The Last Word on Arizona

Bravo, Mr. McCarthy. Bravo.

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"A government that abdicates our national defense against outside forces is no longer a government worth having.

"In adopting the Constitution, in giving their consent to our social contract, the sovereign states agreed to cede some of their authority in exchange for one overriding benefit. It was not to have an overseer to monitor our salt intake, design our light bulbs, prepare for our retirement, manage our medical treatments, or mandate our purchases. It was to provide for our security. It was to repel invasion by aliens who challenged our sovereign authority to set the conditions of their presence on our soil.

"For that reason, border security has always been the highest prerogative of sovereignty. Immune from judicial interference, it answers to no warrant requirement. At the border, the federal government does not need probable cause — or any cause at all — to inquire into a person’s citizenship, immigration status, or purpose for attempting to enter our country. Agents can detain immigrants and citizens alike. They can perform bodily searches. They can go through every inch of a would-be entrant’s belongings, read his mail, and scrutinize the contents of his computer. A person subjected to this treatment may find it degrading or unfair, but the courts have nothing to say about it. At stake, after all, is the irreducible core of a sovereign people’s power to protect themselves from intruders.

"At the southern border, however, the federal government has forfeited its power. As a result, Arizonans are imperiled by Mexico’s brutally violent warring factions. They are crushed economically as the magnet effect of our unsustainable welfare state falls disproportionately on their schools, hospitals, jails, and pocketbooks, to the tune of nearly $2 billion per year.

"Arizona is a sovereign state. Its citizens have a natural right to defend themselves, particularly when the federal government surrenders. The state’s new law does precisely that, in a measured way that comes nowhere close to invoking the necessary, draconian powers Leviathan has but refuses to use.

"Demagogues are smearing Arizona’s immigration law as “racial profiling” because it endorses police inquiries into the validity of a person’s presence in the United States. The claim could not be more specious. The law does not give police any new basis to stop and detain someone. Police may not inquire into immigration status unless they have a “lawful” basis for stopping the person in the first place. And even then, the police officer must have “reasonable suspicion” before attempting to determine whether the person is lawfully present. And that suspicion must be generated by something beyond race and ethnicity — as Byron York notes, the law expressly says these may not be the sole factors.

"The law is clearly constitutional. Yet the Obama administration, having buried unconsenting Americans under avalanches of debt and inscrutable, unconstitutional mega-statutes, is mulling a court challenge, casting its lot with lawless aliens against besieged Arizonans.

"A government destructive of our citizens’ basic rights to know, to determine, and to have the protection of the law cannot endure. This one will not. The only question is how much more damage we will allow it to do."

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).