What, exactly, is the rationale for establishing "sanctuary cities?"

Brandon,

If the local police enforce immigration laws in my city they get fired. If the police officials don't fire them, than the Citi government will fire them. If the city government doesn't fire them... Then they get voted out.

The federal government has nothing to do with this. There was an attempt for a small group of anti-immigrant hardliners to take over city government. They lost resoundingly.

Traceable ancestry shows a combination of Italian, Mexican and Russian.

How Mexico Treats Illegal Aliens--Their practices are discriminatory, corrupt, and abusive.

Mexican president Felipe Calderón has accused Arizona of opening the door “to intolerance, hate, discrimination, and abuse in law enforcement.”

While open-borders activists decry the new enforcement measures signed into law in “Nazi-zona” last week, they remain deaf, dumb, or willfully blind to the unapologetically restrictionist policies of our neighbors to the south.

The Arizona law bans sanctuary cities that refuse to enforce immigration laws, stiffens penalties against illegal-alien day laborers and their employers, makes it a misdemeanor for immigrants to fail to complete and carry an alien-registration document, and allows the police to arrest immigrants unable to show documents proving they are in the U.S. legally.

If those rules constitute the racist, fascist, xenophobic, inhumane regime that the National Council of La Raza, Al Sharpton, Catholic bishops, and their grievance-mongering followers claim, then what about these regulations and restrictions imposed on foreigners?

The Mexican government will bar foreigners if they upset “the equilibrium of the national demographics.” How’s that for racial and ethnic profiling?

If outsiders do not enhance the country’s “economic or national interests” or are “not found to be physically or mentally healthy,” they are not welcome. Neither are those who show “contempt against national sovereignty or security.” They must not be economic burdens on society and must have clean criminal histories. Those seeking to obtain Mexican citizenship must show a birth certificate, provide a bank statement proving economic independence, pass an exam, and prove they can provide their own health care.

Illegal entry into the country is equivalent to a felony punishable by two years’ imprisonment. Document fraud is subject to fine and imprisonment; so is alien marriage fraud. Evading deportation is a serious crime; illegal re-entry after deportation is punishable by ten years’ imprisonment. Foreigners may be kicked out of the country without due process and the endless bites at the litigation apple that illegal aliens are afforded in our country (see, for example, President Obama’s illegal-alien aunt — a fugitive from deportation for eight years who is awaiting a second decision on her previously rejected asylum claim).

Open-borders protesters marched freely at the Capitol building in Arizona, comparing Republican governor Jan Brewer to Hitler, waving Mexican flags, advocating that demonstrators “smash the state,” and holding signs that proclaimed “No human is illegal” and “We have rights.”

But under the Mexican constitution, such political speech by foreigners is banned. Noncitizens cannot “in any way participate in the political affairs of the country.” In fact, a plethora of Mexican statutes enacted by its congress limit the participation of foreign nationals and companies in everything from investment, education, mining, and civil aviation to electric energy and firearms. Foreigners have severely limited (if any) private-property and employment rights.

As for abuse, the Mexican government is notorious for its abuse of Central American illegal aliens who attempt to violate Mexico’s southern border. The Red Cross has protested rampant Mexican police corruption, intimidation, and bribery schemes targeting illegal aliens there for years. Mexico didn’t respond by granting mass amnesty to illegal aliens, as it is demanding that we do. It clamped down on its borders even further.

Here’s the proper rejoinder to all the hysterical demagogues in Mexico (and their sympathizers here on American soil) now calling for boycotts and invoking Jim Crow laws, apartheid, and the Holocaust because Arizona has taken its sovereignty into its own hands: Hipócritas.

"In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith, becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming, in every facet, an American and nothing but an American...

There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American People.

Immigration stats from The LA Times:

1. 40% of all workers in L.A. County (L.A. County has 10 million people) are working for cash and not paying taxes. This is because they are predominantly illegal immigrants, working without a green card.

2. 95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens.

3. 75% of people on the most wanted list in Los Angeles are illegal aliens.

4. Over 2/3's of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal whose births were paid for by taxpayers.

5. Nearly 25% of all inmates in California detention centers are Mexican nationals here illegally.

6. Over 300,000 illegal aliens in Los Angeles County are living in garages.

7. The FBI reports half of all gang members in Los Angeles are most likely illegal aliens from south of the border.

8. Nearly 60% of all occupants of HUD properties are illegal.

9. 21 radio stations in L.A. are Spanish speaking.

10. In L.A.County 5.1 million people speak English. 3.9 million Speak Spanish (10 million people in L.A.County).

Additional figures:

1. Less than 2% of illegal aliens are picking our crops but 29% are on welfare.

~http://www.cis.org

2. Over 70% of the United States annual population growth (and over 90% of California, Florida, and New York) results from immigration.

3. The cost of immigration to the American taxpayer in 1997 was a NET (after subtracting taxes immigrants pay) $70 BILLION a year, [Professor Donald Huddle, Rice University].

4. The lifetime fiscal impact (taxes paid minus services used) for the average adult Mexican immigrant is a NEGATIVE.

5. 29% of inmates in federal prisons are illegal aliens.

That is how democracy works.

At another level, it is due to the present cult of the victim that is so pervasive among liberals in this country. It's virtue signaling, pure and simple.