Immigration and Arizona

Posted as a response to a Facebook discussion on Arizona's new law giving law enforement agencies in the state "the power to question anyone they suspect might be in the country illegally" (Maiman,B. Populist Examiner. http://www.examiner.com/. posted April 24, 2010. Retrieved from "blogger won't allow cut and paste...boo." Last updated 4/24/2010).

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Racial profiling is never okay constitutionally because we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights... "All men," from the Declaration of Independence, does not simply refer to citizens of the United States of America, but to all people created in the image of God. That said, Arizona's new law does further extend and encourage police action as it regard a certain ethnic group, mainly those of those of Mexican, Latino/a, and Hispanic, non-white heritage and descent.

However, "all men" also includes citizens of the United States of America who are fed up with lax immigration laws and regulations that only perpetuate and encourage corporate greed, mainly the underpaying of "said" ethnic group in many of the jobs that help sustain this nation. If you've seen the documentary Food Inc., you'll know what I'm talking about. Not only do we as a nation face the outsourcing of jobs to other countries whose labor laws are unlike our own; and not only do we face the underpaying of illegal workers here in our own country. We come face to face with a large, clandestine network of systems secretly established to unlawfully "credential" many immigrants who are here illegally. That too is unjust.

In Jeremiah 22: 13, Jehovah declares, Sure to be judged is the king who builds his palace using injustice and treats people unfairly while adding its upper rooms. He makes his countrymen work for him for nothing. He does not pay them for their labor." Both illegal immigrants working here in America, outsourced laborers employed by U.S. companies in other countries, and unemployed or underemployed U. S. citizens who could benefit from some if not many of those jobs are hurt by the kinds of unjust labor practices that impact the immigration debate.

In the end, what is the goal of Arizona's new law: love, grace, and compassion or law for law's sake?

And to answer poster's question in the strand as it relates to pressuring the federal government into seriously tackling the immigration conundrum: I could see this valid perspective; to go as far as to pass a law that verges on Jim Crow, in a hope to seriously shine a spotlight on the impact of not seriously tackling the issue of immigration at all. The law will more than likely be get overturned by the courts.