Uncommon Commentary #113: Profiling a Country in Jeopardy

Aside from the very fact that our country is ruled by ORP (Obama, Reid, and Pelosi), there's perhaps no better illustration of how much trouble we are in than the unbelievable uproar over the new Arizona law that makes illegal immigration a State crime—it was, of course, already a federal crime—and authorizes police to require persons to whom they've had to speak for some other reason (such as a traffic violation), and whom they reasonably (v.i.) suspect of being illegal aliens, to produce proof (which federal law has, since the 1940's, required to be carried) of legal residency; the policeman also must call the coldline—I mean, hotline—of the ICE (department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which has the duty of determining whether the suspect is in the country licitly. (Or at least it had, before the ICE, along with seemingly every other organ of government, became a partisan tool of the Obama administration.)  The State statute expressly prohibits the screening of suspects based only on ethnicity; as I have noted previously on the Doman Domain, "racial" profiling is a bogus issue anyway.  "Reasonable suspicion" is a concept that's been defined in courts.  As you can tell, therefore, there is nothing very new or draconian about this piece of legislation; were one to base one's assessment of it on the outcry against it, though, one might guess that it instructs patrolmen to abduct and devour the babies of illegal aliens.
Presumably, not every protestor is aware of the truth about this law, but adults ought to know enough to examine the facts of an issue before bursting forth with so hysterical and indignant an overreaction as we are now witnessing. (Further, it's likely that much of the ignorance is wilful; that the demonstrators and other foes don't even want to know the truth of the situation, lest it interfere with their self-righteous minding of others' business.)
The boycotts and other actions of opposition to the legislation, most of which are taking place outside Arizona, hark back to the 1990 furor over that same State's rejection of making (Dr.) Martin Luther King (Jr.) Day a State holiday; that phenomenon sank to its lowest depth when the University of Virginia proclaimed that its "football" team (which had yet to receive an invitation to any postseason event) would not play in the Fiesta Bowl, even if the site of that game should be moved from Tempe (a suburb of Phoenix) to somewhere like New Mexico. (The Virginia team was at or near the top of the rankings at the time of the pretentious annunciation, but faded over the rest of the season; it's tempting to think that the decline in gridiron fortunes was divine punishment for the university's judgmentalism.)  Is it, then, just a dysfunctional State that's to blame for all the controversy?  No; it's 50 dysfunctional States and a dysfunctional District of Columbia, under a dysfunctional federal government voted into power by a dysfunctional electorate.  Terrorists, for whom our porous border with Mexico is an obvious place of entry into the USA, must shake their heads in disbelief when they think that a country whose people are so deeply divided on such a "no-brainer" as opposing illegal immigration would even try to oppose them.