It's the profit margins, stupid

In Newsweek, Eve Conant attempts a more charitable explanation of Arizona’s Juan Crow law (headline: “Why Arizona isn’t crazy, only wrong”), and falls short:

Arizona has outraged the nation with a new immigration law that obligates authorities to check the documents of anyone they believe is in the country illegally, based on a “reasonable suspicion” during a “lawful” stop. Some accuse lawmakers and the 70 percent of Arizonans who support the bill of acting like Nazis, or of turning Arizona into an apartheid state. But spend some time in Arizona, and you may come to see why so many Arizonans want this.

It’s terrifying to live next door to homes filled with human traffickers, drug smugglers, AK-47s, pit bulls, and desperate laborers stuffed 30 to a room, shoes removed to hinder escape. During a month’s reporting with police and other law-enforcement agents in Arizona last year, I met many scared people. One man who lived next to a “drop house” for Mexican workers slept with two guns under his bed, his children not allowed to play in the backyard. The sound of gunshots was not uncommon. “Four years ago this neighborhood was poodles and old ladies,” he said, too frightened to give his name. “Now it’s absolutely insane.” That morning, authorities had raided the drop house. When the neighbor told me how his kids had been evacuated behind riot shields, he began to cry.

So people in Arizona are scared of drug & human traffickers.  Thus, they…pass a “papers, please” law written by the lawyer for a nativist xenophobe group & introduced by a white supremacist sympathizer?

Anyone that knew the background on that legislation & who wrote it who still supported it is both wrong AND crazy.  People that didn’t and still supported it occupy a spot somewhere on a spectrum between holding the same sympathies & falling for the propaganda of “immigrants = crime” such that they’ve slouched towards pining for Whitopia without realizing it.

Thankfully, Eve touches on how hollow the Invading Criminal Immigrant Hordes narrative is later on.  That could have been made even more obvious by noting that a simple search shows, as immigration in the state has risen, the violent crime rate has been going down.  Here, plug Arizona into the Department of Justice’s stats table search and see for yourself.

Of course, careful consideration of facts doesn’t sell newspapers & push TV ratings, sensationalism does.  So about that crime the media has focused so tightly on, note what it is related to.  Human smuggling as a class of criminal activity solely exists because of difficulty in the legal immigration process, and the War on Drugs ensures that huge money can be made from the narcotics trade.  The violence on the part of the coyotes comes with the territory of desperate people moving under the radar with people they don’t even know for profit.  Meanwhile, the cartel violence is property conflict resolution by other means, over an artificially valuable product.

I can understand the frustration on the part of people who live near this.  But for all the “do something!!” screaming, scapegoating is worse than nothing.  You want to know when Arizona is taking this problem seriously?  Watch for protesters with signs saying “End the Drug War”…

(cross-posted to FreedomDemocrats.org)