Oh msbelle, so horrible, so sad. All the chili lime peanuts in the world for you.

So, I'm home sick today, and watching Quincy, ME. I'm amused that today's storyline is an anthrax issue. I hadn't realized that the idea was so old.

Thanks guys. I'm not sure what it changes for me, really. The possibility of abuse in mac's history is there, but not a definate. My heart just breaks for the families of the abusers. No one knew at the time of the adoption.

ugh, one of my adoption lists is exploding

That's so awful that it sounds like an episode of Law and Order SVU, man. Yesh.

because crossing a border so you can get a job and feed your family is exctly like, oh, say, planting a car bomb in the middle of Times Square

Part of the problem is that illegal immigrants cross the border for many reasons. Crossing for employment reasons, economic opportunity, and the like certainly doesn't deserve to be labeled as terrorism.

But at the same time, a subset of people cross the border for more sinister reasons. I've heard Phoenix described as the Kidnapping Capital of America. Mexican organized crime rings cross the border and kidnap people for ransom. I'm not sure that qualifies as terrorism, either, at least not using a strict definition. But it's legitimate to take very strong action against people that do that.

But even assuming for the sake of argument that the Arizona law will accomplish anything on that (and I'm not convinced it would), the downsides are far greater. They've been raised repeatedly around here, so I won't go into detail. I'll just mention the potential for racial profiling and the authority of any citizen to sue on the grounds of insufficiently aggressive enforcement.

So ultimately, I go in the category of "something needs to be done." I'll let others argue over where it belings in the priority list. But the Arizona law is not the way to go.

I wanted to point out something similar to what Fred said. People in Arizona don't support this law because they're all just straight-up racist dummies; they feel genuinely under attack by crimes attributed to Mexican drug lords and others profiting from illegal border crossing.

That is just heartbreaking, msbelle.

Switching Thumbs animated gif

Argh!

It seems to me that a better long-term solution is to put the coyotes out of business by regularizing immigration enough that there's much less incentive to use their services, such as a guest-worker program.

Yeah, AZ is for sure treating the symptom, not the overall problem.