As Arizona Went, So Goes Virginia

Virginia has long had localized tensions over immigration: places like Prince William County and towns like Herndon where influxes of day laborers and other immigrant Latinos have been followed by police crackdowns, anti-solicitation ordinances and laws empowering the police to check people’s immigration status. But now that Arizona has gone to unconstitutional extremes in its anti-immigration campaign, Virginia’s highest officials are trying to take their whole state farther down that dark road.

Gov. Robert McDonnell and the attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, both Republicans, are leading the charge. Mr. McDonnell is pushing to expand the authority of the state police to enforce federal immigration laws. Mr. Cuccinelli — who signed on to an amicus brief supporting Arizona’s immigration law — recently said that Virginia’s law enforcement officers may check the immigration status of anyone they stop for any reason.

The opinion does not say such checks are required, which the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out in a letter urging local police departments to ignore it...

...A bigger question is why police departments would want to be roped into immigration enforcement with every stop they make. A police officer’s job is not foreign policy or border control. It’s community safety.

Police chiefs and officers across the country, particularly those who work along the border, recognize that you can’t easily protect a community that fears and shuns you. To fight crime, law enforcement needs help. It needs willing witnesses, and victims who tell the truth. It needs time and resources, which it shouldn’t waste chasing peaceable immigration violators and detaining brown-skinned citizens.

In Virginia — and in other states like Florida, where officials and candidates have been aping Arizona — creating a local dragnet for illegal immigrants is a popular slogan. It is not a solution.

More inane/insane drivel from the morons at the NYT. 2+2=5 is the new math for the boobocracy that calls itself the Times editorial board. These people have raised idiocy to heights never before seen. Witness a story lede from the Times a few years ago that said that the nations crime rate continued to drop despite the increase in prison population. Just as the Times refuses to acknowledge illegal aliens aren’t immigrants they refused to see a correlation between increased incarceration of offenders and lowered crime statistics. In other words, “Who are you going to believe - me or your lying eyes?”
Incidentally despite the Times and the rest of the left wing intelligentsia’s sudden recent concern that immigration enforcement is beyond the purview or ability of local law enforcement: Investigating and establishing immigration status ain’t rocket science. I was a cop for 36 years and back in the ‘70’s we routinely dealt with illegals (though not anywhere near the numbers we see today) and it was included in Academy training. Today you could take any experienced cop and train him in a few hours to conduct such an investigation.
In regard to the concern that illegals won’t cooperate with law enforcement because of their status I would posit two points:
1.) I spent several years in Internal Affairs and they never seemed to fear making complaints against cops. In fact they made false complaints at an equal or higher rate than any other population demographic. If they weren’t afraid to do that why should they fear cooperating in any other investigation?
2.) If we deport the illegals they won’t become either victims or perpetrators of criminal behavior, at least in this country, thus rendering moot the need for their cooperation.

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