For another one of my classes I had to do a project in which I was required to research a controversial US state issue. So being from Arizona I naturally decided to research the recent controversy over Arizona's immigration act SB 1070. In a nutshell (for those of you who do not know what this act is) the act was basically an attempt by the state to curb illegal immigration by allowing state and local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of people they suspected to be in the country illegally. Now there is more to the act besides this, so I encourage you to research the rest of the bill to understand the full impact it would have.
Anyways while I was researching the act, the idea of having to have people always have identification on them really concerned me. No doubt legal Mexican-Americans would have had to start carrying their identification at all times in fear of being targeted as an illegal based on their complexion, which no person should have to do.While the act specifically stated that their should be no racial profiling by law enforcement officials I do not think that this would have stopped it because in reality there are not many illegal white people running around the state, so they were bound just to go after Latinos. If we allowed this to happen to Latinos where would it stop? If the government began to think in this manner could it easily spread to thinking it needed to start to control even further into society? This whole act leads to the commonly referred to phrase of a "papers please" state which brings back memories of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Now I AM NOT calling Arizona a communist or Nazi state, I am just saying this act had a very bad tendency that obviously had a totalitarian feel to it. That is the whole point of this blog is to see where there is totalitarian tendencies so we know how to recognize it and dismantle it before it becomes too strong. Thus I believe that SB 1070 would have been a scary step in a totalitarian direction. In my first post I quoted C.J Friedrich who gave four criteria for a state to become totalitarian and one of those was "terroristic police control". I believe that this act would have set up a basis for this control to have begun slowly in Arizona. Luckily however, the supreme court struck down most of the controversial points of the act and now only allows law enforcement to check immigration status after a lawful arrest for other reasons, which is already allowed under federal law.
These are the types of things that we need to fight in the United States in order to keep us free. Even if these acts are popular among the people it does not make them right and sometimes we must push against the majority to keep our freedoms and to awaken them to reality. I am a firm believer that the biggest threat to our freedom comes from within not from outside.
I am very happy to see that in the state of Arizona common sense prevailed when it came to a requirement to carry some form of identification should the police officers suspect you of being an "illegal immigrant". That would have led to all sorts of problems not least of all profiling. When South Africa became a democratic state one of the laws which were repealed pertained, in principle, to blacks being expected to be in possession of a so-called "pass" (below is the link that would give you the nitty gritty of what it entailed.)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sahistory.org.za/south-africa-1806-1899/pass-laws-south-africa-1800-1994
On the question of immigration, South Africa is bearing the brunt. The citizens of our otherwise poor neighbouring states are flocking into our country in droves. The number of "illegal immigrants" (so-called) is estimated to be around R5 mill. That's quite a number for a country of R50 mill. Whatever arguments against them may be, there's a lot to discuss about how invalualble they are to the economy. I say naturalise them so that they contribute towards paying of tax.