Down To The Borderline

A dark figure in a trench coat emerges from the mist. The glow from the tip of his cigarette illuminates the jagged scar that runs from just below his right eye to his chin. He takes a long drag, inhaling deeply before stepping directly in front of the anxious pedestrian. "Do you have your papers? I need to see your papers."
Maybe you thought you were watching an episode of "Hogan's Heroes," or that ill-fated section of "Twilight Zone - The Movie." The one with Nazis. Even when I was a kid, back when the earth was cooling, I knew that was the question that the scary Gestapo officer would always ask the frightened refugees. Just before he rounded them up and shot them. They were the bad guys. Now that scene threatens to be played out, most likely without the mist, in the Valley of the Sun. A measure which is now on the verge of approval in the Arizona Legislature would make it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally. It would also require local police officers to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are illegal. Those who are unable to produce documents showing they are allowed to be in the U.S. could be arrested, jailed for up to six months and fined two thousand five hundred dollars. The police unions insist they wouldn't engage in anything as low or despicable as profiling, but when you consider that even a naturalized citizen could be arrested under this law because he or she was not carrying the appropriate documentation, one begins to wonder how they would use it. Arizona came up with this solution to deal with the estimated four hundred sixty thousand illegal immigrants in their state. That puts them seventh on the list for most illegals, a list topped by California with more than two and a half million. What would they have the cops in San Diego do? Maybe the best answer really is to build a wall to keep all those illegal immigrants out. And all the stupid ideas in.