G.I. still AWOL on SB 1070, except in the pages of The Progressive

by David Safier

It's another day of The Goldwater Institute's staff hiding behind the sofa waiting for the 800 pound gorilla that is SB 1070 to go away.

Still not a peep about the anti-immigrant bill from the normally voluble staff at G.I.

However, riding to the rescue is The Progressive. It's not the kind of magazine you would expect to cite G.I. favorably, but police state legislation can make strange bedfellows.

The article is titled, Local police shouldn’t be involved in immigration enforcement. That's the whole point of the article. Enforcing immigration law hampers local police from doing their job effectively.

And who does the author cite to show that getting local police into the immigration fight harms public safety? Read on.

Involving police officers in immigration enforcement actually hurts public safety. Some of the best evidence of this comes from Arizona itself. The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank, studied the data describing what happened when Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio moved many of his deputies into immigration enforcement tasks instead of policing Phoenix and the surrounding area. The bottom line: Everyone’s safety suffered. The sheriff’s department “has diverted resources away from basic law-enforcement functions to highly publicized immigration sweeps, which are ineffective in policing illegal immigration and in reducing crime generally,” the report said, adding that violent crime went up after the focus shifted to immigration enforcement instead of public safety.

I'll be damned. G.I. had the courage to take on Joe Arpaio, and in the process it pointed out one of the many problems with SB 1070. And this argument doesn't even touch the anti-libertarian notion of mandating that people carry identification papers and be ready to show them to law officers on the basis of something called "reasonable suspicion." That's counter to G.I.'s sacred doctrine.

Come on, boys and girls at G.I. You've already taken the first step, thanks to The Progressive. Come out from behind the sofa and tell us how you feel about SB 1070. Jeb Bush has expressed his displeasure with the bill, and I know he's Matthew Ladner's bff, so that should help. So has Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio. And Karl Rove. Even Tom Tancredo's a critic.

Come on, how hard can it be?