Illegal Immigrants

The year:1938

The place: Berlin

A beautiful  young woman with long, dark hair  drives carefully down Neue Donigstrasse.  One of Hitler’s storm troopers sees her and pulls her over.  He motions her out of her car all the while staring at her.  He thinks she looks Jewish.

“Judin,” he asks?

She shakes her head.  She’s not but she must carry papers to prove it.  She hands him her I.D.

He studies it, shrugs and lets her go.

The year: 2011.

The place: Tucson Arizona.

A beautiful  young woman with long, dark hair drives carefully down Highway 10.  An Arizona state trooper sees her and pulls her over. He motions her out of her car all the while staring at her. He thinks she looks Mexican.

“Illegal?” he asks.

She shakes her head.  She’s not but she must carry papers to prove it.  She hands him her I.D.

He studies it, shrugs and lets her go.

That could have been a town in Kansas but for the prudent Kansas legislature vote (84-40) not to debate the bill (HR  2372) this year which would have required police to check the status of anyone they suspected of being in this country illegally. Many other states are also questioning the legality of such a law including South Dakota, Virginia, Wyoming Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Nebraska and New Hampshire.

Kris Kobach,  Kansas Secretary of State,  was one of the principal authors of the Arizona law that requires police to ‘check the status’ of people stopped for whatever reason.  ‘Check the status” means cracking down on illegal immigration but also acts as a conduit to racial profiling, a re-creation of Nazi Germany in 1938.

One has to wonder what forces are at work to convince Kris Kobach, educated at Harvard, Yale and Oxford, to support such actions. And he’s not alone. Lance Kinzer, and Olathe Republican worked with Kobach to draft the Kansas bill. However, even though Kinzer is Chair of the Judiciary Committee, he was unable to overcome the vote not to move 2327 out of his committee.

Kobach and Kinzer might have Virgil Peck, a Tyro Kansas legislator, to thank. At an open meeting of the house appropriations committee, someone suggested a way to control wild hogs might be to shoot them from a helicopter . Mr. Peck commented, “It looks like to me if shooting these immigrating feral hogs works maybe we have found a [solution] to our illegal immigration problem.” When asked about his observation, he stated he” was just speaking like a southeast Kansas person. ” Really? How many of the good people of southeast Kansas like being lumped into that statement?

Some Kansas House representatives are saying the bill would add thousands of dollars to the already overburdened Kansas budget but perhaps something else is happening.  Maybe Kansans are realizing that racial profiling is not the American way.

Unfortunately, the Kansas legislators didn’t do so well when it came to voter I.D. Starting January 1, 2012, be prepared to get out your driver’s license or whatever every time you vote. This bill, which Freshman Governor Sam Brownback indicates he’s happy to sign, is also the invention of Kris Kobach. He said “he thought the legal viability of the proof-of-citizenship requirement was “extremely high,” in spite of the fact that voter fraud has never been a  problem in Kansas. The Wichita Eagle found  only seven alleged cases of voter fraud in the past five years and only one of those was ever prosecuted. Since Secretary Kobach made voter I.D. a major part of his campaign, some people are wondering if it too isn’t tied to the secretary’s concern over illegal immigrants even though one would think ‘illegals’ would prefer to keep a low profile.

Only two other states have a voter I.D. law: Arizona and Georgia.