Opinion: Arizona lawmakers pushing a ballot measure to crack down on illegal immigration aren’t telling the truth on what it does.

The Arizona lawmakers pushing for a Texas-style law authorizing local officers to go after illegal border crossers insist nobody will be racially profiled because of it.

That’s a myth and they know it.

There’s no such thing as an immigration crackdown without racial profiling — not in Arizona or any place else in America.

Reality is that most asylum seekers and border crossers fleeing poverty and other calamities come from countries where darker skins predominate.

What the ballot measure would do

Until a few years ago, most people crossing the southern border came from Mexico.

Now they’re mainly from elsewhere, including Central America, Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran, Turkey and other war-zone countries like Ukraine.

Thus, putting a target on these immigrants is a target on anyone with dark skin, unless enforcement is geographically limited to the borderline, which the Arizona proposal doesn’t do.  

The Republican-sponsored House Concurrent Resolution 2060 is largely similar to the legislation that Gov. Katie Hobbs recently vetoed. They now want to skip the governor and send it directly to the November ballot to rally voters against Democrats whom they blame for the uptick of border crossers.

The Arizona proposal, which mimics Texas’ immigration law being litigated in federal court, would make it a state crime to enter the country illegally, punishable with jail time and longer prison sentences for repeat offenders.

It’s also stacked with a range of penalties designed to crack down on illegal immigration anywhere in the state — not just at the border, as proponents maintain.

Those include:

• Making it a state crime to submit false documents in applying for federal, state or local benefits,
• Requiring agencies to use the federal E-Verify program to determine public benefits eligibility, and
• Imposing a minimum 10-year prison sentence on adults caught selling fentanyl that results in a death.

Supporters insist it’s about border security

“This is truly a border security bill,” Republican Sen. President Warren Petersen told Fox News, insisting that it is different than the infamous Senate Bill 1070 that led to racial profiling of Latinos and which cost Arizona hundreds of millions of tourism dollars and legal fees.

What Petersen says and what the proposal spells out don’t entirely match.

“It allows law enforcement to, if they see somebody crossing the border illegally, they’re able to arrest them, detain them and put them through the judicial process,” Petersen said.

GOP looks for job security: In fake border bill

That’s right. But a crucial detail he and others leave out of their media soundbites is the fact that the proposal doesn’t specifically limit law enforcement along Arizona’s 370-mile shared border with Mexico.

Technically, any law enforcement officer anywhere in the state could turn “any traffic stop into an immigration interrogation,” as Democratic Rep. Analise Ortiz puts it.

Republican Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes admitted as much during this week’s legislative hearing, saying there’s a lot of questions to be answered.

Speaking on behalf of the Arizona Sheriff’s Association, Rhodes said border counties would bear the brunt of arresting undocumented immigrants but still wouldn’t say enforcement is strictly limited to the border.

This is important because border enforcement — at the border — is Republicans’ selling point to voters, leaving out the sweeping ramifications this kind of law would inflict on Arizona’s labor market, immigrant families of mixed-immigration status and Latinos in general.

These provisions would target brown people

Nobody can deny that SB 1070 put a target on brown people. Police data and court documents prove it.

Anecdotally, countless U.S. citizens were targeted under the “show me your papers” provision of SB 1070. Some of them told lawmakers as much, yet Republicans dismissed the narrative as nothing more than politicking.

Yet, proponents can’t admit the fact that the legislation as written gives local enforcement anywhere in the state the authority to enforce immigration law and that it would be up to them to carry it out — and how.

No word yet on how much of taxpayers’ money it would take to enforce any of the provisions.

Or on how local law enforcement would differentiate illegal border crossers from legal residents and U.S. citizens making a wrong turn in traffic.

What would give local cops the “probable cause” to question the immigration status of somebody they encounter other the initial suspicions because of their skin color?      

Presumably, none of the supporters have ever been racially profiled and truly believe the practice doesn’t exist. But these people are smart enough to know exactly what has happened under SB 1070.

They know exactly what they’re doing. They’re counting on Arizonans to merely take their word for what they say the ballot measure would do — whether that’s true or not.

Elvia Díaz is editorial page editor for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Reach her at 602-444-8606 or elvia.diaz@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter, @elviadiaz1.