In a column this morning, Washington Post columnist George Will attempts to justify— even praises—Arizona’s new immigration law.
He plays Constitutional semantics with words and phrases such as “reasonable,” “reasonable attempt,” and “reasonable suspicion” and even brings in Norwegian grandmothers being “wanded” by airport screeners as a puzzling, perhaps sarcastic example of “acceptable, even admirable, homage to the virtue of ‘evenness’ as we seek to deter violence by a few, mostly Middle Eastern, young men.”
The example is supposed to be a tribute to Arizona Governor Brewer’s “We must enforce the law evenly, and without regard to skin color, accent or social status,” and a testament to the fact that “the nation thinks as Brewer does.”
By the way, is this the same governor who, when recently asked by a reporter to “please explain what criteria will be used to determine if someone is an illegal immigrant, ” admitted that she “[does] not know what an illegal immigrant looks like.”?
Will concludes his Constitutional analysis with these words:
Non-Hispanic Arizonans of all sorts live congenially with all sorts of persons of Hispanic descent. These include some whose ancestors got to Arizona before statehood — some even before it was a territory. They were in America before most Americans’ ancestors arrived. Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their back yards at 3 a.m.
This is very true, Mr. Will, and it is commendable of you to point this out about many of the “probably 30 percent of Arizona’s residents [who] are Hispanic.” But the question begs, why should the skin color of these “fine men and women who trim [our] lawns and put plates in front of [us] at restaurants” beget so much “reasonable suspicion”? Why should these fine men and women be so humiliated—have their Constitutional rights violated—in order to identify and apprehend those “illegal immigrants passing through [our] back yards at 3 a.m.”?
It is probably easy for a Champaign, Illinois-born, peaches-and-cream-complexioned, Princeton-educated person to say that the new Arizona immigration law is “a law Arizona can live with.”
Could it perhaps be because when such a person travels to Arizona, no law enforcement officer will harbor a “reasonable suspicion” that he or she is illegally in Arizona and no law enforcement officer will approach him or her to “determine his or her status.”?
Could it be that the color of a person’s skin does make a difference—in Arizona?
