James Doty thinks the most offensive part of Arizona's new immigration law is and almost certainly will be ruled unconstitutional. That's the part about how cops can stop anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant — a determination, he notes, that will almost always be made on the basis of race.
The whole thing reminds me of an ugly practice we had out here for a time in Beverly Hills. I don't live in Beverly Hills but I pass through it often. So do a lot of folks who, unlike moi, are not Caucasian. There was a time when that alone was enough to get the B.H.P.D. to pull you over, detain you, question you and try to find something they could arrest or cite you for. Ostensibly, it was under a statute that gave the police broad powers to stop anyone they thought might be engaged in unlawful activities…but it was pretty well understood that the idea was to make minorities feel unwelcome, particularly in the evening when they probably weren't just going to or from a job cleaning some white person's home.
I'm a little fuzzy on when this happened but I recall a local TV station doing a hidden camera sting on the practice. They put a black guy in an old car and had him drive lawfully around Beverly Hills for several hours over a couple of nights. Over and over, he got stopped…allegedly because he'd run a red light or driven recklessly, though the tape from the hidden camera truck showed he'd done no such thing. Then they put a white man in the same car and had him drive the same streets for the same amount of time. He was utterly unstopped. The white man even ran a stop sign in full view of a police car and didn't get pulled over or ticketed.
I'm sure a little of that still goes on but it was much worse, much more blatant once upon a time. The police there finally had to give up the lie that they weren't stopping black people because they were black. There were always other reasons, they'd claimed…but they were never quite able to explain what they might be. I don't see anyone in Arizona explaining how the police are going to look at someone and, leaving race aside, deduce that there's a strong likelihood the person is an illegal alien.
But apparently, this new law is going into practice. Betcha within two weeks, there's a news story that they stopped some Hispanic who, some cop thought, looked suspiciously like an illegal alien…and it turns out to be, like, a Congressman or the Mayor or Antonio Banderas.