Virtually every country in the world, including Mexico, controls its own border. If you don't have secure borders, you really no longer have a country. Out of control immigration is one of the major issues in Thursday's parliamentary elections in the UK, where the Conservatives are projected to capture about 300 seats. Here, the federal government--under President Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano--has failed in its responsibility, so the state of Arizona enacted a statute to give the police additional authority. Predictably, the usual open-borders advocates went completely bonkers. One of the bill's authors responds in the New York Times:
On Friday, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed a law — SB 1070 — that prohibits the harboring of illegal aliens and makes it a state crime for an alien to commit certain federal immigration crimes. It also requires police officers who, in the course of a traffic stop or other law-enforcement action, come to a “reasonable suspicion” that a person is an illegal alien verify the person’s immigration status with the federal government...
In sum, the Arizona law hardly creates a police state. It takes a measured, reasonable step to give Arizona police officers another tool when they come into contact with illegal aliens during their normal law enforcement duties.
President Obama and the Beltway crowd feel these problems can be taken care of with “comprehensive immigration reform” — meaning amnesty and a few other new laws. But we already have plenty of federal immigration laws on the books, and the typical illegal alien is guilty of breaking many of them. What we need is for the executive branch to enforce the laws that we already have.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration has scaled back work-site enforcement and otherwise shown it does not consider immigration laws to be a high priority. Is it any wonder the Arizona Legislature, at the front line of the immigration issue, sees things differently?
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