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The hypocrisy of Arizona bashing
How is it that, in one breath, Democratic senators in the US Congress can denounce Arizona state’s new immigration law as racist and, in the next, submit proposals to introduce some of the most draconian immigration policies in the world? The Arizona state government has been lambasted for demanding anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant to ‘show us your papers’, but the Democrats want to go even further, demanding that immigrants ‘show us your biometric data card’....

...Unfortunately, too many of Arizona’s immigration law’s critics are let down by double standards. No sooner have they damned Arizonans as white supremacists and un-American than they turn around with their own plans to keep would-be immigrants from coming to America. And so it was that last week, that at the same time as liberals were laying the proverbial boot into Arizona, Democrats submitted to Congress an outline of their plans for immigration reform including: a social security card containing a biometric data chip; an electronic system which requires employers to monitor the immigration status of their employees by scanning social security cards; and a system to catch and deport individuals who overstay their visas. Whereas Republicans have long opposed the introduction of just such an identity card scheme on the basis that it infringes upon individual freedom, liberals have had no such qualms about these authoritarian measures. ‘I’d be a lot more sympathetic to [Arizona’s immigration] law, in fact, if it required the police to check the immigration status of every single person they pulled over’, writes Megan McArdle in Atlantic Monthly....