Immigration on ABC's This Week

I just finished watching This Week, where the discussion was about the Arizona law. A couple of observations: first, there was no Hispanic or South Westerner on the panel; there was a black (Rev. Al Sharpton), a comedian (Bill Mahr); an editor (Katrina Vanden Heuvel), along with the more usual Washington insiders, Matt Dowd, George Will, and Jake Tapper, the host. It would have been interesting to have an articulate Arizona news reporter or expert commentator on the program, to talk about the situation on ground zero. Another example of the arrogance of Big Media and Washington.

Second, as usual, there was not a peep about cracking down on employers, kind of a taboo topic on national television; neither Democrats nor Republicans (lobbied heavily by those who gain by hiring undocumented workers) like to discuss this except to pay lip service about it and get onto something else. Biometric card? This is one way to deal with employers, but Democrats and Liberals tend to reject this as somehow compromising civil rights, so along with not openly discussing the huge infrastructure that accommodates corporations who hire illegals, they reject the single most effective tool to enforce the law on both the supply and demand sides.

Finally, Sharpton nailed George Will, who likened the Arizona law to the regulations that require everyone entering Congressional offices to identify themselves, making it constitutionally valid: Sharpton pointed out that in Arizona, given the "reasonable suspicion" standard for making a stop, only Hispanic-looking people were in fact subject to the law, violating equal protection under the law. Will doesn't often get get a well-deserved lesson in constitutional law on national television, but it happened today.