We're All Arizonans Now

My favorite former Alaskan Governor, Mrs. Sarah Palin, is at it again. I sometimes wonder if she is not a close relative of Michael Palin, since she has a talent for the comically absurd, but I suppose it is unlikely. I don’t know what the Alaskan equivalent of the Mayflower was, but if Mrs. Palin’s forbearers were on it, perhaps Alaska would be better off it had been a little less sea-worthy. Actually, I have mixed feelings about even discussing Mrs. Palin, since I have often criticized the American news media for giving her inordinate attention, out of all proportion to her relative significance or merit, but I am coming to understand that she represents something very real and very worrisome about a significant element of American society.

The most recent pearl of wisdom that Mrs. Palin threw in my swinish path was the statement made concerning the law recently passed in Arizona. When discussing the law requiring law enforcement to ascertain the immigration status of persons they have “official” contact with, Mrs. Palin suggested Americans want to know “Why haven't the police already been doing that?” It would probably be pointless to try and discuss the subtleties of Constitutional protections with Mrs. Palin and her supporters, and none of them will be reading this anyway, but those of us who are not part of the ignorance is bliss bandwagon should probably be a bit concerned that a significant number of people in this country feel that Constitutional protections should be casually ignored when “questionable” people are involved.

For the record, I do believe that the United States needs to be more effective in both bureaucratic regulation of immigration and physical control of our nation’s borders. You probably cannot call yourself a nation if you don’t have at least marginal control over people entering and leaving your sovereign territory and that is probably what we currently have, marginal control. There are a lot of reasons we would want to know who is coming and going across our borders, and law enforcement is only the most obvious of them. Immigration reform is a very complex issue, but I think the demand-siders are probably correct on this one; the best way to manage the issue is to enforce requirements to demonstrate eligibility to work in the U.S. and punish the employers who violate these regulations, whether they are lawn maintenance contractors or Wall Street corporations.

Mrs. Palin and her intellectual peers are not supportive of national employment documents, because that would force all citizens to produce documentation and submit to verification in violation of their privacy rights. The Arizona law, however, would only require that people identified by an individual police officer as being “questionable” would have to produce proof of their right to be in this country and, I can only surmise, since most of the people so identified will be of Hispanic extraction, the chances that an honest, god-fearing white person will be subjected to the indignity of this process is remote. Perhaps I am being unfair; I know that many “Tea Party” supporters and other adherents of nativist populism are expressing resentment about being labeled as “racists”, but I have a problem finding any other explanation for the inconsistency in their stated concerns about Constitutional rights. It appears that while all pigs are equal, some pigs may indeed be more equal than others.

Beyond being concerned that any person of voting age in the United States could be so ill-informed or lacking in intellectual discernment as to find Mrs. Palin a credible or sincere spokesman for anything but her own interests, I find it distressing that some significant segment of our population still feels that the problems this nation faces can be best addressed by abandoning our principles. Anyone who has endured my rantings previously knows that this is one of my consistent themes. In my view, every massive social disaster experienced since around 436 B.C. has mostly been the result of a society that felt it could do things the easy way when times got tough.

So let’s just harass Mexicans about their citizenship status; after all, they’re not like us; they don’t share our commitment to the rights of man. Hell, what if we do screw up and drag a legitimate resident off to the holding camp? Who cares? It won’t be you or me or anybody we know very well. God knows we’ve got millions of Americans lined up waiting for all those grass cutting jobs that will be made available. While we’re at it, maybe we can get some unemployed East German engineers to help us design the razor wire, scatter guns and minefields for our border management infrastructure. If that fails, we can all go to Idaho and wait it out in our fortified compounds and protect the flame of true liberty with the guns we so bravely prevented the government from depriving us of. Sarah probably won’t be there to enjoy paradise with us though; she’ll be in Aruba sipping pina coladas and spending all the money in her Swiss bank accounts that she made talking nonsense to our dumb asses.