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… wasn’t

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
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 one’s personal information and seizure of your person—in the form of an arrest

— without a warrant, is extremely unreasonable. It clearly violates one of our country’s

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 California’s 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

defense’s and, when they lost, the plaintiff’s. 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 don’t 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
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.