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8/9/2019 Paper against SB1070 in Arizona
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Arizona has recently enacted the Support our Law Enforcement and Safe
Neighborhoods Act, a bill designed to regulate illegal immigration. This bill gives police
officers of the state of Arizona the right to determine the immigration status of a person
during any legitimate contact made by an official or agency if reasonable suspicion
exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the U.S.
(http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/). This bill is unconstitutional in that it legalizes racial
profiling, violates article six of the Bill of rights, preventing unreasonable search and
seizure, and will cost more than it is worth.
Racial profiling is defined by DeAnza College as any police or private security
practice in which a person is treated as a suspect because of his or her race, ethnicity,
nationality or religion. The state of Arizona has declared that the immigration status of
anyone who makes legitimate contact with an official is subject to verification: no
warrant is required. Police officers regulate a number of things from traffic laws to bank
robberies. Because of this immigration law, an officer within his rights to decide that
there is a reasonable suspicion that the Hispanic driver that just passed him wasnt
wearing a seatbelt. Subsequently, the officer is entitled to detain the person and verify
their immigration status, which has no relevance to the question at hand: the officer is
permitted to leap from unfastened seatbelt to undocumented alien without any connection
between the two scenarios. Here, the detainee was held suspect because of his or her
race and their personal information was unreasonably searched/seized.
The Bill of Rights was specifically states that it is the right of the people to be
secure against unreasonable search and seizure and no warrants shall issue, but upon
probably cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to
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be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. The bill, as written by members of
the Arizona state government, allows a law enforcement officer, without a warrant, to
arrest a person if the officer has probable cause to believe that the person has committed
any public offense that makes the person removable from the U.S.. In my opinion, the
search of ones personal information and seizure of your personin the form of an arrest
without a warrant, is extremely unreasonable. It clearly violates one of our countrys
oldest testaments to natural human rights and liberties.
Although Michael Hethmon, a co-collaborator of the bill, concedes that the bill
was, actually, intended by its creators, myself among them, to provoke sustainable
immigration reform, this reform is not truly sustainable. Thomas Saenz argues that the
bill should never have been brought up in the first place. He speculates that the cost of
defending this bill will be similar to that of Californias Proposition 187, which also had a
similar goal as SB1070, and was passed by voters in 1994. There were so many lawsuits
against the proposition the state had to divert much of its resources in order to handle all
the paperwork. On top of that, there was the cost of paying for attorneys, both the
defenses and, when they lost, the plaintiffs. When the initial complaints had settled
down, it was left to be seen that much of what the original bill had intended had been
made null or void, and the vast bulk of the law never took effect.
As we have seen in the days since the Support our Law Enforcement and Safe
Neighborhoods Act was passed, there exists an enormously negative reaction to the bill.
There are multiple protests planned across the nation in an effort to get this point across:
most of us dont want SB 1070; it is unconstitutional; it legalizes racial profiling; it will
be expensive. The costs of this bill far outweigh the possible gains. People will begin to
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see the state of Arizona as they saw communist controlled Eastern Germany, who also
required their inhabitants, citizens or otherwise, to carry proper paperwork for passage: as
defying natural rights, the rights this country was literally born to protect.