Boston Herald Bad posture on amnesty Funny how feds lean on Ariz., not R.I. By Michael Graham | Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Today, Arizona. Tomorrow . . . Rhode Island? Attorney General Eric Holder finally filed that long-rumored lawsuit challe nging Arizona’s new immigration law. In his opinion, only the federal government has the legal authority to “enforce” (read “completely ignore”) border security. If the Obama administration were convinced that Arizona would treat illegal immigration the same way the feds do, they wouldn’t have bothered to sue. Unfortunately, Arizonans seem to take the rule of law seriously. And this is a big problem for Team Obama. Holder is worried that trained and knowledgeable local cops will actually prove that the law is enforceable, blowing his boss’s cover. Remember President Barack Obama’s claim last week that our borders are “just too vast” for us to secure them through enforcement, with fences and border patrols? The border’s too big. The hole in the Gulf is too deep. The recession is too stubborn. Maybe we should find the president a smaller, easier-to-manage country to govern. You know - send him to the minors for a few years. Anyway, if enforcing immigration law is a bad thing for local cops to do, as Holder claims, why pick on Arizona? If he’s really upset that the same laws he has taken an oath to enforce might actually get (gulp!) enforced, why isn’t he suing Providence instead of Phoenix? They’ve been doing local immigration enforcement for years now. As The Boston Globe-Democrat reported yesterday, “From Woonsocket to Westerly, the troopers patrolling the nation’s smallest state are reporting all _illegal immigrants_ (http://www.bostonherald.com/search/?searchSite=true&topic=illegal+immigrants&submit=Go!&byline=&mode=score&sorting=score&searchSite =recent) they encounter, even on routine stops such as speeding, to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” Even liberal Providence, where politicians long opposed any local enforcement efforts, changed its policy in 2008 after the infamous Marco Riz case. Riz was the illegal immigrant arrested by Providence cops twice while under a federal deportation order but released both times. He was then charged with carjacking a woman in Warwick and raping her in Providence. Rhode Island cops now routinely contact ICE when they suspect they’ve come across an illegal immigrant. Since 2006, the number of contacts they’ve made to ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center in Vermont has nearly doubled, the Globe reported. How is this significantly different than Arizona’s proposed law? Families who fear running into the next Marco Riz might think Rhode Island is onto something. But not Team Obama. No, what Holder wants is for more states to follow the Massachusetts model. When Gov. _Deval Patrick_ (http://news.bostonherald.com/search/?topic=Deval+Patrick&searchSite=pubdate) took office, he let it be known that his attitude toward immigration enforcement was . . . not to. As a result, the Globe reports that the number of calls to the ICE support office from Massachusetts law enforcement plunged under Patrick, from 4,461 checks in 2006 to just 575 in the last fiscal year. Amnesty-siacs like Holder and Patrick never answer the simple question: What’s wrong with enforcing the law? We know what happens when you don’t - Phoenix becomes the kidnapping capital of America, blue-collar workers lose their jobs and as a new study by the Federation for Immigration Reform concludes, illegal immigration costs us $113 billion a year. Does anyone believe the costs of enforcement would be nearly this high? So why sue Arizona? The glaring, obvious and painful answer is politics. Hispanics are a key part of the Democratic Party coalition, and many Latino voters are unhappy with President Obama’s lack of action on amnesty for illegals. And it’s a lot more effective making that case in Tucson than Pawtucket. A fight with Arizona puts Obama on the side of amnesty, but without requiring him to do anything - a classic move from the president who as a senator loved to vote “present.” -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
