Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Arizona immigration law and illegal immigrants: state of extremes

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=7&did=2035219461&SrchMode=1&sid=3&Fmt=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1274190039&clientId=9417

This article brings up debate about the new immigration law in Arizona stating that when a police officer makes a routine stop they are permitted to question the resident status of the person and ask them to show proof that they are in this country legally. People worry that this will leed to racial profiling and discrimination. It is believed that about 400,000 undocumented residents are living in Arizona right now. Protestors argue that allowing law officials to do this will start to be seen as a personal attck on the hispanic population, which is about 30% of the whole population. There is no way for a state official to tell a persons residential status just by looking at them, judgements will be made based on biased opinions.
The arguments for, and against, this new law are very logical. The main points of the law are questioned, for example, how anyone can tell who is legal or illegal based on the way they look. And that this law is coming about just because of the suggested amount of illegal immigrants in the state. The article gives many different statistics of the states population so that the reader can fully understand the "cultural generation gap" the writer refers to. The arguement is persuasive in that the reader can fully understand both sides of the debate and see why this law is wrong. Everyone in the United States knows about the immigration problem in America so the majority of the population can relate and have an opinion on the article.
This article kind of angered me, because I agree that this new law will lead to racial profiling and discrimination against one main race, hispanics. There is no possible way to look at someone and know that they are illegal. Officers are going to look at the immigration problem and use it to their benefit to start questioning people of different races.

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