The new Arizona immigration law, SB 1070, goes into effect this Thursday, and it is obviously and rightfully a contentious issue at the moment. As if you haven’t already heard everything about it, here is my unwarranted opinion. Hooray!

In case you enjoy living under a rock, the law makes the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and gives the police the power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. So basically, you will be detained and harassed if your skin is brown, if you have a thin mustache, if you have more than two people living in your house, if you listen to Spanish radio stations, if you know how to conjugate the word correr (to run, which will happen), if your car is painted purple, if you eat tongue burritos, or any number of other bullshit, superficial, racist reasons. The police don’t have to provide any proof, they just have to suspect you. And we all know that police officers would never abuse that power.

Can you imagine how white people would react if we had a similar policy against Canadians? If you could be detained simply on suspicion of being a Canadian immigrant? Every time you ordered pancakes with maple syrup you’d have to show your I.D. Every time you went to a bar to watch a hockey game you’d need to show your driver’s license. Every time you wanted to wear a winter hat with ear flaps you’d have to sing the star spangled banner. White America would be livid, and yet many people show no empathy in this situation.

I love the fact that the people that say they love this country the loudest are also the people that hate immigration the most, and they perceive no irony there at all. My impression of them: “America is the greatest country in the world! So God dammit, stop wanting to come here.” I’ve been reading some of the message boards on this issue, and one comment particularly stood out to me. Someone said “Why don’t we just pardon everyone in our jails and turn them loose in the streets? Because they broke our laws! This is an invasion - they are here illegally - do your jobs people and get rid of these criminals!” Granted, immigration must be controlled at some level, and I don’t have all the right answers, but to relate a person sneaking into this country with a violent criminal in our prison system is too far. An illegal immigrant’s crime is a crime of hope, not of hate. I’ve never met an immigrant who snuck into this country because of our lax laws on murder, arson, or rape. They sneak here because they are trying to forge a better life for themselves and their families. It may be misguided, but that is admirable, not deplorable. Next thing we know, we’ll be throwing teenagers into jail because they ‘hoped’ to get a sword for Christmas, but they didn’t have the proper weapons permit already in place.

Michael Hethmon, who helped draft SB 1070, recently argued that the law “was intended by its creators, myself among them, to provoke sustainable immigration reform.”  The choice of the word provoke is pretty curious. That sounds to me like he wrote the law in order to force the federal government to take illegal immigration seriously and come up with a plan for sustainable immigration. Arizona has long been frustrated with the federal government’s actions on illegal immigration, and now they are trying to flex their muscles. Holy shit, that’s petty. We’re talking about the lives of millions of American residents, both legal and illegal, and Arizona is trying to compare dick sizes with the feds. They are like two kids bickering over a toy in the sand box, only the sandbox is the Arizona desert and the toy is every person with a tan.

I’m hoping this law gets overturned in the courts. Until then, don’t wear a sombrero when driving through Arizona.