Com­ment: Ari­zona is on the verge of pass­ing a law that will legal­ize racial pro­fil­ing and make it ille­gal for immi­grants in the state to walk about with­out proper ID papers, requir­ing offi­cers of the law to check the papers of some­one they think might be in the state ille­gally.  This has prompted the Car­di­nal of the Los Ange­les Archi­do­ces to com­pare the law to some­thing the Nazis would pass. One of the co-sponsors of the bill in the AZ leg­is­la­ture appears to be good bud­dies with Nazis.  That state sen­a­tor, Rus­sell Pearce, has a long his­tory of things like send­ing out emails writ­ten by the National Alliance and is on excel­lent terms with a well known local neo-nazi, J.T. Ready.

“Rus­sell Pearce’s Willie Hor­ton: White suprema­cist J.T. Ready” by Stephen Lemons; Phoenix New Times; 9/22/2007.

. . . . One thing that toupee will not hide is Pearce’s big­otry towards Mex­i­cans, and his unsa­vory con­nec­tions to out­right neo-fascists, such as Mesa’s J.T. Ready, who recently took part in a neo-Nazi demon­stra­tion in down­town Omaha, Nebraska. After the demo, mem­bers of the swastika-wearing National Social­ist Move­ment and fel­low trav­el­ers retired to a local farm where they lit giant swastikas afire, lis­tened to hate-core music, slam-danced, and bar­be­cued a Mex­i­can and an Israeli flag. Ready also keeps a page on the NSM’s NewSaxon.org, a racist MySpace, “for Whites, by Whites.” And he’s attended the local neo-Nazi National Vanguard’s Win­ter­fest event. Report­edly in his Scot­tish kilt. Ooh-la-la.

Ready’s a sup­porter of Pearce, and at a June anti-immigration rally at the State Capi­tol, the prej­u­diced pair spent almost all of their time with each other. They even appeared smil­ing and arm-in-arm in pho­tos. In any other state, such damn­ing pics would sig­nal the end of a politician’s career. Here in AZ, they’re shrugged at by those in the nativist move­ment. That’s because so many nativists see noth­ing wrong with neo-Nazis or their beliefs, beliefs which dove­tail with their own.

But in 2006, when Pearce was caught for­ward­ing an anti-Semitic e-mail to his sup­port­ers — an e-mail from the neo-Nazi National Alliance, even Repub­li­cans bagged on him. . . .

“L.A. Car­di­nal: Nazism in Ari­zona Immi­gra­tion Bill” [AP]; Google News; 4/20/2010.

The head of the nation’s largest Roman Catholic arch­dio­cese has con­demned a pro­posed Ari­zona crack­down on ille­gal immi­grants, say­ing it encour­ages peo­ple to turn on each other in Nazi– and Soviet-style repression.

The mea­sure wrongly assumes that Ari­zo­nans “will now shift their total atten­tion to guess­ing which Latino-looking or foreign-looking per­son may or may not have proper doc­u­ments,” Car­di­nal Roger Mahony said in his blog Sun­day — a day before Arizona’s Leg­is­la­ture sent the immi­gra­tion enforce­ment mea­sure to the Repub­li­can governor.

Gov. Jan Brewer has not indi­cated whether she will sign the bill, which cre­ates a new state mis­de­meanor of will­ful fail­ure to com­plete or carry an alien reg­is­tra­tion doc­u­ment. It would also require offi­cers to deter­mine people’s immi­gra­tion sta­tus if there’s rea­son to sus­pect they’re in the coun­try illegally.

Ari­zona has an esti­mated 460,000 ille­gal immi­grants. Pro­po­nents of the bill say it was prompted by con­cerns over the cost of pro­vid­ing ser­vices to ille­gal immi­grants and by the slay­ing of an Ari­zona rancher near the Mex­i­can bor­der this month. Author­i­ties believe he was fatally shot by an ille­gal immi­grant pos­si­bly con­nected to a drug smug­gling cartel.

Repub­li­can Ari­zona Sen. Rus­sell Pearce, who spon­sored the bill, has said it will take hand­cuffs off police and put them on vio­lent criminals. . . .