On 1-5-2010 19:13, Warp wrote:
> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> No, but the notion that you can pick someone up because they *look* like 
>> an illegal immigrant (which BTW violates the 4th amendment right to 
>> protection against unreasonable search/seizure) *is* patently racist.
> 
>   Why does it have to be racism?

Racism is here used as a general term of judging people by what cultural 
group they appear to belong to based on how they look.

>   Imagine that a woman is raped, and the police is immediately called,
> and they suspect that the rapist is still in the vicinity. The police
> ought to start questioning suspects they find. Male suspects.
> 
>   One could argue that only having males as suspects is discrimination,
> that suspects should be equally male and female. But that someone would be
> a complete idiot. It's 99.999% probable that the rapist was a male, rather
> than a woman who raped a woman and was nevertheless mistaken for a man
> (that has probably never happened in the history of mankind). Hence it
> makes sense for the police to only suspect males and leave females off
> the hook. If the police was stupid enough to start detaining females for
> suspicion of raping a woman, they would be wasting valuable resources
> which would be better used in searching for the actual rapist. After all,
> law enforcement has only very limited resources to solve crimes.
> 
>   Likewise with illegal immigration: The vast majority of illegal immigrants
> don't look like locals. Hence it only makes sense to prioritize the scarce
> resources law enforcement has and concentrate on people who don't look like
> locals. This is not racism. This is practicality. Questioning people equally
> is only going to waste resources, which wastes taxpayers' money, and causes
> less crimes to be stopped.

There is another way that even takes less time and is not illegal 
because of various international laws: don't question people unless you 
have a serious reason to believe that they are illegal (or you are 
questioning them anyway because of a non-related suspicion or check).

Frankly I find your reasoning that "I know there is an illegal immigrant 
in this country, so I have to check everybody that looks like he might 
be it" quite disturbing. But that is not unusual.

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