With the new migrant law on the books in Arizona it may take a while, if it survives constitutional scrutiny, to sort out the rules of engagement between police and citizens.
But, hey, if the U.S. Army can work out rules of engagement between themselves and Iraqi citizens in order to minimize the wholesale loss of life in collateral damage there, then so can Joe Arpaio, the Sheriff of Maricopa County. He seems like a reasonable, even-handed guy, right?
Arizona’s law does, however, clearly mark a shift in practice away from the concept of equal treatment under the law. And there is a clear danger it will serve as a gateway drug for law enforcement agents to assume far more authority than they now have over citizens.
Greater authority of government, we have learned from a slew of Republican thinkers, inevitably leads to a loss of Liberty, which is a bad thing. In fact, this law looks suspiciously to me like one of those (probably liberal) infringements on the concept of limited government that our founding fathers fought so hard to preserve.
Jose Garcia
So as a card-carrying conservative, I think this is a bad law, and for Arizona Republicans to pass it suggests they haven’t been studying enough of their own doctrines of limited government, or else drinking the cool aid of some wicked imposter dressed in Gingrich clothing. Barry Goldwater must be turning over in his grave with sadness.
Taking the least efficient approach
There is absolutely no reason for this law to be on the books, anyway, since the most efficient way of stopping illegal migration is to go after the small gang of criminals who have caused the phenomenon to get out of hand: the employers.
Every time an illegal alien gets a job, at least two people have broken the law: the employer and the alien. So far the government’s entire approach to immigration enforcement has been to go after the migrant, not the employer. But there are millions of migrants, and only a few thousand employers.
So once again, Big Government has been doing the least efficient thing going after the migrant and creating a huge, bloated, expensive bureaucracy to boot, which never seems capable of even stemming the tide of illegal migration, much less reducing it significantly. Sound just like the war of drugs to you?
In both cases the result is in the liberal tax-and-spend direction of creating huge, high-paying law enforcement armies at taxpayer expense. The uniforms are pretty but the drugs and migrants keep coming in, but you can’t mention this if you’re doing your job in Congress because the Liberal-biased media will accuse you of being un-American and in favor of drugs and Mexicans.
Traitors
My solution is to criminalize the hiring of aliens and enforce the rules rigorously.
Since migration enforcement is a national security issue, those who hire unauthorized migrants are, essentially, traitors. They have no respect for the laws of the federal government, or the possibility a terrorist might sneak in. They deserve to be treated as serious criminals, not winked at like johns while the girls of the night go to jail.
So Congress should enact a law charging those who hire illegal migrants with high treason (which is worse than low treason), sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in jail for the first offense, with no chance of parole. After the first five or six employers are shown on FOX News, shackled in chains and being hustled by guards into the Maricopa County jail, to be fitted out with the pink underwear Joe Arapio makes them wear, and then shown doing jumping jacks in pink panties at 3:30 in the morning before facing a pile of rocks to break down all day, the flow of illegal migrants will slow down to nothing.
Where there is no demand, there is no supply, according to the best conservative economic theory. And even if you don’t like theory, illegal migrants aren’t stupid, and they tend to go only to places where the jobs are plentiful. When they see their employers in jail with pink underwear washing dishes and picking up litter in chain gangs for the next 20 years, they won’t even bother to jump the fence.
Stopping illegal migration in its tracks
The first employers who get caught, of course, will whine about not knowing they were hiring illegals. This is nonsense. They know damn well who they are hiring, and, wink, wink, in the interests of national security, we might word the law so that the burden of proof is on the employer to prove he didn’t know, a much higher standard.
Or maybe even send them to Gitmo for the water boarding thing before the pink panties, being as how we’re talking national security here. The courts might let this sneak through for a while, like a lot of other stuff, on the basis of national security.
And along with the new criminalization laws we can create a foolproof ID card so that after the criminal employers send their lobbyists to Congress to forgive them we can say, “Aha! From now on you can’t use the excuse of ignorance anymore.”
If all this were to come to pass we would stop illegal migration in its tracks in a matter of weeks and punish the traitors among us who have rewarded illegals with jobs. Then, maybe, we could begin a sane discussion about what kind of people we want to invite to the U.S. as immigrants, and what kinds of policies we might imagine that are fair to all concerned and make us proud of ourselves as a nation of immigrants once more.
Garcia has taught government and politics at New Mexico State University for 30 years. He has been active in Democratic Party politics in Doña Ana County for many years. He publishes his own blog, La Politica: New Mexico!