What will you say to the Arizona police?

[struggle4progress]

Poll question: What will you say to the Arizona police?

[KILL THE WISE ONE]

1. none of the above i got an enhanced drivers license to make border crossing easy

[miscsoc]

2. i won't say anything, since i'm white

and if i was in arizona i'd be left alone even though i've never been in arizona in my life :)

[pitohui]

12. yeah i can tell you've never been in arizona, i'm white, i haven't been left alone

the checkpoints are not just for brown people but enjoy your fantasy life...it's easier to imagine you have white privilege and live in a plantation house if you never venture out of your apartment i guess...

crap, when i think of the shit i've taken in arizona and texas for years and no one said boo because i was white...i just assumed everyone went thru this had no idea a special law had to be put in to search anyone who wasn't white or i would have been like mega-pissed years ago!!!!

[miscsoc]

15. you're right

it's absurd to imagine that if police are allowed to stop people they suspect of being illegals they might just possibly target ppl who have the same skin colour as most people in the big country directly to the south of the state from which most illegal immigrants actually come

[EFerrari]

3. LOL

K&R

Although, it looks like this POS is not popular with LEOs in Arizona because it makes them liable no matter what they do.

[John Q. Citizen]

8. Leave it to the Repos to abuse their own infrastructure

[struggle4progress]

33. That's an excellent point. Thanks.

[John Q. Citizen]

4. "...y tu mama tombien!"

[chollybocker]

5. "Do you validate?"

[cliffordu]

6. How about:

I want to talk to a lawyer.

[TlalocW]

7. You forgot a couple

You look Canadian! Let me see YOUR birth certificate!

Mein brith certificate? Jawohl! Ah am haffing it here somewhere... I vill find it for you... MACH SCHNELL!

TlalocW

[pitohui]

9. what "will" i say? what about what HAVE i say?

i've been stopped by them on plentitudes of occasions over the years, and it really doesn't matter what you say as long as your accent is such that they can tell you could not possibly have been born anywhere other than the grand old us of a

i don't think they go on looks as much as you think but voice is telling -- i get stopped a LOT and have been stopped in arizona a LOT (and i'm blonde) but once they talk w. me a bit i am not usually detained long, my longest detention was in texas and because of my own stupidity i gave them more cause than usual (long story, won't bore you with it here)

in other words, i don't know how to answer your question because i have actual experience w. this, so i know how silly yr question is

they are talking to you to check your behaviors plus accent, if you can't speak well, or you're a weirdo (in real life, in person, i'm both -- a visibly odd person who can't speak well) i don't know what else they can do but check it out

SOME weirdos are dangerous (see under terry nichols) so to sit and cry no weirdo should ever be questionied is just..really...weird

oops, i forgot, it's all about race somehow even though "mexican" isn't a race, ok, next question, phrase it better next time, maybe you'll get the answer you want

but in the real world, they aren't just questioning "brown" people, if so, i would have no worries -- if they went by these supposed profiles, as a white middle-aged female i would NEVER be questioned, instead i am very frequently questioned/detained/searched

you are getting outraged because you've been told to get outraged -- not because of personal experience -- my mom, who is even older and whiter and tinier than i was just sharing in a puzzled tone her "search" stories -- trust me, whoever it is that thinks terrorist are using white grandmas to smuggle stuff in...they're searching EVERY white gramma no matter how tiny at least in my family

[Hawkeye-X]

10. In Slavic accent

Please to be bitink me.

Hawkeye-X

[Arctic Dave]

11. Don't tell them your from Russia, I did it back in 89 while walking

Back from Mexico drunk. Border patrol was not amused.

[pitohui]

13. c'mon, don't tease us like that

tell us the rest of the story!!!

i have to admit, border patrol is HIGHLY amused by my existence, i sometimes feel like when they go home for the day i'm the joke they tell their girlfriends :-)

[struggle4progress]

14. ... Thomas Warziniack was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia, but immigration authorities

pronounced him an illegal immigrant from Russia. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he's never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack's claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona ... After he was arrested in Colorado on a minor drug charge, Warziniack told probation officials there wild stories about being shot seven times, stabbed twice and bombed four times as a Russian army colonel in Afghanistan, according to court records. He also insisted that he swam ashore to America from a Soviet submarine ... Colorado court officials quickly determined his true identity in a national crime database: He was a Minnesota-born man who grew up in Georgia ...
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Immigration officials detaining, deporting American citizens
Are U.S. citizens being deported to foreign countries?
By Marisa Taylor | McClatchy Newspapershttp://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/01/24/25392/immigration-officials-detaining.html

[Speck Tater]

16. Why the hell would I ever go to Arizona? nt.

[JPK]

20. Why....well let me tell you....

I've been there and it's just a load of fun in july. First never venture out in midday summer sun. You will die. Second, don't venture out after the sun has gone down. It fools you. You will die. If you have an artistic love of varying shades of brown, you'll love the landscape. If you like the isolation of having the nearest town or city being hundreds of miles away but is a trek across the desert and get to a place that looks just like the place you left, all shades of brown..... and dry, you'll love it. Oh, and I asked a guy how do people work outside in the heat of the day and he said we don't, he was white. He said the beaners work during the day. They're used to it. White guys work at night outdoors in the summer. During the day, whitie works in airconditioned buildings and travels to and from in his job in an airconditioned car to get to their airconditioned home with a Fred Flintstone front yard rock garden. Hey Honey, I need to go to Home Depot and pick up some red rocks to resod, er re-rock the front yard. What shade of brown should I get? I saw a nice cactus, it was starting to flower so it will give a little color to the yard besides brown. Watch out for the scorpions!

[struggle4progress]

34. It may be an acquired taste but some of us find the desert breathtakingly beautiful

[blueamy66]

37. What an ass.

Arizona is beautiful.

[DireStrike]

30. Ah you beat me to it by a longshot.

[tavalon]

17. Actually, none of the above as I will not darken their door.

[Justitia]

18. Look! Over there! It's the Chupacabra!

[Kalyke]

19. Eh... I'd just let my Chihuahua lick him to death.

Seriously... my rescued old guy has bad teeth and his breath is FOUL.

Fuck.... what if he's not in this country legally? Will they deport my Gordito?

[petronius]

21. I saw the Grand Canyon last year, so there is little chance that I'l be anywhere near AZ

However, AZ police may visit CA from time to time, in which case I will say to them what I say to every visitor: "Yes, you fucking tourist, it's an ocean! It's pretty, we get it! Now drive faster than 20 or get off the road!"

:)

[slampoet]

22. I will say in my best elocution, "English do not pangle, pickle pangle, speak very well do not I, ..

mr. prime minister."


Then i will try to fart.

[struggle4progress]

35. Me in States United geborn was! Me am citizen are!

[slampoet]

41. It reads like a teabagger sign doesn't it?

[spin]

23. If asked, I'll just show them my Florida driver's license ...

If what I heard on the news today is correct, that's all I have to do.

No big deal.

By the way, rather than bitching about Arizona, lets get behind Obama and push for a new immigration bill. Not next year, or five to ten years from now. RIGHT NOW!!!

Few people mention it, but one of the reasons that we don't have a rational immigration policy is that many large employers enjoy having what is basically slave labor to abuse and underpay. Our Congress is bought and paid for by these same corporations.

If Mexicans come to our country to do "jobs that Americans will not do" they need to get at the least minimum wage and enjoy the same protections and rights that American workers do. Mexicans are extremely hard working individuals. One of my friends who is a supervisor on an electrical crew says the Mexicans are the best workers on a job site.

How we as Democrats can stand by and watch the employers profit from mistreating Mexicans irritates me.

Just one example of many: (One that really pisses me off.)

Gulf Coast Slaves: Halliburton Exploits Katrina Latino Workers

New America Media, News Feature, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Nov 17, 2005

Martinez, 16, speaks no English; his mother tongue is Zapotec. He had left the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, four weeks earlier for the promise that he would make $8 an hour, plus room and board, while working for a subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief work. The job was helping to clean up a Gulf Coast naval base in the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. "I was cleaning up the base, picking up branches and doing other work," Martinez said, speaking to me in broken Spanish.

Even if the Oaxacan teenager had understood Bush when he urged Americans that day to "help somebody find shelter or help somebody find food," he couldn't have known that he'd soon need similar help himself. But three weeks after arriving at the naval base from Texas, Martinez's boss, Karen Tovar, a job broker from North Carolina who hired workers for a KBR subcontractor called United Disaster Relief, booted him from the base and left him homeless, hungry and without money.

"They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one," Martinez said.

He says that Tovar "kicked us off the base," forcing him and other cleanup workers – many of them Mexican and undocumented – to sleep on the streets of New Orleans. According to Martinez, they were not paid for three weeks of work. An immigrant rights group recently filed complaints with the Department of Labor on behalf of Martinez and 73 other workers allegedly owed more than $56,000 by Tovar. Tovar claims that she let the workers go because she was not paid by her own bosses at United Disaster Relief. In turn, UDR manager Zachary Johnson, who declined to be interviewed for this story, told the Washington Post on Nov. 4 that his company had not been paid by KBR for two months.

Wherever the buck may stop along the chain of subcontractors, Martinez is stuck at the short end of it, and his situation is typical among many workers hired by subcontractors of KBR (formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root) to clean and rebuild Belle Chasse and other Gulf Coast military bases. Immigrants rights groups and activists like Bill Chandler, president of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, estimate that hundreds of undocumented workers are on the Gulf Coast military bases, a claim that the military and Halliburton/KBR deny even after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency turned up undocumented workers in a raid of the Belle Chasse facility last month.

Visits to the naval bases and dozens of interviews confirm that undocumented workers are in the facilities. Still, tracing the line from unpaid undocumented workers to their multibillion-dollar employers is a daunting task. A shadowy labyrinth of contractors, subcontractors and job brokers, overseen by no single agency, have created a no man's land where nobody seems to be accountable for the hiring – and abuse – of these workers.
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=93b709e20da9749bbefecb6215fb7049

[pampango]

31. Agree about helping Obama push reform now, but republicans will oppose it 100%, as well as

enough Blue Dogs to make it very difficult. My guess would be that those folks who are most supportive of this Arizona law and fearful/resentful of illegal immigrants are not going to be supportive of Obama's reform framework that includes, among other things, a path to citizenship for some of them.

The frustration with the federal government's inability to do anything about immigration seems to come from both sides of the political spectrum. The frustration of the republicans has been expressed in Arizona with the passage of this immigration law. They believe (or at least pretend to) that an "enforcement only" solution is possible. Make the wall bigger, send in more border guards/troops, sanction employers, and now empower local police to enforce immigration laws. It doesn't matter to them that billions have been spent on the wall, border patrol reinforcement, etc. They have to keep repeating the mantra that the federal government (coincidentally controlled by Democrats now) has failed to "secure the border", so we can't talk about anything more comprehensive.

The frustration of Democrats is that we can't combat this type of state action with any overriding federal action. While Democrats have majorities in both houses, republicans will oppose this even more than they did health care this year and the last attempt at immigration reform in 2007. It will be loud and messy. My impression is that national Democrats think that financial reform and, maybe, climate/energy reform are winners politically, while immigration reform is much dicier politically in an election year. They know republicans will oppose it and use it to fire up tea baggers and the rest of their base and they know that many Democratic politicians that also like the "enforcement only" style of immigration control.

[spin]

43. Sadly, I fear you are right....

so our government will do nothing to create a more rational and fair immigration system. Illegal immigrants will continue to be exploited and will be forced to live in fear of being stopped for a minor traffic violation or of a knock on the door.

[struggle4progress]

39. Because Florida didn't object to the 2005 "REAL ID" Act? But some of us do object to it

[spin]

44. The real ID act proved to be a pain in the ass when my daughter...

renewed her driver's license. She was told she needed a copy of her divorce papers which she obtained. When she showed it at the driver's license office she was informed that it had to be an official certified copy.

She ended up driving all over the country for a week working for the census with an expired license while she waited for the form to arrive in the mail.

When my license was due for renewal the next month, I just applied over the internet and got it without any problem. Of course, when I renew again I will have to present all the required documents.

# Your current Florida license or ID card will continue to be valid as identification for federal purposes until December 1, 2014 for individuals born after December 1, 1964 and December 1, 2017 for everyone else.


# After the 2014 and 2017 dates, Federal agencies will no longer accept a driver license or ID card unless it is Real ID compliant. This means you will not be allowed to board commercial flights or enter federal facilities unless you have a REAL ID compliant document.


# Florida has met the 18 material compliant requirements of REAL ID.
http://www.flhsmv.gov/realid/index.html

Note: I was born in 1946. My renewed license expires in 2018. I may have some problems flying commercially in that last year.

[Quantess]

24. Here's where my fair complexion and blue eyes will save me from harrassment.

At least, nobody will mistake me for a Hispanic. If I were at all hispanic looking, I'd stay out of AZ.

[krispos42]

25. "Officer, you look like an illegal immigrant. I demand you arrest yourself immeidatly or I'll sue"

Ta-dah!

[classysassy]

26. Sorry officer just passing through

on my way to canada.

[HopeHoops]

27. "First show me YOUR FUCKING papers!"

[Mari333]

28. LOL

[DireStrike]

29. Why the hell would I go to Arizona?

[hatrack]

32. "Yo no soy marinero, soy capitan, soy capitan!"

:toast:

[slackmaster]

36. I've only spoken with an Arizona police officer once in my life

I had a flat tire on Interstate 8 about 30 miles west of Gila Bend. An AZ state trooper pulled up behind me and directed traffic away while I changed my tire.

He suggested a place where I could buy a set of tires. I thanked him and went on my way.

He was very polite and professional.

[AsahinaKimi]

38. I could say

I swam over from Japan, but of course that would be a fib! I lived in Scottsdale for a year. I loved the weather, and those little running lizards were cute. Had a Cactus collection, ya know, the kind that you can break open and use on sun burn. I loved the lightning storms, with no rain, and people were actually nice to me.

But..It didn't have an Ocean..So I went back home to California. Glad I did. I will never move out of San Francisco again.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

40. Sprechen Sie Englisch, Offizier?

[KansDem]

42. How about, "I'm planning on being born again. Ask me for my BC after that."

Then prepare to get tased...