had “everyone here scared to death.” My mistake for thinking that meant you.
Yutsano
@Corner Stone: The effects on El Paso also include the fact that many of the citizens of Juarez are sending their loved ones over the border because El Paso is safer. If that doesn’t scream there’s a problem then you’re not paying attention.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
To ChockFullOfNazi:
Matthews was just on again and the officer you quoted as saying that “90%” of the people who they talk to during a stop identify themselves as illegal aliens actually said:
How in the fuck you get 90% out of that statement is beyond me when 51% would be just as valid an interpretation. Like I said earlier, you are a liar. You are stretching things to fit your narrative. End of story.
But you be sure to get that transcript to show me how wrong I am, ok? :)
Turbulence
Little Dreamer, since you are (so obviously) not scared at all, maybe you can explain to your AZ buddies, who apparently are really scared, all the stuff I wrote here. Just replace “Little Dreamer” with the names of your scared AZ buddies. Since you’re not scared at all, I take it you agree with me that public policy should be based on objective statistics and not tv-news inspired terror, right?
Little Dreamer
@Turbulence:
I’m not worried personally, I’m stating general consensus here in AZ, but you go on and keep misrepresenting what I was trying to say.
We’ve all said “everybody” and meant a large part of a certain population we were referring to at one time or another. It’s a common expression. Just because I said “everybody” doesn’t mean I meant absolutely everybody.
If I was scared, I wouldn’t be out driving the streets of Phoenix between 2 and 6 in the morning. I’ve heard gun shots when I’m driving on my route, I didn’t toss it up to illegal immigration (no, I decided some crazy asshole probably had too much to drink and was out harassing someone with his gun). I still go out every night and throw papers even though I know there is a potential for either getting into a car crash (lots of drunks out on the road at 2 am) or having some crazy individual do something nuts.
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
I’m afraid you’re going to have to provide those numbers, because the ones I’ve seen have all said that illegal immigration is down because of the economic downturn. And, yes, it applies to Arizona, too.
But, hey, those are just statistics from the Department of Homeland Security, so who are you going to believe, them or something you kinda think you might have heard?
ChockFullO'Nuts
So there was the rebroadcast, and this is what the Sheriff said:
” …. and nine time out of ten, (if they are here illegally, they just say so)….
The parentheses are mine, I didn’t catch the exact wording, but the meaning was very clear.
That may not be word for word, but the “nine times out of ten” is word for word, and some guy jerked me around earlier here claiming that I had made up that assertion and was a “fucking liar” because I remembered it as “90 percent of the time” and the man did not say “90 percent of the time.”
MattR
@Little Dreamer:
I think more people are saying that the violence in Juarez has not had as horrific effect on Arizona as you (and the media) are portraying. In fact, I would say there is a parallel to right wing politicians and the Arizona media using Juarez as an excuse to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment to right wing politicians and the national media using the fear of 9/11 (ie. terrorists will get WMD from Sadaam) to whip up anti-Iraq sentiment
jackie
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Do you have an example of a country that wasn’t a police state that controlled a 2000 mile border against a massive desire of people to cross it? I’m not being snotty. I can’t think of one where people were desperate to come for a chance to feed their familes and there was a organized crime organization making millions bringing drugs across. I understand the reason the people of border states are scared. I do not believe that trying to seal that border will convince people that government can be effective. That border can not be sealed. No amount of wishing will make it so. We can posture, we can pretend to do something, we can harass a few hundred/thousand folks. Republicans are good at macho gestures. The reason there is a mess is their ideas don’t work.
Mnemosyne
@Little Dreamer:
Please explain how allowing Arizona police to randomly arrest people anywhere in Arizona protects the border.
You keep stating this like it’s some kind of self-evident fact, like of course letting cops in Flagstaff arrest anyone who doesn’t have their birth certificate on them is an integral part of border control that should be paid for by the federal government.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Mnemosyne:
I think the quote was that there were twice as many illegal aliens here as there were just a few years ago. This stuck in my head mainly because I knew from prior research that the percentage of the total population that were aliens (total legal and illegal) had remained remarkably stable over the years, until recent times when it suddenly was said to have been going up. I was listening to MSNBC on the XM radio in the car so I didn’t catch the source, but I can try to find it. Also, to ElCid’s points, the reason for the rise was said to be “pressures” on the border brought about by the imbalance betwee economic opportunity on each side of the border … the greater the imbalance, the greater the pressure and the higher the immigration rate.
Whether this more precise recollection changes my earlier meaning, I will leave up to you, and if it does, then I withdraw the earlier blurb.
anonymous
@Rosali:
You forgot the Arizona-extorting-the-federal-government-to-violate-the-civil-rights-of-law-abiding-citizens part.
Little Dreamer
@Turbulence:
Turbulence, the problem isn’t that the tv is creating terror, the fact is the terror IS happening, right across the border, and it is migrating north into this country. That they are showing it on Arizona tv is only because it’s happening.
The Arizona rancher who was murdered became a big story because folks like John McCain got outraged. Arizona is a red state, unfortunately, and as a border state with a lot of mexicans trying to find opportunity here, those righties do scare easily. The problem isn’t so much that the violence isn’t happening, it’s that the border isn’t being secured.
No, I’m not one to scare easily, but then, I am also a Democrat who never believed that Muslims are scary people (I have a muslim friend who used to live here in Phoenix and was absolutely amazed that a white woman would befriend him because he’s not used to that – he’s since moved to another state, but he and I took a trip to the Grand Canyon together and had an absolutely lovely time). I also never believed that Saddam was harboring WMD or that Iraq was going to create a “mushroom cloud” missile to send to the US either.
Corner Stone
@Yutsano: Fuck you. You’re not even trying now, just arguing for some stupid fucking point.
Really? I’m not paying attention? One of my best friends in the world and I talk multiple times a week, and when I don’t hear from him or his wife I wonder if maybe they are dead…and I’m not paying attention?
Yeah, his wife has earned legal status and he travels back and forth every day for business.
I think I’m paying attention.
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts: So, again, my following the typical recommendation for immigration control is endorsing a vague and nebulous “social experiment”, and increased border security will simply be assumed to confront the problem, because other nations on Earth have been assumed to have controlled borders.
And should I point out the problems with this argument, it suggests my lack of faith in government’s power to act effectively.
Dang, you convinced me. SEAL THE BORDER!
MattR
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal): @ChockFullO’Nuts: I have no idea which of you is right, but can I just say “holy fuck”?!?!?
@Corner Stone: I am pretty sure Yutsano was agreeing with you.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Fuck you you lying liar, I just posted his EXACT words. Your adding quote marks to your post and then saying that they were your words but it was close to what he was saying tells me all I need to know about you.
You’re a lying fucking weasel.
@MattR:
Sure!
ChockFullO'Nuts
@jackie:
I’m no expert on sealing or not sealing borders.
However, the blurb I mentioned asserted that no call for immigration reform or path to citizenship had political viability with a porous border still in operation.
I can’t disagree with this. In fact, the pressure NOT to provide a citizenship path is considerable even if we stipulate a closed border as a hypothetical. So the point is, unless due diligence and good faith efforts are made to reduce the flow at the border, I don’t see meaningful immigration reform having much of a chance. I could be wrong, but the thing would be an experiment in the manner of ElCid’s hated “giant experiment” problem with sealing a border.
Now all of this is interesting fodder for discussion, but the immediate problem (here in Phoenix) is that the federal government is doing nothing. Call it cruel irony if you like, the conservatives who want less government interference are complaining that the government is not doing enough and rooting for a law that makes government more intrusive. What can you do? Well, Republicans obviously are not going to solve this problem, and I am stuck in a Republican state. How about if some bastion of progressive thought, you know, like West Virginia, steps up and takes the lead in suggesting a solution?
Okay, not West Virginia. Those poor souls have enough on their plate, maybe Montana. Maybe ….. Avalon. I don’t know.
Yutsano
@Corner Stone: Uhh…that was a general you, not a specific you. It’s been made very clear you are very well aware of the situation in both El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. Mea culpa for not being more clear.
Little Dreamer
@Mnemosyne:
I didn’t say that it did. I said that if we don’t have federal border protection, this is the kind of legislation that you get. I didn’t say I agreed with it. I’m not in support of the bill. I just see that if this bill is to be stopped, the only way to do it is by putting the responsibility for federal border protection on the federal government.
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Well, that’s kind of my point: I think that “sudden rise” was pure bullshit and the people who were saying that on the radio were lying to you, because every statistic I’ve ever seen says that whenever there’s an economic downturn in United States, the illegal immigration rate goes down, and this downturn has been no exception to that.
You’re assuming that even when we have 10% unemployment that economic opportunity is still better on this side of the border, and that’s just flatly untrue. Especially since the industry that was one of the biggest utilizers of illegal labor was the construction industry, which has been in the toilet for at least, what, 18 months now?
Short of extenuating circumstances (like the massive civil wars in Central America in the 1980s that displaced millions of people), illegal immigration goes up when the US economy is good and goes down when it’s bad. This downturn has been no exception.
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Obviously anyone who doubts that the border can be sealed by the persuasive force of people calling for the border to be sealed are people who opposed the sealing of the border.
Until we seal the border, it will not be possible to seal the border, because there is no responsible plan to seal the border which doesn’t involve sealing the border.
Those advocating weird crazy social experiments which involve policies other than sealing the border are failing to seal the border in pursuit of sealing border.
Needless to say, sealing the border would finally make sealing the border possible, at which point we could make efforts towards sealing the border.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
Fuck you, you lying sonofabitch. The man said Nine Times Out Of Ten and I said Ninety Percent of the Time, and you tried to make a big fucking deal out of it. That’s what happened, and you know it.
He said Nine Times Out Of Ten, I had another listener in the room, I didn’t imagine it. Nine times out of fucking ten. Nine times out of ten, get it you lying worthless POS?
NINE TIMES OUT OF TEN
Yes, there will be a transcript tomorrow and you can bet your sweet lying ass that I will post it.
Little Dreamer
@MattR:
Well, Juarez is not directly affecting AZ, but we have the same type of violence. The violence is apparently more prevalent in Juarez, and yes, I agree that the news stations are whipping up anti-immigration sentiment, but, the rancher murder here did that too, and that WAS a situation directly affecting AZ.
I think the news stations are just trying to show that what is happening in Juarez (the level of violence) could be headed here.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@El Cid:
You can play your word game all you like, but your policy measures are no less an experiment than is closing the border.
To paraphrase other posts here, when have these measures resulted in the results and effects that we desire?
Further, given the history of the Mexican government in this area, in what fantasy world do these widely accepted measures take place? Mexico appears to be a train wreck at the present time. We are a country that waves mountains of cash in front of Mexico to buy drugs, and then suggests that they control their drug traffic problem. How is that going to work exactly?
Little Dreamer
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
I heard it, he said “nine times out of ten”
He was talking about asking the person if they were here illegally and stated something to the effect that nine times out of ten they will just tell the cop that they are.
Mnemosyne
@Little Dreamer:
Look at the statistics I posted above from DHS. Illegal immigration is down. Less. There are fewer people coming over the border illegally than a few years ago.
And yet somehow this is evidence that the federal government isn’t doing enough and so now we have to stop people in the street and demand that they show their papers.
I understand that people have a feeling that they’re being invaded by illegal immigrants, but that feeling is not supported by the facts. What makes you think that this law will magically make people feel better when they’re already ignoring the facts?
Yes, cross-border drug wars are a huge and escalating problem, but it’s a law enforcement problem, not a “border control” problem. Checking the papers of every construction worker and nanny in Maricopa County isn’t going to do jack shit to fix it.
Comrade Kevin
I think I’ll listen to Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Tucson on this issue, rather than the two cretins who are pretending to not defend the law on this thread.
Does this person look like an “illegal”? If not, why not?
Turbulence
Little Dreamer, construction of a fence near San Diego has cost over $10 million per mile. If we wanted to a build a fence covering the Mexican border (which is what you described up thread), it would cost over $20 billion. Can you please confirm that you want the federal government to blow more than $20 billion building a fence?
jackie
@ChockFullO’Nuts: The feds aren’t doing nothing. What they are doing is not working. It can’t work. I agree that too many people nod along when they say seal the border and then we’ll talk about reform. Since the border can’t be sealed and no one can talk about a rational drug policy the problem will not be solved and you will live with the problem forever. Your fellow citizens will continue to elect people who have no interest in solving the problem and every few years will do somethig stupid and counterproductive. I don’t have a solution that isn’t all boring, wonky and slow and neither does anyone else.
Arizona can yell” fix it now” all it wants. We’ll get smarter or we will fail.
MattR
@Little Dreamer: I just listened and he said “more often than not”, “a lot of the time” and “nine times out of ten” in the same answer. (EDIT: it is about 5:30 or so in)
Little Dreamer
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
I think you stopped listening after “more often than not” because about a minute later, while finishing that answer, he said “nine out of ten times”.
You heard “more often than not” and you thought you won the argument and plugged your ears.
MattR
@Mnemosyne: It is the cousin of “the gov’t is coming to get your guns”
@Little Dreamer: Can you really blame him for turning Chris Matthews off as soon as possible?
Little Dreamer
@MattR:
You didn’t listen to the whole thing. If it isn’t being rebroadcast, I’m sorry, but you didn’t stick around long enough to hear it.
Okay, did you edit that, because I could have sworn you said you didn’t hear it. Hmmm. Apologies if I misstated what you wrote.
ChockFullO'Nuts
I think what I heard was some version of this story:
3:15 p.m. MT, Tues., Feb. 23, 2010
ATLANTA – When the Olympic Games came to Atlanta in 1996, a building boom transformed the landscape of downtown and brought with it an influx of Latino immigrants — both legal and illegal.
In the years since, the number of illegal immigrants living in Georgia has skyrocketed, more than doubling to 480,000 from January 2000 to January 2009, according to a new federal report. That gave Georgia the greatest percentage increase among the 10 states with the biggest illegal immigrant populations during those years. Many in metro Atlanta say the explanation for the boom is simple.
“It was because of jobs,” said Kathy Brannon, who worked for the suburban city of Chamblee for nearly 30 years. “That’s why people have come to this country since it started, for opportunity.”
North Carolina, another fast-growing Southeastern state during those years, is also one of the top 10 states for the sheer size of its illegal immigrant population, estimated at about 370,000 in January 2009 as compared to 260,000 in 2000, according to the report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics. The agency relied on data from the American Community Survey, a nationwide sampling conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The large immigrant populations in Georgia and North Carolina are largely Mexican and undocumented, said Jeff Passel, a senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center.
Nationwide, the report found that the illegal immigrant population grew 27 percent during the study period, though the numbers fell in the last two years. The population was 11.8 million in January 2007. It fell to 11.6 million in January 2008 and dropped to 10.8 million in January 2009. That coincides with the downturn in the U.S. economy, and demographers say the drop is likely to be temporary.
“If you look back over the last 20 years, the inflow of undocumented immigrants goes up and down with the U.S. economy,” Passel said.
“The only way you’re going to get the illegal immigrant population in Georgia to go down is to legalize them or get rid of the jobs,” said Dowell Myers, a specialist in demographic trends at the University of Southern California.
—–//
So I think I heard correctly, although the story is more complex than the sliver that stuck in my recollection. What I take from this is that the nationwide number grew by 27 percent, and that the distribution shifted toward the Southeast.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Little Dreamer:
The transcript will be up tomorrow, that will put and end to his bullshit.
MattR
@Little Dreamer: Did you not read my whole comment? I said that he said “nine times out of ten”
(EDIT: Nevermind. I see your edit. And no i did not edit that comment. Your brain may have pulled a DougL :) )
Corner Stone
@Yutsano: Ok, sorry about that. I read it like “I wasn’t paying attention”.
People here can call me a liar all they want, doesn’t change the reality of everyday life for a lot of people who don’t actually happen to be me.
My friend and his family have been scared to death for the last few years. Every day. His wife recently received legal status (she’s a lawyer if it matters) and they bought a home in the burbs of EP, TX.
He has business on both sides so every day is like a devil’s report card.
The law in AZ isn’t going to change any of this, better or worse. But people here blithely spouting accepted axioms.
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Okay, fine — then admit that both approaches are ‘social experiments’ because neither have been done before
But no — you have kept repeating about how the federal government just needs to enforce the borders and seal the borders etc as though there is any evidence that such efforts are likely to have a large impact on illegal immigration over the U.S-Mexico border.
I’m starting to think that to you, the notion of people using available evidence to suggest likely effective solutions to the problems under discussion here is a “social experiment”.
Hell, if it will make people feel better, sure, have all sorts of troops down there. Big equipment. Loud planes. Make a lot of noise when some busts are made. Spotlights. Air raid sirens. Whatever.
In what fantasy world does the U.S. change its drug control policies to reduce Mexican narco-barons incentives to ship to U.S. customers?
Why, I guess it’s the same fantasy world which thinks that the U.S. could seriously address the problem by adding border security.
These are the drug barons who send as-yet undetectable home-made submarines from Colombia and environs to Southwest Mexico. They fly small planes and ultralights over the U.S.-Mexico borders and drop packages along the coast. They place shipments in other FREE TRADE traffic and pay off border guards and police and soldiers to look the other way, and they do.
But we need to seal the border, and if we could only seal the border and liberals would get out of the way of sealing the border, than a sealed border would allow us to seal the border.
Little Dreamer
@Turbulence:
I’m not a fiscal conservative. I realize I’m in a minority. I believe in taxation to get services (I also believe that those who use more services and earn a lot more money should pay more for that ability).
I’m not balking at a 20 billion dollar price tag, although, I’m sure support for that kind of undertaking will probably not earn many kudos.
Salt and freshly ground black people
@SGEW: ppGaz aka ThymeZone aka ChockFullO’Nuts has been stirring shit up and topping it with sriracha hot sauce since I started reading this blog back in ’05. I wouldn’t take him too seriously. He likes no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners arguments just for the sake of arguing even when I suspect he doesn’t really believe all the crap he’s spouting.
Yutsano
@Corner Stone: I’ll take the blame for it, mostly because I wasn’t comfortable with the wording as it was but I still submitted it. I’ve seen stories about how horrible the situation in both Juarez and El Paso has gotten (though of course it only makes national news when American diplomats get killed, never mind the thousands living in terror every day and frightened out of their gourds to live their lives) and something needs to change in both American and Mexican policy. You’re correct that this will change nothing in Arizona.
handy
This “but we gotta do something!” attitude is the same one that got us bogged down in a war 7 years ago that we are still fighting. Flinging poop at problems like a bunch of agitated monkeys doesn’t get us anywhere near a solution.
Little Dreamer
@Corner Stone:
I was in El Paso the day Anna Nicole Smith died (Feb 8, 2007?). I was on my way to Arizona to be with TZ. I stayed in a Motel 6 right off I-10 (the border was right there across the highway) and I have to say, it was a very uncomfortable feeling, I could tell that something was not right in that area. (I’ve been through that area before and didn’t feel that insecure, I could tell something had changed).
Luckily I was only there for a night and I was on the road the next morning, driving through NM (and their “do not pick up hitchhikers” signs) and in Phoenix by the next evening.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Mnemosyne:
I posted what I think is the actual AP story that I referenced earlier, but Word Press has seen fit to eat the post. Sorry. I will try to repost it later and see if I can figure out what caused it to be eaten. With WP, one never knows, its behavior makes no sense.
Between WP, and some jackass calling me a liar for quoting a guy as saying Ninety Percent when he actually said Nine Out Of Ten, I am a little worn out.
What the AP article said is that a study through early 2009 showed illegal immigrant population (not rate) was up nationwide 27 percent over the period, and much more sharply up in the Southeast because the distribution was shifting toward the Southeast where jobs were plentiful during the period. Along those lines.
I am pretty sure that the population figures are much more stable than the influx rates are, so we may have been talking apples and oranges.
If WP lets me I will try a repost of that story later, but was AP and dated February 23 2010, and from the MSNBC website
Corner Stone
@MattR: I see that now, and apologized for my remarks to Yutsano. It didn’t read like that to me, wonderfulness of intertrons communications, etc.
El Paso is better than Juarez. But increasingly the bad guys just don’t give a shit where they spray.
Little Dreamer
@Salt and freshly ground black people:
It would be kind of hard for him to not believe what he says when I read it and assume he believes what he says (and he proves to me that he does).
You don’t know who you are talking about, and you have to say these things behind a name nobody recognizes. Yeah, I got your number!
MattR
@Corner Stone: Heh. I have to monitor myself when communicating on the Internet because I have a dry, sarcastic sense of humor
(EDIT: And I am just replying to get us over 400 comments by midnight PST)
Salt and freshly ground black people
@Little Dreamer: Whatever – my old handles were ominira and iluvsummer if it makes you feel any better. And I think he can speak for himself.
Mnemosyne
@jackie:
That’s what’s so frustrating — “sealing the border” is one of those great catchphrases that conservatives use to avoid dealing with the underlying causes and they have managed to convince a certain percentage of the population that nothing can be done until we completely militarize the border. Even simple, effective things like increasing penalties for the employers of illegal workers.
If you really want to get a blank look from a conservative, bring up the fact that illegal immigration soared far above any previous level in the 1980s because we were supporting the wrong side of multiple civil wars in Central America and people were trying to get the fuck out so they wouldn’t be murdered by death squads. We’re still dealing with the consequences of the Reagan administration’s decision that people in danger of being killed by left-wing death squads could get asylum in the US but people in danger of being killed by right-wing death squads were dangerous Commies who needed to be deported back to their justified executions.
Yutsano
@Corner Stone:
This. We’re dealing with people (and this does apply to Arizona here) who are choosing to either ignore or willingly flout the law for ultimately selfish gains. The real question is how do we remedy the situation so that all can benefit instead of just being punitive for its own sake?
Plus as an aside, it’s not like we haven’t argued for no good reason in the past before. Okay the NFL is a good reason but still…
@MattR: I suppose I’ll have to cut you a check as well. :)
Little Dreamer
@Salt and freshly ground black people:
Don’t remember those names, sorry.
I’m sure he will speak for himself if/when he finishes posting whatever current post he’s making and doesn’t decide that he’s done.
Citizen_X
@Yutsano: Am I #400?
EDIT: Woo hoo! I am! Well before 12 PST, too!
EDIT II: Oh, I suppose I should say something useful, so here goes: Illegal immigration and Mexican drug wars are two different problems that don’t really overlap all that much. So don’t conflate them by talking about how the AZ law is needed because Juarez is crazy violent, etc.
Yutsano
@Citizen_X: BINGO!
El Cid
The Congressional Research Service based on the Census’ Current Population Survey and American Community Survey has illegal immigration (resident unauthorized aliens) at 8.4 million in the year 2000, peaking at 12.5 million in 2007, declining to 10.8 million in 2009.
PDF here.
Arizona is estimated to have had 330,000 resident unauthorized aliens in 2000 and 560,000 in 2008. Illinois followed Arizona with 440,000 in 2000 and 550,000 in 2008.
There is also argument in the paper that increased border crackdowns may have increased the resident unauthorized alien population, given that individuals who may have followed work back and forth now had a greater incentive to remain within the United States and send remittances back.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@El Cid:
You aren’t arguing in good faith here. I am talking about controlling the flow over the border. How that gets done, and what the results are, not my area of expertise, and I don’t think they are yours either. But keep harping on it, it’s really helpful.
The point I clearly stated was unless that flow, the rate of that flow, is under control then trying to fashion something called Immigration Reform is in big trouble. Politically, dead in the water. How do you create a path to immigration reform that is any good (path to citizenship, and all that) when you can’t show that the flow at the border is under some kind of control, manageable, predictable?
I posed basically that question earlier and all I can get from you is that you think it is crazy to talk about sealing the borders.
Fine, it’s crazy to talk about sealing the borders. Now what? Are you suggesting that a political path to immigration reform can be constructed with no control over what is happening at the border? Is that your argument, or are you arguing that your version of the experiment is the right one and mine is the wrong one? I can sort of make that out of your rants, but it appears to me that you have the same empirical evidence for your scheme’s chances of success that I have for mine. In other words, not much.
We both know that economic pressures and imbalance drive the rate of immigration. I said this here several years ago, I am not unfamiliar with the concept. However, we can’t really control that imbalance. Not much on our side, not at all on the other side of the border. And then bottom line, Mexico seems to be a completely hapless and unstable partner in this situation.
So …. now what? You said that you advocated reforms. What’s the path to those reforms? Policy experiments with an unstable border partner? Help me out here.
MattR
@Yutsano:
After watching the congressional hearings today, please don’t.
And now the question is: will we get to 500?
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
My question with that would be what they’re considering to be the “population.” Are they counting the (American citizen) children that people had since coming here as boosting that population?
It sounds pretty much like I was saying, though: when the housing bubble was in full swing and there were a lot of jobs for illegal workers, you had a lot of people coming here for work. When the work dried up, they went home. Which, again, to me points out that the only possible way to make a difference in the immigration rate is to increase penalties on employers, not workers.
MattR
@ChockFullO’Nuts: IMO, the easiest and most practical solution would be a crackdown on those who employ illegal immigrants. But I also acknowledge that there is little political will for that and that it has to include a better mechanism for employers to verify the authenticity of documents presented to them.
Lovely Rita
This thread makes me really sad. I can’t believe some of the stupid, closed minded, FDL like shit I have heard here tonight.
I have lurked and occasionally commented here since 2007 and ThymeZone (other incarnations include TheHatOnMyCat, ThugOfMeat, SrirachaHotSauce and CFON) and Little Dreamer have been here since I came here. I don’t agree with them on everything, far from it. In fact, they are sometimes too “left” for my taste.
What they are not are racists, Republicans, crazy lunatics, or people divorced from reality, as I have seen so many accuse them of tonight. People who claim to know something about this community. You idiots don’t even know it’s members and are painting stalwart Dems as “freepers” because you don’t even know your own community.
John, you should know better. You know TZ isn’t a racist freeper and not only encouraged this but then made a new post ridiculing him. The echo chamber tonight was deafening. Sound and fury signifying nothing.
What TZ is saying is that like it or not, there is a cisis at our border with Mexico that we are not dealing with. It is a fedreal problem, as it is an international border and needs a federal solution. Congress is fucking around because no one outside of the border states sees this for the crisis it is because it’s not up close and personal. TZ and Little Dreamer are asking for the help of non border state residents to get their Congressional representation to act, because the border states don’t have the representation to force action at the federal level. Until this problem at the border is dealt with in a real way, you are going to see knee jerk reactions from desperate people.
“When people are thirsty and there is no water, they will drink the sand.”
Give the people of Arizona a workable solution and federal help with dealing with our international border with Mexico or we will keep seeing dumbshit laws because people want action. Get off your asses and realize that this is a federal problem and call Congress and make them do something.
TZ and Little Dreamer, thanks for bringing my attention to the seriousness of what’s going on down there.
I was really embarrassed for a lot of you tonight.
Yutsano
@MattR: Didn’t Arizona already try this? I do believe they employed the federal verification system (the name of it escapes me right now) and that was supposed to take care of the illegal hiring issue. IIRC it also included some stiff penalties for the employer side of the equation. If that somehow was insufficient, the next step is Breathing while Brown?
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
That’s a good point. Until we do something that appears really difficult to do and you don’t have any particular suggestions of how to do it, nothing will get done.
Still, we need to do it, and anyone arguing for approaches constantly recommended by those studying immigration issues are weird nebulous social experiments.
So what we need to do is not argue in bad faith, and we need to control the flow of people over the border. Somebody needs to figure out how to do that, but even more importantly, it needs to be done now.
I agree. We need to control the flow of people over the U.S.-Mexico border. I demand that we control the flow of people over the U.S.-Mexico border. Until we control the flow of people over the border, we’re not going to have control over the flow of people over the border.
A big step might be to get people to demand that we control the flow of people over the border, because that might be a way of making someone think of how we can control the flow of people over the border.
So are we going to do this or not? And whether or not we know what to do, why hasn’t it been done yet?
Mnemosyne
@El Cid:
The funny part, of course, is that I guarantee you that at least 30,000 of those new unauthorized aliens were Polish, not Mexican/Central American, and probably more.
Because, as I hope we are all aware here, not every illegal worker is Latino/a. Not even close. As my dad always said, one of the reasons that Ted Kennedy was such a huge supporter of immigration reform was because of all of the illegal Irish aliens in Boston that were related to his constituents.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Not sure what to make of this interesting tidbit. According to your posts, “crackdowns” have the effect of slowing repatriation …. but crackdowns intended to slow emigration from Mexico would not work. Or something. So the crackdowns only increase the immigrant population because they only slow down the flow at the border in one direction …. out, but not in.
I dunno, that’s getting a little campy for me. Approaching the bizarre.
So, let’s just say, the liars can figure and the figures can lie, and all that. But if you are a rancher in Patagonia, AZ (where my earlier posted picture of the verdant hills was taken) …. and you wake up to a passel of people camped out in your bushes, what are you supposed to make of all this? Whose demagoguery do you believe? What drives you to trust government to know what it is doing and act in your interests?
Can you see that guy’s situation? Because he is down there yelling like hell that the thing is just horribly broken.
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne: Whoopi Goldberg, for all her faults, put up a very good point the other day. She mentioned that there are thousands of folks from Europe and Asia who are here on visas that expired years ago. I wonder how many of these people are going to end up in trouble in Arizona now?
handy
That was awesome.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@El Cid:
Well, you are having a lot of fun there, but people down here aren’t laughing. They see what appears to be (a) a big problem and (b) a federal government paralyzed and impotent.
I basically come to this with a lifelong faith in the capacity of government to solve problems and serve the needs of the people, and I don’t know what to tell them.
And quite honestly, I don’t see how your funny schtick helps anything. What do you say to these people? This is a political vacuum and right now the Republicans are rushing in there to fill that vacuum, presumably with empty promises.
How do we compete?
Little Dreamer
@Citizen_X:
Except that the drug war is not directly held back by our border. Those drug warriors pour over our border because they want to get their product to people on this side of the border, and sometimes people get killed, like the rancher in Southern AZ who I linked a story about earlier.
The fact is, the television stations here are conflating the drug war and the immigration subject. I was just mentioning that Arizona tv shows this violence quite often and we’ve had incidents on this side of the border that were directly related to the drug war and immigration (perhaps not real immigration, but people stepping over the border to make a buck).
Mnemosyne
@Lovely Rita:
But it’s not a crisis that this law will affect. At all. It’s a cross-border war that requires the US to work closely with Mexico, not an illegal immigration problem that we can solve single-handedly.
I realize that people will grasp at stupid, unworkable solutions like “seal the border” in a case like that, but why are we supposed to stroke their egos and pretend that it’s going to work? How is arresting landscapers and nannies in Phoenix going to solve the problems with drug cartels in Juarez and El Paso?
I’m sorry, but this “we have to do SOMETHING even if it’s completely useless” attitude is one of the reasons we’re in the mess we are today, and I’m not limiting that to just illegal immigration. Less symbolic posturing, more actual action that accomplishes something, plz.
MattR
.@Yutsano: I have no idea what Arizona is currently doing. But any ID system is bound to fail if you don’t identify and investigate companies that hire people off the books (ie. without caring about or checking identification). You could put microchips in every person authorized to work here and there would still be companies hiring people without microchips if the risk/reward stays the same as it is now. (EDIT: Which is what capitalism dictates)
ChockFullO'Nuts
I dont know, I didn’t see that in the story. I think my post never made it out of mod hell but you can see the text yourself up there at 383 if it ever comes out of moderation. Or you can see it at MSNBC.
I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that the children born here are citizens and don’t get counted as aliens. But the story doesn’t address that, does it? I don’t think so.
Yutsano
@Little Dreamer: If anyone is saying that what Arizona is going through (I was down there two weeks ago and I saw what a huge issue this was) is exaggerated or overblown, they don’t know what they’re talking about. The issue I’m having is that the solution being proposed will not solve it. You have every right to demand some sort of action, you also have the right to demand the actions actually correct your problems. Maybe border patrols do need to be increased in the Arizona area, maybe there are some creative ideas out there that need to be tried. This law just seems like an overreaction that will lead to even more problems.
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Are you serious? Is there anyone who would read that and not assume that this related to basic economic incentives, i.e., that the potential reward for risking capture to enter the United States and gain income versus having no or little income in Mexico was higher than the potential reward versus risk for returning to Mexico?
That seems “campy” to you? Would this mean that an economics textbook sounded like a drag queen stage show to you? And UN reports on migration and employment patterns a Liza Minelli impersonation fest?
I’m not against increasing border security. Of course it should be done. And if it would help, do so visibly. Make sure it’s not just about effective policies but effective displays.
But will it prevent that rancher from finding refugees hiding on his property? Maybe, from time to time. Maybe that rancher will feel more that something is being done. Especially if there’s a really strong response when such a thing is reported. But it won’t really keep this from happening to ranchers a lot.
I’m against talking like increased border security is likely to have a major impact upon illegal immigration or narco-trafficking or border crossing narco-violence. Not because of ideology, but because of realism.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Mnemosyne:
Inclined to agree with you, but if the alternative to doing anything is doing nothing, then I think Arizona is going to opt for doing something …. We won’t sit here and eat shit and pray to Jesus, we are not West Virginia.
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
It would be nice if he could at least realize that they’re there because all of those entrepreneurial home developers in Maricopa County decided it would be cheaper to use illegal labor during the housing bubble and then ran like hell when it collapsed.
It won’t solve his immediate problem — a call to the Border Patrol is what his immediate need is — but it would be nice if we could get people to connect the dots and realize that people come here illegally to get work because employers will illegally give them jobs.
Illegal immigration is like prostitution: you can arrest the prostitutes all you like, but you won’t actually make a dent in the problem until you start arresting the johns. And the employers of illegal workers are the johns who are creating the market.
Little Dreamer
@Yutsano:
I don’t support the bill and I agree that it will not solve the situation. I am saying this bill happened because it was a reaction to the border situation not being tended.
A crazy reaction, yes – but, right wingers see “stop a latino in Phoenix and get one more illegal off the street” as a solution, even though it’s not.
I agree with TZ that all who are here right now should be given amnesty and we should be working on trying to minimize the ones that are coming over after that.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Okay, I was being kind. It sounds like mumbo jumbo horsehit, my friend.
Look at it politically. How do you fashion any political solution unless you can prop up some plan that at least attempts to control …not influence … the flow at the border?
And how do you take those highminded policy measures and turn them into some proposed actual measurable effect at the border? And how long does that take? And what do you do in the meanwhile, while you are waiting for the effects to kick in and measure them? Even if you are right, and they will work, how long will that take? How does that look any different to the average moke here in the US from “they will greet us as liberators?”
I am serious.
Yutsano
@Little Dreamer:
Fixed that for you. I wish it weren’t so, but denying the racist component to the teabagger’s solution won’t bring about getting to a more workable answer. I’m ambivalent about the total amnesty solution, although I think time in the country should have some say in the answer. I also think back taxes (from both the immigrant AND the employer, after all they’re not exactly volunteering their portion of FICA here) should be part of that as well.
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts: My “funny schtick” is on a fucking political blog named “Balloon Juice” where commenters with pseudonyms come to bitch about shit. My guess is that serious and comprehensive solutions to illegal immigration and cross-border narco-trafficking will generally have some other provenance for public discussion. Just a guess.
But people are hurting and the Republicans are eating it all up, maybe Democrats should compete in the false solutions arena, right? I mean, if people who are hurting don’t want to hear realistic and well-thought out albeit imperfect approaches, then, hell, give ’em what they want!
Have Democrats promise them 10 foot tall genetically engineered border patrol agents with laser vision; underground robot burrowing Mexican detectors; deputize every fast food joint and gas station and grocery store to scan and analyze everyone’s birth certificate upon entry.
If they want the federal government to be less paralyzed and impotent, how about they stop electing people whose purpose is to make the federal government paralyzed and impotent?
Is Barack Obama supposed to redeploy several hundred thousand troops from Iraq and Afghanistan to the border? Admittedly, this would likely be much more popular among both troops and people, and would arguably do more good or less harm, but somehow I don’t see Republicans and ‘states rights’ folks lining up for this either, not to mention all the warhawks around wanting us to stay in both places until eternity arrives.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Mnemosyne:
I will partly agree with you. Illegals today are pretty adept at getting and using fake credentials. I can take you to a strip mall where you can buy yourself a fake ID here in Phoenix, and get yourself ready to hit the street with your new ID. Employers are not detectives and won’t spend a lot of money to investigate minimum wage workers.
But there has to be the will to enforce at the employer level, and in a down economy, going into a workplace and trashing jobs and arresting bosses doesn’t look too good on tv. And this problem has existed for all of life, which is well over six decades. Why is this approach suddenly going to work? Why will the authorities now decide that this is the way to go? Is John McCain going to come down to the plant and lead the charge?
I can’t think of a politician who wants to touch this.
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
The alternative isn’t to do nothing. The alternative is to crack down on employers and reduce the demand for illegal workers (which, not incidentally, would make it easier to differentiate the narco-terrorists from the poor saps just looking for work).
But that would hit quite a few Republican voters, so that’s a total non-starter in Arizona. Better to shit on the workers again than do anything to discomfit the employers who lure them there. As long as there are johns circling the neighborhood with money in hand, you’re going to have whores on your street corners, and no amount of stopping them to check their papers is going to change that.
Really, this all ties in with what DennisG has been saying for weeks: a big chunk of our economy has always been built on slave labor, whether that was literal slaves, poorly-paid sharecroppers, or the modern equivalent, illegal workers. Until we confront that, we’re going to have this same fight over and over again because employers are going to continue trying to find cheap labor and circumvent labor laws because that’s the American way.
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Then you’re just willfully being an obtuse dumbass, and if you were on a committee reviewing such serious research you sound like you’d write something like “we don’t need yer damn pointy-head ivory tower la-di-da no way” on your comment section.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Um, no, how about a real solution? If I had one I’d post it.
I assume you’d do the same.
In the absence of solutions, sitting around and throwing grenades at authorities who are thrashing around and trying something doesn’t seem very useful.
Like I said earlier, the famous law is a throwdown to the federal authorities to get them to do something. I have a hunch that they will do something. I don’t tend to catastrophize over such things.
Comrade Kevin
Keep digging, “ChockFullONuts/ThymeZone,AngusTheGodOfMeat/whatever other 50 names you use”/”Little Dreamer”. Enjoy your cesspool.
California tells you to go fuck yourself.
Corner Stone
A side note, not relevant to the AZ bill –
Years ago (and years and years), when I was a young teen hunting on a few thousand acres South of Rocksprings, TX ( at some points about 20 miles away from the Mex border), we used to stock the line cabins with candles, blankets, canned goods on the table before we left.
One time a business partner of the guy who owned the lease asked us what we were doing.
When we told him the supplies were for the illegals coming across he grew indignant, belligerent. Threw a fit about it, called us a bunch of names and demanded we not do what we were doing.
When we calmly explained that they were coming anyway, and the supplies not only helped them, but kept some from tearing the place up looking for usable material he was not any happier about it.
There’s a modern allegory there but I’m too tired to make it.
*there was nothing better – NOTHING – better than trying to wash yourself with pumped well water in the dead ass cold winter of West Texas. You want to talk about merciless?
ChockFullO'Nuts
@El Cid:
If it is such a good idea then surely you can write up a quick description of what their “solution” might look like, in response to my pretty sensible questions about it. Right?
Or is fucking with me all you can all night? What else you got?
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne: You know what? We’re the DFHs. We’re the fucking adults in this room. Beneath all the bluster and sniping I have seen good workable solutions and compromises here that don’t involve treating a whole class of people like criminals. Now what we need to do is take the talk and turn it into action. This becomes the hard part, although oddly enough I think part of the answer is getting Hayworth to win the primary then get a decent Dem to run against him. Then hopefully the Democratic candidate for governor (who’s leading but not by much) will get into office and very slowly we’ll get to where we were when Ellis Island was a place of refuge for millions and not a museum.
Comrade Kevin
@ChockFullO’Nuts: You own this clusterfuck, asshole. Your dumbass state passed this piece of shit, don’t try to push it off on us. Go fuck yourself.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Comrade Kevin:
Fuck you, man. Do you have something useful to say, or are you just into this kind of crap?
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Exactly. No politician wants to tackle the actual problem — the employers — because the employers vote. So instead we’ll continue to get all kinds of bullshit nibbling around the edges that will never, ever solve the problem because the problem is us, not them.
So I guess I’m with El Cid at this point: if we’re going to give the people completely bullshit solutions that will do absolutely nothing, why stop at checking everyone’s papers? Let’s just propose implanting a chip in the right hand of every American citizen.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Comrade Kevin:
I own the thing? Why, because I have never voted for a Republican in this state in 43 years of voting? How do I own it?
Actually, I am a native Californian, not an Arizonan. And California is in a great position to be lecturing people in any other state how to run a fucking state. Are you kidding me?
Clean up your own completely dysfunctional backyard, asshole.
Kiss my entire ass.
Wile E. Quixote
Fucking ChockFullO’Nuts. The whiny little punk-ass bitch hasn’t said one goddamned word about my proposal to solve Arizona’s problem with illegal immigrants. Obviously Chock is against my proposal because he’s a punk-ass bitch who likes to hire illegal immigrants to work in his yard, and therefore would end up taking two in the back of the head and being dumped into a mass grave because he’s part of the problem.
Chock is against those vanloads of illegals going a hundred miles an hour down the freeways day and night, unless of course they’re coming to work in his yard. In which case you’d better plan on dodging, because Chock does love him some cheap yardwork.
Comrade Kevin
@ChockFullO’Nuts: You will keep getting it until you own your own state’s shit.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Mnemosyne:
The chip thing makes more sense than relying on pieces of paper that can be faked by any high school kid, don’t you think?
We use it for dogs, but as we know from reading BJ, dogs are more valuable than people.
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Sure, they’ll do “something.” It won’t be useful, and it won’t solve the problem — in fact, it will probably make the problem worse — but at least the feds will be able to say they did “something.”
Comrade Kevin
@ChockFullO’Nuts: You live in Arizona, your legislature, your problem. Don’t push it off on anyone else. You fucksticks elected them, not me.
Little Dreamer
@Comrade Kevin:
Funny!
I suppose when we go to San Francisco in two weeks, we’ll find the doors to the hotel and the restaurants where we want to spend money closed?
I am absolutely fascinated at the knee jerk reaction by certain people on this blog today.
California? You mean the California that has their own immigration problems and even less money than Arizona to fix anything, let alone immigration? THAT CALIFORNIA?
Hilarious!
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Comrade Kevin:
Really? Then you own the complete and epic fail of your state’s ability to govern itself? Paying its employees with IOUs?
And from that lofty perch of complete and abysmal failure, you will lecture people in other states about how to conduct their affairs?
Wait, are you really Arnold Shwarzenegger in disguise?
You big lug.
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Sorry, I forgot to put in the link to make the joke obvious. I’ve added it now.
Comrade Kevin
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
The voters of California own it, of which I am one, yes. And?
eponymous
ChockFullO’Nuts,
“You aren’t arguing in good faith here. I am talking about controlling the flow over the border. How that gets done, and what the results are, not my area of expertise, and I don’t think they are yours either. But keep harping on it, it’s really helpful.”
Well, I’ve waded through this trainwreck of a post and this is the first mention from you about controlling the flow over the border.
“The point I clearly stated was unless that flow, the rate of that flow, is under control then trying to fashion something called Immigration Reform is in big trouble. Politically, dead in the water. How do you create a path to immigration reform that is any good (path to citizenship, and all that) when you can’t show that the flow at the border is under some kind of control, manageable, predictable?”
Well, as others have metioned repeatedly, one step would be to create a disincentive for people to cross the border illegally. And I think any decent immigration reform would include steep penalties to employers who hire illegal workers (higher fines and even jail time would help). This would be applicable for the entire US and would help out border states as they are often used as points of entry to other areas within the US. This would, in turn, free up resources to combat the problem of people entering the country illegally (such as those associated with drug trafficking).
“I posed basically that question earlier and all I can get from you is that you think it is crazy to talk about sealing the borders.”
Because you haven’t provided any concrete proposals that would effectively do so. Other than the federal government needs to address the problems at the border.
“Fine, it’s crazy to talk about sealing the borders. Now what? Are you suggesting that a political path to immigration reform can be constructed with no control over what is happening at the border?”
See above – if you create a disincentive for people to immigrate to the country illegally (most of them here are trying to survive, and guess what? people here in the US are paying them money for work that allows them to survive), then you’ve effectively reduced the number of people (potential illiegals) who will cross the border. There’s part of the flow control issue covered.
“Is that your argument, or are you arguing that your version of the experiment is the right one and mine is the wrong one? I can sort of make that out of your rants, but it appears to me that you have the same empirical evidence for your scheme’s chances of success that I have for mine. In other words, not much.”
See, my proposal isn’t really an experiment, becaue we already have laws that make it illegal for people to hire workers that are not in this country legally. It’s just that the penalities aren’t that steep for those who hire illegal workers.
“We both know that economic pressures and imbalance drive the rate of immigration. I said this here several years ago, I am not unfamiliar with the concept. However, we can’t really control that imbalance.”
Sure we can – make it a disincentive for people to immigrate to the US illegally. If illegals wishing to come to the US know that they can’t obtain work (because the penalties for hiring illegals are steep), then they won’t come here.
“Not much on our side, not at all on the other side of the border. And then bottom line, Mexico seems to be a completely hapless and unstable partner in this situation.
So …. now what? You said that you advocated reforms. What’s the path to those reforms? Policy experiments with an unstable border partner? Help me out here.”
That’s were comprehensive immigration reform comes in. If we (as a country) still want to have a immigrant workforce (one that is legal), make it easier for people who want to come here and work get a work visa (or some other status), so long as its a process that makes controlling “the flow across the border” manageable.
Comrade Kevin
@Little Dreamer: Hey, California hasn’t passed a “Papers, Please, you Spics” law. Your state has.
Mnemosyne
@Yutsano:
Sadly, I’m not too hopeful with that. Notice that the two people posting here who could actually put your dream of a Democratic senator from Arizona into action don’t think there’s any need to do it. All they want is to feel like The Government Is Doing Something even if that Something is completely pointless.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Hey, I totally agree. But the fact that you and I agree that this is good is not going to get it done. We live in a real political atmosphere, whatever we do has to be sellable to some pretty big segment of the population.
I have no idea how to get that done. I hope that the smart folks in the White House come up with one. And I hope they do it soon because I think we lose seats in November and it only gets harder.
I further think that this is a golden opportunity to devise and pass such a plan and that doing this the right way helps us considerably in November. My personal preference is for the most open border possible, but I believe that anything that looks like that is political suicide. I could be wrong about that though.
Wile E. Quixote
ChockFullO’Nuts
You know Chock old buddy, if California weren’t being fucked in the ass by the federal government by receiving 78 cents in federal spending for every dollar they send to Washington D.C., they’d be a lot better off. If California could stop sending money to useless states such as Arizona, a state which is full of filthy, dirty, lazy white shit golems such as yourself who suck down 1.20 in federal spending for every dollar they pay in taxes they could fix a lot of their problems. Of course that would mean that Arizona would be fucked, but let’s face it, you’re fucked anyways because you’re stupid human garbage in a state full of human garbage that can’t survive without massive federal subsidies and cheap labor provided by the illegal immigrants you’re bitching about.
Comrade Kevin
@Wile E. Quixote: Don’t confuse the man, it might interrupt the mowing pattern on his golf course.
Comrade Kevin
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Of course your are. And some of your best friends are Latinos.
Go Fuck Yourself.
Little Dreamer
@Comrade Kevin:
The state that I live in has passed a law that I don’t agree with, so you’re attacking me because…?
Careful there, you may just realize that you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face by trying to heap me in with a bunch of reactionary right wingers.
Look, you want to get mad at AZ for passing this law, I get that, but if people from AZ who vote Democrat want to debate this and state we have a situation here that needs fixing, getting pissed at us and treating us like right wingers isn’t going to convince us that you’re not crazy.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Mnemosyne:
Right, two Democrats posting from Arizona are the reason why you are stuck with Republican senators from Arizona.
I already addressed that point, and your reference to that here is just bullshit, just complete bullshit.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Comrade Kevin:
What is your fucking problem, man? Are you drunk, or what?
You sound like a crazy person. I OWN the politics of the state I live in? What kind of stupid nonsense is that?
Wile E. Quixote
@ChockFullO’Nuts
Well more valuable than people like you anyways. I mean if I were driving down the street and had the choice between hitting a dog or swerving and hitting you I wouldn’t think twice. And if there weren’t any witnesses I wouldn’t think twice about backing up over you to finish the job and then dragging you off into the bushes and taking your wallet.
I mean if I ran over a dog I’d feel bad about it and the dog’s owner would feel bad about it. If I ran over you I’d feel bad about it, because it would ding up my car and I might have to get a front-end realignment, but outside of that no one would care.
Midnight Marauder
@Lovely Rita:
This is hilarious to me. So after the people of Arizona elected a legislature that makes it a priority to criminalize looking like an “illegal” immigrant in their state, and their governor signs it (because we keep hearing from a certain someone about how popular this thing is with the cowering
bigotssheeple…), we are then supposed to turn around and give them a “workable solution” to outright racism? Are you being fucking serious? Do you even understand how nonsensical this “request” is on its face? Think about what you are asking in this situation:Just some of the dumbest logic I’ve ever heard. Because remember, that’s what this entire conversation is about, Arizona asking the federal government to help them prepare and train law enforcement officers to apply a rule that is egregiously unconstitutional.
That’s a lot of time to hash out an argument that is, essentially, nonexistent.
Little Dreamer
@Wile E. Quixote:
Put the whiskey bottle down, you’re embarrassing yourself.
We’re supposed to take this seriously?
The level of federal funding is a valid point, but, you lose when you resort to this shit you posted above.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Wile E. Quixote:
What the hell is the matter with you?
Seriously.
What is the matter with you?
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Wile E. Quixote:
You’re crazy, man. Honestly.
Mnemosyne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
No, I was replying to Yutsano’s claim that your state may actually have a decent chance of electing a Democrat this year since Hayworth is so insane. But, as I told him, it looks like you don’t have any interest in getting a Democrat elected even if the opportunity appears and would rather bitch on the internet about how the gardener down the street is causing narco-terrorism in Juarez, so I doubt the Democrat has a chance even with an opponent as batshit crazy as Hayworth.
Little Dreamer
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Apparently Wile E. Quixote and Comrade Kevin have been drinking together.
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t know who you are nor do I find you interesting — I didn’t start commenting here regarding you and I don’t weigh visiting Balloon Juice on what does and doesn’t persuade you of anything.
And “if it is such a good idea” and so forth — there is not one “solution” to the problem. That’s because it’s not just “one” problem, though it often does sound like it is. Proposed solutions mentioned repeatedly on this blog are largely the same as recommended by the commission originally launched by George H. W. Bush.
Here, for example, is Rep. Gutierrez’ Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity. There are a lot of parts to it, but then there would have to be.
That’s without addressing such crucial related issues as the structure of trade agreements with Mexico and other Central American / Caribbean nations which often serve to displace both U.S. and foreign workers and industries, and of course the decriminalization of drugs.
But maybe you’re right, and that this AZ “existing while looking foreign” law might spur the federal government into effective action, taking care of the problem without having to do all the tedious and detailed stuff typically recommended and which would require comprehensive legislation drawn up which wouldn’t be blocked by the Neo-Confederate Filibuster Party.
Comrade Kevin
@Little Dreamer: nice way of avoiding replying.
Little Dreamer
@Mnemosyne:
__
Umm, who opened the bar and didn’t inform me and TZ?
You guys are all acting crazy now.
I think I shall leave you all to your booze and your anger. Holding a real conversation here just became impossible.
terry chay
@Little Dreamer: I wasn’t the one who claimed across the board that Blue States give more than they get in taxes and Red States do the reverse. You called bullshit on someone else’s post and were humiliated by facts. (By the way, your argument that New Mexico isn’t “true blue” actually is an argument against you as New Mexico is one of the few “blue” states that receives more money than it pays in taxes.)
The statement of the original poster as provided was factually correct: Arizona already receives more money than it pays in taxes.
As for “true blue”? What the fuck is that? There are pockets of blue in red states (Austin, Salt Lake City, Park City). I’m pretty sure if we do a breakdown of California, we’ll find the counties that give more than they get are nearly all VERY blue (since those counties are near large cities), whereas those VERY red counties may actually receive more funds than they get (it’s hard to say because most of the federal disbursement goes into Sacramento where it then becomes impossible to track).
The Red/Blue state divide is even more pronounced as a city/rural divide. Not only that, but rural areas tend to get more than they give in taxes (which makes sense really, services are much more expensive to provide out there per capita).
This makes the difference even more pronounced.
Not that it matters. What matters is you claim Arizona somehow deserves money to enforce an unconstitutional law that they instituted, and I pointed out that the other three border states don’t seem to have issue with illegals enough to follow suit (in fact, California is considering passing state resolutions boycotting Arizona), have far more demographically challenging situations (either larger total population of immigrants, larger total immigrants from Mexico, larger percentage immigrants, or larger percentage immigrants from Mexico, larger total population of undocumented immigrants (estimated), larger total economy dependent on undocumented immigrants…), two of which certainly give far more than they get in taxes (California and Texas are both in the top 10), and none so hypocritical nationally as Arizona (after all, if you swap Kyle for a Democrat in 2006 you’d have immigration reform, if you swap McCain for a Democrat in 2008, you’ll have immigration reform…
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne: As always, I’m the eternal optimist, mostly because CFON and Little Dreamer obviously care about their state and want a workable solution to the problem. I’m certain if a decent Dem went against Hayworth or even Grandpa they would both work towards his/her election. It’s really not the central point here. Should the federal government pay to train Arizona LEOs to enforce this law? They say yes, I say no, we disagree, and the issue got conflated from there.
El Cid
If you’re mixing booze and anger, a good shaker is helpful, and of course ice.
Little Dreamer
@Comrade Kevin:
I didn’t avoid replying, I said what I needed to say. That is isn’t what you wanted to hear is not my problem.
Go take your meds, you’re overdue.
You are off your rocker, and you’re blaming ME for not giving your screed serious consideration? Nope, sorry, not my problem at all.
Mnemosyne
@Little Dreamer:
Funny how every time we bring up the fact that this law is less than useless and will probably make things worse but that you don’t seem terribly interested in changing that — by, say, supporting the Democrat in November’s election — you suddenly announce that you’re leaving the thread without responding to any actual points anyone has made.
What is this now, the sixth time you’ve announced you were leaving the thread and then came back again? I’ve lost count.
Mnemosyne
@Yutsano:
You’re a better man than I am for giving them that much of the benefit of the doubt (and that’s leaving aside the fact that I’m not a man at all
;-)
On that note, it’s midnight and I have to work in the morning. ‘Night, all.
Comrade Kevin
@Little Dreamer: What? It’s your law, enforce it yourself. We, in California, don’t want to fund your “Papers, Please” bill.
terry chay
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Which is why W tried to move forward on immigration reform in 2007 and it was stymied by his own party. Blaming the lack of immigration reform on the fact the Democrats controlled congress is a joke when everyone knows it was the Republicans that couldn’t muster enough votes.
MattR
And the answer is 472. Good night all.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Wow. That’s the most embarrassing meltdown I have ever seen here, and I have seen a few.
@El Cid:
Okay, so the appeal to the guy in Patagonia who is worried about going outside to work his ranch is that we are should renegotiate our trade agreements?
That’s your answer? I think you must be working for John McCain.
No wonder people in Arizona don’t trust Washington.
@Mnemosyne:
Hayworth is indeed insane, but he’s not as insane as Joe Arpaio, and that damned guy can’t lose in an election. He has a base here that just loves him, and he has been basically DOING what SB 1070 suggests for a long time and nobody seems to be able to stop him.
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne: Hey! I’m gay as a plaid rabbit! That counts for something, amirite?
@ChockFullO’Nuts: You’re leaving off the other part of the Hayworth equation. He’s not only insane he’s incredibly stupid. I doubt he has the capacity to moderate himself enough to grab enough of the independent vote (gag) to win a state-wide election. After all not all of Arizona is deep red.
terry chay
@Little Dreamer:
California can easily fund the border since their border is much smaller and far more undocumented immigrants cross it every year (more than the other three states combined, and they cross both directions since they’re mostly migratory). We’re talking about the 10th largest economy in the world (and one that would drop the U.S. out of 1st if it wasn’t there). Their budgetary problems are due to institutional ones in the political system, not like Arizona (which will have the double whammy of the real estate collapse and a marked decrease in tourism).
I-5 goes “through” the state of California as does I-10 (in the same direction as it does I-10 in Arizona).
The choice of setting up two borders (the real one and de-facto one) is a compromise because the agriculture industry of California (a huge economic engine for the state) depends on migrant and day labor much of which consists of undocumented immigrants.
Oh, by the way, that agricultural industry votes Republican, often with percentages that put even Arizona to shame.
BTW, Arizona has already had a noticeable decrease in undocumented workers. The reason why? Your economy is in the shitter so migrant labor isn’t coming in at high rates. So I guess your law will “solve” your undocumented labor problem by throwing your state economy further into turmoil.
The facts… they burn!
Yutsano
I think we can put this thread to death now. At least I’m going to crash out. Night y’all.
El Cid
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Fuck you, doofus. You don’t even read the fucking comments and want to play like you’re Mr. Fucking Patagonia rancher. If you’re so god-damned stupid that you skipped several paragraphs down to the bits about trade agreements over the listing and links to comprehensive immigration reform stretching back to a commission launched under George H. W. Bush, then go ahead and mock it as being gay and probably stinky and totally not what the cool kids in the back of 7th grade English would say.
But if what you’d like to do dress up as Patagonia John and act like every rancher is a complete fucking moron who squints and gets all ornery if someone suggests that helping out with border and immigration problems might be a bit more complicated that a 4 or 5 word slogan, then your problem will be in finding the right hat and a good studio photographer to take your photo on the wooden horse.
Why don’t you make fun of the need for derivatives reform by complainin’ that Trucker Bob lost his pension and he don’t need to hear no damn talk about “derrieres”? Or how Hardware Store Cashier Jane ain’t got no time for you to talk about “rescission” and “reimportation” ’cause she’s having too hard a time worrying about keeping her insurance coverage and affording her perskiption drugs.
Why don’t you consider not just explaining things to Patagonia John but a whole room full of the different people involved in and affected by immigration, illegal and otherwise? It makes it more complicated, but then it’s harder to imagine everyone taking exactly the position you think most relevant.
El Cid
@terry chay:
By helping the U.S. economy fall into the shitter, George W. Bush was finally able to contribute to nation-wide illegal immigration reduction. Yay!
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Yutsano:
Yes, I alternate between hope and despair when it comes to AZ politics.
I heard somebody on the tube a while ago saying that maybe we can energize the Hispanic vote and get it out against Hayworth/McCain and possibly beat that seat.
I don’t know. I have been way busy this year, and in and out of the hospital and dealing with other things, I really don’t know what the chances are of winning that seat this year. We (LD and I) are planning on going to Drinking Liberally tomorrow (Thursday) night and maybe we can get up to speed on that. We’ve missed a bunch of DL sessions lately.
Which reminds me, we will be at George and Dragon Thursday evening after 6 pm. Anyone in the Phoenix area should come down and mix it up with us. We are very congenial and good looking people.
Okay, she is. But I am not that horrible.
Mark S.
@eponymous:
I agree with this approach (disincentivizing illegal immigration). Here are a couple other things I think would help that won’t happen:
1. Legalize marijuana
2. Whatever we give Mexico in foreign aid, quadruple it. Shit, give them whatever we give Israel and Egypt. We’re going to have this fucking problem as long as we have ten times the standard of living of a country we share a thousand mile border with.
Wile E. Quixote
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
What’s wrong with me? Dude, you’re the one who’s advocating putting microchips into anyone who has darker skin than you. You’re the one who’s in favor of a law which will be used by white racists to harass anyone with dark skin and Hispanic surnames, regardless of the fact that a lot of people who have those characteristics are US citizens and many of them come from families that have been in the US longer than the lazy crackers you’re descended from. You’re the one who lives in a state that survives because of the exploitation of illegal labor and who has probably hired illegal aliens himself, but, instead of advocating stiffer penalties for employers who hire illegals, advocates a pointless law which won’t do anything except give the cops a license to harass anyone they like. You’re the crazy liar who’s making up bullshit stories about having to dodge vans full of illegal aliens going 100 miles per hour down the Arizona highways (What’s next? Stories about young bucks buying T-bone steaks with their food stamps?) and you’re the dickhead from a state full of no-loads and dickheads that is already consuming more than it’s fair share of tax dollars who wants more tax money so that you can live out your racist fantasy of making Arizona Mexikanerrein.
You’re not interested in immigration reform. You’re just a racist dipshit who wants the cops to beat up on Mexicans and other people you don’t like because of the color of their skin. The only thing wrong with me, and this is only by your lights, is that I think that stupid, crazy, lying racist dipshits like you need to have your asses kicked.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@El Cid:
First of all, I didn’t mock your Bush reference at all, did I? I made a quick and dirty response here because we had to disconnect from the grid for a little while due to a DSL conflict. And after all the ridicule you have thrown at me tonight, you can’t take a little ribbing?
I will take a look at your link when I can. We are getting ready to go to work here.
Are you in AZ? If you are, you know about the murdered rancher down there, just a couple weeks ago. Story of the century around here on this issue. People are up in arms. We might conclude that they are overreacting, but politics is like that. Talking to them about trade agreements right now is going to get you thrown down a well if you go down there. Not kidding.
It’s all well and good to decide that these people are just stupid or take the Drunken Poster position that the whole state is full of “human garbage” and we are too stupid to know what to do. But those stupid people are going to say, if we are so smart, how come we haven’t done anything? And I don’t have an answer for them.
I thought you might, but apparently I was wrong.
Wile E. Quixote
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
So that’s the problem. I totally understand your username now, it’s a desperate cry for help. Obviously the funding cutbacks in Arizona mean that you haven’t been able to get the kind of long term care and medication at the Arizona State Hospital in Phoenix that you are obviously so desperately in need of. You know, I’d be willing to send Arizona some more money if they’d promise to use it to keep crazy, hate-filled cranks who have paranoid delusions about vanloads of illegals careening madly down Arizona highways and therefore want to put microchips into all of the brown people, you know, people like you, into a nice quiet locked ward somewhere where you’d be generously supplied with the anti-psychotic meds that you so obviously need. Otherwise you’re probably going to get a gun go shoot up a crowd full of brown people.
ChockFullO'Nuts
I make a snarky remark, dude. You have seen those here before, have you not?
Right. A racist dipshit who is basically in favor of an open border and easy path to citizenship for aliens. And pretty much saying so for five years here. I don’t think the idea has political viability, but if I were king, I’d certainly do it.
I definitely am. I want amnesty for people already here, and a much more open border policy. I also want flow controls at the border but I don’t know how to make that work, as should be obvious by now ….. but I don’t think anybody else here does either. And no, open and flow controls are not incompatible. Even if we accept three times the legal immigrants we take now, we have to have a way to control the flow at the border. Whether it’s ElCid’s policy stuff, or something else, I don’t know. Whatever it is has to be politically viable, though, or I can’t see how we ever get it.
Lovely Rita
@ Mark S.
This thread made me feel like I was out with Otto again.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Wile E. Quixote:
No, actually these happen with pretty tedious regularity around here.
Often enough that people just expect them now.
Again, dead wrong, dude.
ChockFullO'Nuts
No, really it’s just a label on a coffee can. I tried to post the visual link but WP ate my post.
I just like snappy handles, it entertains me. Of course, I could never top the wit of something Wile E. Coyote, but at least I am trying.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Uh, no, I didn’t hire people, I just worked in cubicle in a great big office building, and I guarantee you there were no illegals working there, ever. Deep background checks. Fingerprints, the whole shooting match.
Wrong again. Sorry.
TenguPhule
So the NUTs solution to the problem is to force the police to harrass anyone they decide is not an American based solely on how they look and be able to SUE the state for not doing it enough as decided by the most dumbass neo-nazi able to file a lawsuit.
*WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG HERE?*
ChockFullO'Nuts
@TenguPhule:
I don’t know, maybe advocating Hawaiian kings’ human sacrifices as a vehicle to political ends?
Heh. Where in the world did I get that idea?
TenguPhule
When you Arizonians pony up and beat the shit out of the GOP senators and house turds who keep blocking any reform or sanity, then you can bitch.
Until then, Arizona is only a net contributer to the problem.
TenguPhule
In all fairness, our old sovereign government only beat lawbreakers to death rather then fellate them and give them big cash bonuses.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@TenguPhule:
Sure, people are disposable, only states count. Or something.
A nice boycott that kills jobs for minimum wage workers, hotel workers, service workers …. that’s the ticket. Lay off the people who are the most exposed to the hated law.
Little Dreamer
@Mnemosyne:
How many times do I have to say I don’t support this law before you figure it out. 100? 1,000? Give me a number, will ya?
I’ve sat on this thread and stated I don’t believe the law will solve the problem it’s supposed to be solving for hours, yet I’m being told that when you point out that it’s useless that I seem to throw up my hands and run. Not true, I’ve stated I don’t support this law numerous times.
As I understand it, the law is supposed to not be used on anyone who hasn’t been stopped on a legitimate complaint of some wrongdoing first. If it is used against those who didn’t actually do anything first, I will be as vocal about it as you are, but until that happens, I am not going to fly off the handle and call it a “police state law”. We just don’t know how it will be conducted yet. A law enforcement officer was on Hardball earlier saying that this isn’t going to change the way police officers conduct their jobs at all. I tend to believe him. I also know that Joe Arpaio will try to add teeth to this thing and I don’t want to see that happen. I will be outraged if/when it does happen.
I have also stated numerous times that this law is a result of not having any action taken on the illegals coming over the border. The whole reason why TZ and I are being flamed tonight is because nobody wants to admit that AZ has a real border control problem.
TZ and I didn’t elect this government in AZ, so how is it our fault exactly? We are merely here trying to input some information from real people who are in AZ, and we’ve been branded right wingers simply because we admit there is a border problem. I’m sorry that it threatens your position for there to be a real problem at the border, but there is, and there is nothing that you can do to make us see it your way until the border situation is addressed. Neither TZ or I are happy about this law, we aren’t saying it’s a real solution and we’re not joining up in sympathy for the Republicans who are happy with this law.
We also aren’t allowing the racist legislation meme rule our thinking, because first of all the law isn’t in force yet and there are no incidents of such, and because we see that those who are trying to force a boycott on the state for passing this law are only going to hurt the people at the bottom. Brewer isn’t going to suffer for signing it. The AZ Legislature isn’t going to feel any personal pain from thinking up the policy. The people who are going to get hurt are going to be the workers who don’t have conventions to conduct and customers to serve.
I keep hearing that since the Martin Luther King holiday was enacted through a boycott that this works, but the fact is immigration is a lot harder to fix than setting up a fucking holiday. I think you’re going to find in the future that this boycott is going to hurt a lot of people and is isn’t going to be a threat that is easy to back down from because AZ residents will not back down without some sort of border solution being put into place first.
We don’t agree with the law, but we understand why the Republicans wanted it. We don’t believe it will work, but we can’t do anything to stop them wanting to try to enforce it. We are here discussing it because we want to see the real situation addressed, but it seems that many of our consummate lefties have decided to throw us into the fire and call us Republicans because we see that cooler heads need to prevail on this.
And, after writing this long post, I’m left wondering as I sit here, do you really believe that I keep throwing up my hands and avoiding the issue? I’ve posted on this shit probably a hundred times today. That we’ve ended up in a flame war is not due to my lack of trying to get people I normally agree with on other issues to stop acting like idiots on this issue.
I don’t see where we’ve suddenly turned into a fascist state, and I also don’t see where this boycott is going to fix anything either.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@TenguPhule:
Wait, it’s between fellating and beating to death?
( clock ticking )
Can I get back to you?
ChockFullO'Nuts
@TenguPhule:
Still thinking.
Mark S.
@Lovely Rita:
Ha!
Little Dreamer
@TenguPhule:
So because there are more righties in AZ than lefties, that’s somehow our fault?
Are you drinking too?
ChockFullO'Nuts
@TenguPhule:
( looking at ceiling )
ChockFullO'Nuts
@TenguPhule:
Hey, you made post number 500. I think you get the carwash coupon.
Little Dreamer
@Wile E. Quixote:
Please show where either of us said we are in favor of this law. The most I’ve done is state that the law might not be treated as a law to stop latinos simply because they are latinos (and we can’t say that it has happened because the law is not in effect yet). If/when it does happen, I will shout as loudly as you do, but I’m not going to get outraged without proof that racial profiling has occurred.
TenguPhule
And as has been pointed out before, why the fuck are the other states getting the heat on this when its the fucking GOP that’s the shitpile in the corner?
Nothing can get done because the corporate cocksuckers are the big shoe in the works.
Obama can’t even fully staff the government with competent people because the fucking Right will not let them be confirmed.
So unless Arizonians are out there breaking GOP kneecaps, they don’t get to bitch when their own reps are enabling the continued fuckup that is the immigration issue.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Little Dreamer:
Well it looks like 2:41 am is the magic moment, according to the latest update.
Time to roll?
ChockFullO'Nuts
We are, we got 5 of 8 US House seats in a Red State by working our asses off to get them. I never thought I would see the day.
But these things take time. And this immigration thing can cut either way at this point. If the Dems step up, it can work for us, but if we hang back, go for retributions, and let the GOP control the noise space, it’s a setback. I’m not sure that this thing hasn’t cost us the governorship here so far. Don’t know. Maybe we will find out more at the Drinking Liberally meeting Thursday.
I would stand up and suggest that we renegotiate our trade policy as a solution, but getting my private parts cut off with dull knives and put on a stick just doesn’t appeal to me like it once did. So I may hold off on that.
Little Dreamer
@terry chay:
__
I think you are conflating what I challenged with what you wanted me to challenge because I didn’t have that humiliated moment and I wasn’t arguing that blue states don’t give more than red states. I was simply talking about the fact that the reason why AZ gets more in aid might have to do with something other than what others were trying to blame it on.
I can’t honestly say what reason that AZ gets more aid, but somehow I get the feeling that if I were to pick reasons out of the air, I’d probably be wrong, and I didn’t see anyone making the effort to research it. I did see others here stating that AZ has to depend on federal water, and they don’t realize that AZ has water resources of its own. That was not my argument though. I didn’t see anyone research what purposes that the dollars going out need to bring more back. I suspect it has a lot to do with McCain and pork barrell projects – but I don’t know what those projects are.
I would never challenge the idea that blue states put out more money and red states get more back. I know that this is a fact. I was simply stating that we don’t know that it’s related to this immigration situation.
Humiliated? Ummm, only in your own mind.
TenguPhule
I’m entirely in favor of scrapping NAFTA and renegotiating the trade agreements with SA.
Of course I am biased by the fact the cheap SA slash and burn sugar and pineapple fucked up our local ag firms.
But then again, I’m also in favor of mandatory indentured servitude for life of business owners who employ illegals too.
Little Dreamer
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Soon.
To everyone still posting: TZ and I are headed out (he’s helping me with papers tonight) and I hope that we can continue this discussion at another time, but, really, I’m sorry to see that so many people here who I thought I understood pretty well seem to not know me at all.
Sad really, after spending so much time here since 2005.
TenguPhule
And a decent immigration policy while working with a treacherous polictical minority trying to destroy it at all costs doesn’t?
bob h
And be sure to sign that Obama Birther bill, Governor Brewer.
Barry
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Don’t even try to pretend that you’re a Democrat; the only reason that you might have not voted Republican is that they weren’t right-wing enough for you.
Xenos
@Little Dreamer: Pls keep in mind that given the time you are posting you are getting the cranky insomniac crowd posting from here in the East. I still look forward from hearing from the veterans of the Darrel wars here, so don’t take it personally.
Edit: And who the fuck is Barry? Another Firebagger?
bellatrys
So how come conservatives like Chock and Dreamer and a gazillion other “EEK! Swarthy furriners!” types just luuurve it when white dudes drive like maniacs and shoot people up?
I mean, surely they’re not saying that ONLY brown folks speed or commit crimes, right? Because that would be a) blatantly counterfactual, b) blatantly stupid, c) blatantly racist.
So they must think that it’s a-okay when the white fratboys who narrowly missed a head-on collision a block away ten years ago by plowing a parked pickup up onto the sidewalk go midnight drag racing down residential streets with their brand-new birthday sports cars, or when the notably pale Hell’s Angels and Outlaws get into brawls/shootouts like has happened several times in the past couple years, including last week, or when a houseful of white guys with old New England names got busted for armed resistance to their weed growing/cocaine importing house getting busted this past year–? (And this is not anywhere near as rowdy a region as it was when the Feds were shooting live ammo around at the rumrunners coming down from Canada, and taking out beloved locals and reaping riots in return, back in Ye Good Old Days.)
Or the white guy who strangled his girlfriend to death a few streets over, last year, in a stock fit of jealous rage right out of a Dickens novel, or the white guy who had his white minions butcher a white handyman he thought had cheated him, or the white gal who murdered her disabled (white) boyfriend and burned his body on her ranch, all recent or recently-tried crimes of notoriety in this lily-white (but not blancmange enough for the fearful h8ers, only being +/- 90%) neck of the Northeast–?
Why is THIS okay with Nuts & Dreamer, why are they cool with this shit when it’s being done by people who are NOT Latin@?
‘Cause obviously it ain’t the shit itself that bothers them, just the hue of the ones who are doing it. –Which seems like the definition of racism, or at least tribalism/clannishness, to me…not to mention perverse and lacking in self-protective self-interest, since there are so many more of the majority around, it would only make sense to be concerned about ALL crimes & misdemeanors, and not ONLY those committed by foreigners/non-citizens/citizens-with-different-accents/people-who-look-different/all-the-above. Odds are it’ll be someone you know & trust & is even related to who murders/rapes/robs you, after all.
And since they’re not making any distinction between “looks illegal” and “looks Latin@” despite the fact that as many have pointed out the stats say that very, very many illegal immigrants are of Northern European extraction – not to mention that hell of a lot of Latinos ARE white, too – the claims that it’s just fear of “illegal” immigrants and not immigrants of South American origin disolves like the bathroom tissue it is, even before the allegation that Canadians (in this conception of course all-white, never mind reality!) are non-criminal and never dangerous in all their endeavors, which is to laugh at in New England…I mean, it’s not like my Puerto Rican neighbor asked chalky ol’ me if *I* was Latina, due to a bumper sticker on my car, when introducing herself – oh wait, she did!
So yeah, everyone’s calling you guys racists because the racism is dripping off your every meme, you creeps.
John Cole
Just catching up on this thread, but for those of you who think Chock and Little Dreamer are Republicans, you need to get a grip. They were Democrats commenting here before I was a Democrat.
Second, the real problem people seem to be missing is that Chock and Little both claim the new hideous law will not solve the problem of border security, so why should the federal government be required to pay for it. Arizona enacted this stupid law. They should bear the costs.
Cynicor
Why don’t we just close the border? Problem solved!
Jrod
@John Cole: No, but you see, since the Fedrul Gubmint hasn’t spent $10 billion on a wall covering the entire border plus $100 million a year to post guards every 10 feet, it’s actually the feds’ fault this law passed. I mean, come on, a rancher got killed! That’s worth like 20 Detroit murders. You can’t honestly expect Arizonians to keep their shit together in the face of violence that’s nearly 1/10th as bad as the average rotted out inner city.
Therefore, in a way the feds owe Arizona! That’s why, when they enact legislation that’s reprehensibly racist, everyone else should give them a pass. And pay for their new gestapo, of course. Hey, if the rest of the country gets tired of it, we should give in to the BAAAWWWWing and sink billions into a wall that won’t fucking work.
It’s either that, or Arizona is justified in begging for federal money to harass everyone darker than Joe Arpaio. Oh wait, the law that was clearly written to mandate racial profiling might not really be used for that, the only fair thing is to wait and see. A rancher!
(And yes, it’s terrible that the rancher was murdered, but don’t use his body as a prop at your little klan rally. And don’t try to pretend that this wasn’t a racial profiling law. When my home state does idiotic shit, like trying to pass an abortion ban every year, I don’t try to say that, oh, they’re justified because how else should they react to all these slut and skanks running around, I mean sure it’s kinda wrongheaded but jeez, just look at them, why I heard some stories… No, I say that they’re being stupid fucking assholes and that’s that. Just because you claim to not defend the law doesn’t make it so.)
Xenos
Having had a chance to work through some of this ridiculous thread the lesson seems to be that even rational and liberal people, when made to feel under attack, tend to resort to right-wing solutions out of desperation. There is no defending the AZ law, which is clearly the result of hysteria. There is a law and order problem arising from the border and it is not necessarily very tightly linked to the problem of illegal immigrants who are coming to this country for work reasons.
But this is not going to be solved by sealing the border. That is not going to be practical or effective. It makes as much sense as invading Iraq which felt great until we got over the adrenalin and realized that our strategic goals were fucking stupid. Obama doubled the number of border guards… whole lot of good that did. If he doubles them again, still won’t make enough of a difference.
So what is to be done? How about dealing with the actual facts regarding crime rates? Anything that gets outside of the media-induced hysteria and back into the land of facts would be helpful.
Little Dreamer
@bellatrys:
__
It’s NOT okay, but it is a lot easier to deal with murderers who are US citizens and can be tracked and caught then dealing with illegals who head back over the border.
And, as an FYI, I grew up on the east coast, I was born in the North East (very close to the Mason Dixon line) and I am fully aware that murders occur.
Someone else on this thread stated something about Arizonans not understanding crime in inner cities, that’s actually pretty funny considering I’m currently sitting in the middle of a metropolitan area of almost 4 million people. Arizonans do understand inner city violence, but they don’t understand violence that cannot be tried in a court of law.
As we have been made aware, Republicans are authoritarians. They say they want smaller government, but if you were to give them the choice between no government with daily murders by illegals who can’t be tracked and brought to trial or bigger government and the ability to apprehend and try illegal suspects, I’ll bet my bottom dollar they’d choose the latter.
Little Dreamer
@Xenos:
__
I’m not defending the law and I wouldn’t choose it if given the chance to have any law I wanted become policy. I am merely saying that the law came about because people here realize a problem exists and since we have a rightwing government, they enact right wing policy.
Little Dreamer
@John Cole:
I agree that Arizona should be expected to pay for this particular legislation. I was arguing earlier that the federal government (that means ALL of us) should be responsible for the federal border. I have no problem with the idea that the federal government will not support this law either financially, or figuratively. I’m actually hoping that the law gets struck down as unconstitutional, but that lawmakers take the lessons learned from this debate and try to come up with some real solutions that actually do something to help alleviate the situation.
Little Dreamer
By the way, I just finished delivering today’s newspaper to my customers, and I thought you all would be interested in knowing that the headline was about migrant workers deciding they’re going to leave and go back to Mexico.
Perhaps John McCain would like to rethink that statement he made about Americans not being interested in holding jobs picking lettuce, because otherwise, we may not have any produce in the stores.
Xenos
@Little Dreamer: Maybe those of us who eat lettuce are going to have to pay an honest market rate for it. Oh yeah, Nafta. Nevermind.
Remember November
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
I notice New Mexico NOT raising a hissy fit over this.
I guess the heat and all that ‘tomic ‘splosions over the years have finally settled into your dna..
Let’s just call it what is, Un-American fascism. Really, not made up shit by Bachmann and Beck.
Yes we have an immigration problem…but it’s not the people jumping fences, it’s the shiny incentive billboards we have that they can see.
take away the incentive, or enable them to be upstanding taxpaying citizens without beating them down for wanting a better life and demonizing them with draconian measures, and casting everyone who is a legal resident of Az and of hispanic descent under a blanket of McCarthyist suspicion.
Hey…I know let’s build a big wall between US and Mexico…worked for the Chinese and the Germans…
El Cid
No one should make assumptions that people backing or opposing this or that policy are “conservatives” or “liberals”. At least not by typical usage. People who think this AZ law may be bad but a useful means to an end can easily be people who vote for Democrats and prefer liberals among Democrats.
ChockFullO'Nuts
A little unfinished business from yesterday.
First, this transcript from yesterday’s Hardball, and interview with an Arizona deputy sheriff about enforcing this law:
HENRY: Well, you—from what I understand, under federal law, if you‘re here and you‘re on a workers permit, you‘re supposed to carry that card with you. You may or may not. But there‘s other indications that a person is here illegally.
MATTHEWS: Like what?
HENRY: Well, for example, I mentioned earlier the Mexican voter card.
Sometimes, they carry a Mexican birth certificate with them from whatever state it was in Mexico.
And, more often than not, Chris, you would be surprised that, when we talk to people, a lot of times, they‘re—they‘re dead honest with us.
You ask them if they‘re here from Mexico. You ask them for how long, where did they come from, did they come here illegally, and, nine times out of 10, they will tell you, “Yes, I‘m here illegally.”
—//end transcript
I wrote about this, as I had been listening to show on XM radio in the car coming back from an errand. I paraphrased the officer as having said that “Ninety percent of the time people will just tell us that they are here illegally.” I’m paraphrasing myself here, but that’s about what I said.
A complete horse’s ass named DougL flew in and stated that the officer had never mentioned such a number as ninety percent, and that I was a fucking liar. I responded that this was the way I remembered it, but that the broadcast would be on again later and folks could watch it and judge for themselves whether I mischaracterized what he said.
Later the rebroadcast was on, and the insane DougL again stated that the officer had never said what I quoted, even after I had corrected the verbiage to say “nine times out of ten” as a correction to “ninety percent of the time.” The man still insisted that I was lying. The harangue went on.
Above is the MSNBC transcript from the interview, as cut and pasted from their website this morning. I did not mischaracterize what the officer said, I just remembered his “nine out of ten” as “ninety percent of the time.”
Even after I corrected the blurb to use the officer’s actual language, the harangue went on. I promised the damned fool that I would post the transcript today when it came up on the NBC site, and here it is, as promised and on time.
mey
@Xenos:
This.
CfoN, LD, the whole argument sounds like the rancher’s death (which I hope everyone is aware, is still open, no suspects, but lots of suspicion about WHO killed him) is Arizona’s 9/11. And that Arizona’s response is to invade Iraq and institute the Patriot Act. Arizonians are seemingly going guano crazy — when even card carrying-ACLU’ers, hardcore Democrats are justifying the new AZ law as needed because at least something is being done, I’m not sure any rational argument(s) can be made at this time. It feels like they are expecting another terrorist/illegal immigrant attack at any moment, and have decided the best defense is a good offense. And that their local media (Colin Powell) has proven to them that illegal immigrants (Saddam has WMD) are the problem, and that this law (invade Iraq) will address the rancher’s death (9/11).
ETA: BTW, John, this thread officially makes you a shrill DFH.
eponymous
@Mark S.:
I would tend to agree with you. Politically, not likely to happen (although the initiative in California regarding marijuana may offer some hope). There are other items that would help as well as part of a comprehensive immigration reform bill (as others here have pointed out), but who knows what will happen given the current political climate in Washington.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Who do you think you are talking about? Not me, I hope, because to my recollection I have used only a couple of adjectives to describe the law, so far, and they are, in the order I used them, “rotten” and “useless.” I further stated that I didn’t think the thing should be signed into law, that was over a week ago. Of course, I didn’t get that particular wish.
I did suggest that passing the law might serve a useful purpose, namely to force an issue. Of course, that issue could have been forced without actually signing the thing into law. The signing appears to have been a political move aimed at getting Governor Brewer reelected.
I don’t think the law itself is very consequential. I wasn’t sure until I actually read it and then matched it up against some remarks made by a sheriff out here who appeared on Hardball yesterday (see above). He seemed to be suggesting that the law was really no big deal and represented no big change to what he was already doing. That started me thinking so I took some time last night to look it up and read it. I won’t spend a lot of time on it here, but the short version is, I know why he was talking that way. It really isn’t apparently much of a big deal, which is why I think it is sort of useless. About all it says is that if you pull somebody over and they can’t produce ID and have the identifiers of someone from another country, like language, maybe some foreign ID cards or whatever, you should turn them over to the immigration folks for a closer look. Not really very shocking, and all of it based on methodical development of probable cause, not “snatch em off the sidewalk if they look Mexican” or any of that nonsense.
I personally don’t think the law will produce much other than hyped rhetoric on tv and on blogs, and maybe, hopefully, some action by the Feds to clean up the situation. From what I have seen Joe Arpaio doing, I’d say his current process is more draconian that whatever this law calls for, and he’s been doing it for a long time. Not that I think that’s a good thing, I personally think Arpaio is basically crazy, but there you are.
Wile E. Quixote
@Little Dreamer
Do you know what? You will be a freeper soon, because folks like you and ChockFullO’Nuts, a sad victim of Arizona’s budget cuts who should be locked up in the Arizona State Hospital in Phoenix and heavily medicated, are all about the outrage and not about actually solving any problems. Not buying into the outrage? Hell, you and Chock are all about the outrage, you’ve bought into the racist outrage behind this law hook, line and sinker.
Let’s look at how this started. John Cole said that Arizona should go fuck itself and enforce it’s stupid racist law with it’s own money. A fair enough statement, Arizona is already taking more from the rest of the country than they give and Arizona citizens are the ones who have benefited from cheap illegal labor, you know, those vanloads of illegals careening down the roads at 100MPH, because they’re on their way to do your landscaping, work on your construction sites, clean your hotels, wash your dishes, et-cetera. And as soon as Cole pointed this out Chock had himself a big old shit aneurysm.
Chock sputtered and fumed about how the rest of the country was using Arizona as a heat shield, (I’ll give him credit for the new metaphor. I had thought that we were throwing Arizona under the bus, a bus filled with illegal aliens driving madly down the highway at 100MPH.) in the ongoing war against illegal immigration. Chock sputtered and fumed told everyone how illegal immigration was our fault and how the racist idiots in Arizona were our fault and how Arizona’s stupidly racist laws were our fault and how miners in West Virginia were obviously stupid because Arizona is a mining state and you never hear about accidents there. And blah, blah, blah.
And of course the results were predictable. Chock came in here trolling with his stupid, outraged racist bullshit and everyone jumped on his ass because, well, even the best of us, and I make no claim to being anywhere near this, occasionally like to shoot fish in a barrel. And you and Chock aren’t just fish in a barrel, you’re fat, slow, dumb and ugly fish, and the barrel is small. In fact it’s not a barrel, it’s one of those five gallon orange buckets you can get at Home Depot. And so we fired away, and what made it even more enjoyable was watching the two of you try to duck and dodge. Because as soon as someone challenged one of your stupid statements you backpedaled away from it as fast as the White House backpedaled away from that picture of George W. Bush standing under the “Mission Accomplished” banner. Again, sometimes it’s really fun to blast away at slow moving targets, especially when they’re really dumb and really deserve it, and both you and Chock do because despite your protestations of liberalism you’re both a couple of dumb racists at heart.
I predict that within about two years both you and Chock (assuming that he’s not taking another Thorazine holiday in a padded room somewhere) will be full time posters over at Red State or the Free Republic. You’ll start by dipping in a toe, checking the site out, reading a few posts, and then some day Erick the son of Erick will post something about how the damned illegals are careening down the roads at 100MPH and liberals just don’t care and you’ll say “Right on” and write a post about how liberals are using Arizona as a heat shield against the swarthy brown menace and are more concerned about the civil rights of illegal aliens than they are about white Arizona ranchers being killed by Mexicans. And everyone at Red State and the Free Republic will love you for this because there’s nothing that crazed religious fanatics love more than a convert. Don’t believe me? Well David Horowitz has been doing this schtick for years, telling everyone how he was a Red Diaper baby and hung around with the Black Panthers before he saw the light and became a conservative.
And why will you and Chock end up as Freepers? Well it’s because both of you are bad and stupid people. You’re both racists, you’re both dumb, you’re both addicted to anger and you’re both seriously into feeling victimized (The two of you really get off on stories about white folks being victimized by brown folks. You probably touch yourselves every time you read one.). Both you and Chock will be able to go over to RedState and the FreeRepublic and post about how you’re being victimized by the illegals, about how you used to be card-carrying member of the ACLU about how liberals don’t care about the illegals and about how the evil liberals victimized you when you tried to warn them. And you’ll love it there because the more tantrums you throw about those nasty brown people and the nasty white liberals the more attention you’ll get.
Wile E. Quixote
@ChockFullO’Nuts
Yeah, we are talking about you. Because you’re the one who had the shit aneurysm when John Cole said that the Arizona should go fuck itself and pay for the enforcement of this law rather than asking for money from the federal government to support this idiocy. Remember that. Probably not, no more than George W. Bush remembers standing under that “Mission Accomplished” banner.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Wile E. Quixote:
Aw, climb down from the microphone there, dog.
First of all, I thought you were dead. Glad to see you made it through. But anyway.
I like to bitch at Cole once in a while. He irritates me often and I keep my mouth shut but once in a while I just have to let him have it. It’s not really your deal, I’m sure he is a big boy and doesn’t need a smelly dog to be his lawyer, knowhatImean? He can take care of himself and smack me without help from you.
And also too, I am not fat. Six feet tall and right now about 155. Maybe 160 if I have to take a coyote. I am downright slender, really. Elegant, if you will.
mey
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Yes, I am talking about you. That it might “serve a useful purpose, namely to force an issue” is justifying this “rotten” and “useless” law. You then go on to explain how this law really is not “very consequential”, “really no big deal”, “represent[s] no big change”, which sounds like this is like a “nit” and “trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn’t amount to diddly.”
It seems like you are trying to convince yourself and others that this law is so inconsequential that it doesn’t really matter how “rotten” it is, but at the same time, maybe it’s not really even that “rotten.”
Or you’re trying to find the cherry on top of a shit sundae, meaning, “hey, this damn law is so bad (except maybe it’s not even that big of a deal, but anyway, it’s so bad) that maybe now people will talk about doing something and we’ll get it taken care of, so, there is at least some redeeming quality to this useless law.” But I’m not seeing the snark in yours or LDs posts that would indicate that this is what you are arguing.
I think everyone is waiting for that “snap out of it” moment, because we can’t understand why you don’t see or won’t acknowledge what we’re saying, but that’s not going to happen, because you are feeling the exact same way about those that disagree with you.
I’m almost expecting to hear some variant of “illegal immigrants hate our way of life,” because that is the path I think you’re headed towards.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@mey:
Well, if the sheriff on Hardball was right, and I take that to be a question, and not an assertion, the law doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on his impression of his job. Because he spoke that way, I went looking for the law itself and started reading it, and I can’t find that it would have that much of an effect either.
Perhaps I am misreading the law, but so far, I can’t find that most of the people talking about the law have read it or understand it on a technical level. Which is neither here nor there, but it doesn’t help me figure out where the extreme language about this law is coming from. Is it about something really in the law, or is it about the idea of the ? I am trying to explore this on another thread today but I am doing other things and the process is going very slowly. The law has a lot of text and I don’t find all of it that easy to figure out.
I’m a proponent of a pretty open border and full amnesty for all illegals onboard now. It is not likely I am going to change my views on that. I don’t see how having a border war helps the fortunes of either country. However, the US government has failed miserably to manage this situation, and the people here have no particular reason to trust that this will get better any time soon.
Derek
Will you morons take your fucking murdered rancher and SHOVE HIM UP YOUR ASSES? Just because one dude got killed does not mean that your murder rate has magically jumped past Baltimore, or Detroit, or New Orleans. When people ask you for statistics like murders or violent crimes per 100,000 people, one rancher doesn’t count for shit. I don’t care if it’s on the fucking nightly news, dumbass!
The next person who mentions violent crime in Juarez in relation to immigration in Arizona should be shot. The two are unrelated.
I also see that NO ONE has commented on the words of Sherrif Dupnik. (No one on team idiot, that is.)
terry chay
@Little Dreamer: The reason that Arizona gets more aid is because it is more rural than it is urban. Infrastructure costs more (per capita covered) to do in rural areas in order to provide the same public goods (police, postal, schools, park rangers, doctors, etc.). When you factor that military disbursements (not contracts which are restricted to a few companies, but things that are more fungible like bases and the like) are done by the Senate, then less populous states will also have more in the way of a kickback. If stuff is spread over the 50 states evenly, then the less populous states get more per capita and those states are usually less populous because they lack large cities.
The reason that rural states also vote republican is the red-blue divide not really a state divide so much as an urban-rural divide (though there are geographical difference. Obviously Austin is not as blue as San Francisco or Washington D.C., However the divide is much more pronounced on the county level than the state level).
I mentioned this explanation I first posted the statistic above. It is *natural* that the states that have republican majorities also get more money per capita. The fact that those republican majorities tend to espouse “smaller government” is a bit ironic and perhaps hypocritical, but par for the course, especially in the West (In California, where I currently live, the most republican or libertarian espousing people I know are people who are former or current state employees, work or have worked and have parents who worked at large defense contractors, own farms, and the like). Western Republicanism has always been built around the principle of small government and states rights just as their wealth has been built around government contracts, subsidies, and kickbacks.
Did you know before WW2, San Francisco was a larger city than Los Angeles? What do you think built LA, Orange County, and San Diego, Hollywood or the military?