May I see your papers, citizen?

I just love signs. Can I suggest one of these Ma?

Given what I know of her NOW, no I dont.
But at the time, she was violating the law so yes she should have been put in jail.

But if you are saying that either of them were rewarded years after the fact, I gladly concede the point.

If someone is caught being here illegally, we treat them EXACTLY the same way that their home country treats illegal immigrants.

MEXICO CITY " As many as six out of every 10 Central American women and girls are raped as they pass through Mexico hoping to cross illegally into the United States, Amnesty International said Wednesday.

The rapists include criminal gang members as well as local authorities in collusion with them, said Rupert Knox, an Amnesty International researcher on Mexico.

Knox called on Mexico to take action to end a "really chilling panorama" faced by migrants passing across its borders even as the nation complains about a tough new immigration law in the state of Arizona.

In irate response to the Arizona law, which Republican Gov. Jan Brewer passed last Friday, Mexico issued a travel warning alerting citizens who are traveling to or residing in Arizona that they might face harassment. Aeromexico suspended some flights to Arizona, and the government of the Mexican state of Sonora canceled an annual meeting scheduled for June with its Arizona counterpart to protest the new law.

The London-based human rights group issued a 48-page report titled "Invisible Victims" that says that tens of thousands of migrants, nearly all of them from Central America, fall prey to gangs that rob, kidnap or rape them as they cross Mexico.

Much of the abuse occurs in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, where criminals who are in cahoots with conductors and local, state or federal police halt freight trains, which often are carrying hundreds of illegal migrants, it said. Problems are also severe in Tabasco and Veracruz states.

Many migrants who pass through those states, Knox said, "suffer abductions, sexual abuse, mistreatment, extortion, murder and other abuses that they endure in this voyage of terror."

Last year, Mexican immigration authorities detained 64,061 migrants, about a fifth of them women or girls, the report says.

Migrants fear that if they report assaults, abductions or rapes, they'll be deported to their home countries, it said.

Amnesty International arrived at the conclusion that as many as six out of 10 women are raped after sifting through independent studies, consulting Mexican and international experts and monitors, and conducting its own interviews, Knox said.

"Many women migrants are deterred from reporting sexual violence by the pressures to continue their journey and the lack of access to an effective complaints procedure," the report says. It adds that the prevalence of rape is such that some smugglers of people demand that women have contraceptive injections before the journey as a precaution.

Even when severe abuses are reported to the government, they remain a low priority for many state and federal authorities, the report says.

Criminal gangs are behind most of the abuses but "there is evidence that state officials are involved at some level, either directly or as a result of complicity and acquiescence," it adds.

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.

Predictably, groups that favor relaxed enforcement of immigration laws, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, insist the law is unconstitutional. Less predictably, President Obama declared it “misguided” and said the Justice Department would take a look.

Presumably, the government lawyers who do so will actually read the law, something its critics don’t seem to have done. The arguments we’ve heard against it either misrepresent its text or are otherwise inaccurate. As someone who helped draft the statute, I will rebut the major criticisms individually:

It is unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them. It is true that the Arizona law makes it a misdemeanor for an alien to fail to carry certain documents. “Now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers ... you’re going to be harassed,” the president said. “That’s not the right way to go.” But since 1940, it has been a federal crime for aliens to fail to keep such registration documents with them. The Arizona law simply adds a state penalty to what was already a federal crime. Moreover, as anyone who has traveled abroad knows, other nations have similar documentation requirements.

“Reasonable suspicion” is a meaningless term that will permit police misconduct. Over the past four decades, federal courts have issued hundreds of opinions defining those two words. The Arizona law didn’t invent the concept: Precedents list the factors that can contribute to reasonable suspicion; when several are combined, the “totality of circumstances” that results may create reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.

For example, the Arizona law is most likely to come into play after a traffic stop. A police officer pulls a minivan over for speeding. A dozen passengers are crammed in. None has identification. The highway is a known alien-smuggling corridor. The driver is acting evasively. Those factors combine to create reasonable suspicion that the occupants are not in the country legally.

The law will allow police to engage in racial profiling. Actually, Section 2 provides that a law enforcement official “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” in making any stops or determining immigration status. In addition, all normal Fourth Amendment protections against profiling will continue to apply. In fact, the Arizona law actually reduces the likelihood of race-based harassment by compelling police officers to contact the federal government as soon as is practicable when they suspect a person is an illegal alien, as opposed to letting them make arrests on their own assessment.

It is unfair to demand that people carry a driver’s license. Arizona’s law does not require anyone, alien or otherwise, to carry a driver’s license. Rather, it gives any alien with a license a free pass if his immigration status is in doubt. Because Arizona allows only lawful residents to obtain licenses, an officer must presume that someone who produces one is legally in the country.

State governments aren’t allowed to get involved in immigration, which is a federal matter. While it is true that Washington holds primary authority in immigration, the Supreme Court since 1976 has recognized that states may enact laws to discourage illegal immigration without being pre-empted by federal law. As long as Congress hasn’t expressly forbidden the state law in question, the statute doesn’t conflict with federal law and Congress has not displaced all state laws from the field, it is permitted. That’s why Arizona’s 2007 law making it illegal to knowingly employ unauthorized aliens was sustained by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

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.

And it’s very necessary: Arizona is the ground zero of illegal immigration. Phoenix is the hub of human smuggling and the kidnapping capital of America, with more than 240 incidents reported in 2008. It’s no surprise that Arizona’s police associations favored the bill, along with 70 percent of Arizonans.

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. It is any wonder the Arizona Legislature, at the front line of the immigration issue, sees things differently?

Kris W. Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, was Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief adviser on immigration law and border security from 2001 to 2003.

It is unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them. It is true that the Arizona law makes it a misdemeanor for an alien to fail to carry certain documents. “Now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers ... you’re going to be harassed,” the president said. “That’s not the right way to go.” But since 1940, it has been a federal crime for aliens to fail to keep such registration documents with them.

"You know, you can try to make it really tough on people who look like they, quote, might be illegal immigrants," he said.

The president added that a Hispanic American whose family had been in the United States for generations faced a situation in which "now suddenly if you don't have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you can be harassed, that's something that could potentially happen."

“Reasonable suspicion” is a meaningless term that will permit police misconduct. Over the past four decades, federal courts have issued hundreds of opinions defining those two words. The Arizona law didn’t invent the concept: Precedents list the factors that can contribute to reasonable suspicion; when several are combined, the “totality of circumstances” that results may create reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.

The law will allow police to engage in racial profiling. Actually, Section 2 provides that a law enforcement official “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” in making any stops or determining immigration status.

It is unfair to demand that people carry a driver’s license. Arizona’s law does not require anyone, alien or otherwise, to carry a driver’s license.

OK, but if you look Mexican (or Canadian) and you don't have any ID, how are you going to prove your citizenship

Once they're at the court house, maybe the computer can save them.

Those of you that want to open the borders,
I have another solution that you would have to agree is 100% fair to everyone.

Let our laws regarding illegal immigration mirror other countries laws.

Apparently you continue to misunderstand what "open borders" means.
In its fullest form, it means that you don't have illegal immigrants to begin with, because all immigration is legal.

U coud LOSE your country, ideologically, real fast that way, Thomas.

Quote:

OK, but if you look Mexican (or Canadian) and you don't have any ID, how are you going to prove your citizenship

How many citizens do you figure dont have ID? There are a lot of reasons why a person would want to get an ID if they are allowed to do so, I don't see citizens who fail to get ID to be enough people to worry about. If they are concerned about this new law maybe it will motivate them to get off their ass and get an ID.

A person does not need to have the id with them, it needs only to be in the computer system to avoid problems.

David wrote:

U coud LOSE your country, ideologically, real fast that way, Thomas.

My understanding is that Thomas is not an American.
I am pretty sure that he has no American children either.
He has no stake in our future.

If he has no id. then there may well be an investigation
qua his citizenship; so what ?

Proportional paradox

Although elections to the US House of Representatives use a first-past-the-post voting system, the constitution requires that seats be "apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers" - that is, divvied up proportionally. In 1880, the chief clerk of the US Census Bureau, Charles Seaton, discovered that Alabama would get eight seats in a 299-seat House, but only seven in a 300-seat House.

This "Alabama paradox" was caused by an algorithm known as the largest remainder method, which was used to round the number of seats a state would receive under strict proportionality to a whole number.