some fixes, immigration edition

Arizona moves a bit toward sanity here

Not quite as much as I would like to see, mostly because there's still no clear path to figuring how to reform the legal immigration pathways in order to make them workable and easier for people to arrive at and then within our borders in search of future prosperity. But then again, to be fair to Arizona, that's not Arizona's problem (or their power to do).

But as written here, a law which imagines that everyone would have to prove their status as a legal resident and citizen, as opposed to a law where only those despicable brown people from "Mexico" must do so, is not a law that would have passed (nor a law I would recommend as a solution). Fixing that problem with the current law such that it doesn't implicitly say "go forth and racial profile" to the witnesses to crimes, the people walking on the street, people driving one mile over the speed limit and so on (and this is the same state where people fired shaving cream to cover the speed trap cameras and a guy wore a gorilla mask to drive around town so they couldn't prove it was him driving on the cameras remember... ), seems like a good start to the problems with the law. Obviously it's important to have clear identification of people when they are suspected and/or arrested for actual criminal actions.

It would be a better idea still if those criminal actions were serious ones, as opposed to chickenshit things like blowing past the speed limit at one over.

But it will probably lead to enough whining by some jurisdictions of Arizona's legal residents and immigrant populations (as well as some of those white folks that previously thought they would and should be immune from police scrutiny), that the law will probably be overturned in time (if the federal government doesn't get there first). Or lots of people will flee the state for other more sensible pastures, and Arizona will continue to solve its immigration problem in the most efficient way: make its local economy less prosperous so people leave.