Breathing While Undocumented

[babylonsister]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Greenhouse

Linda Greenhouse is the Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Senior Fellow at Yale Law School.<1> She was a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who covered the United States Supreme Court for nearly three decades for The New York Times.<2>


http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/breathing-while-undocumented/?ref=opinion

Breathing While Undocumented
By LINDA GREENHOUSE


I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?

The intent of the new Arizona law, according to the State Legislature, is “attrition through enforcement.” Breathing while undocumented, without a civil liberties lawyer at hand, is now a perilous activity anywhere in Arizona.

snip//

Indeed, federal pre-emption would appear to be the most promising route for attacking the Arizona law. Supreme Court precedents make clear that immigration is a federal matter and that the Constitution does not authorize the states to conduct their own foreign policies.

My confidence about the law’s fate in the court’s hands is not boundless, however. In 1982, hours after the court decided the Texas case, a young assistant to Attorney General William French Smith analyzed the decision and complained in a memo: “This is a case in which our supposed litigation program to encourage judicial restraint did not get off the ground, and should have.” That memo’s author was John G. Roberts Jr.

So what to do in the meantime? Here’s a modest proposal. Everyone remembers the wartime Danish king who drove through Copenhagen wearing a Star of David in support of his Jewish subjects. It’s an apocryphal story, actually, but an inspiring one. Let the good people of Arizona — and anyone passing through — walk the streets of Tucson and Phoenix wearing buttons that say: I Could Be Illegal.

[Cha]

1. That first sentence is my line..

"I'm glad I've already seen the Grand Canyon".

"I could be illegal" would be one way to protest against the law.

[babylonsister]

2. The second-to-last para. concerns me; if the SC gets involved,

what would John Roberts do now? :scared:

[Cha]

3. I know..no

telling. Will he want to further ignite the flames that the "lawmakers" in AZ have set into motion? Or will some semblance of sanity take hold of his mind?