Warp wrote:
> nor for racist reasons,
> even if a choice is made based on typical illegal immigration profiles?

What do you mean by "profiles"?  And how does the policeman pick who to ask?

That's *exactly* the point in contention. What's in the profile? How do you 
know the person you're asking fits the profile?

If the profile is "looks Mexican" and the policeman picks based on 
"Mexican-looking guy walked past" then it's racist.

If the profile is "didn't pay social security tax last year in spite of 
spending thousands of dollars on his credit card" and the policeman does a 
credit card database search for people like that, then it's not racist reasons.

See?

> Why is discrimination and racism always assumed as such?

Because a person's "race" is the only thing about them that they can't 
easily change that you can recognize just by looking. These are *great* 
factors for enforcing something. Unfortunately, what it enforces is usually 
unrelated to crime.

If you had an airborne disease that only affected red-heads, that would be a 
*great* way of finding people who needed the vaccine.

>> You're talking about a specific crime.  The point is that there is no 
>> *specific* crime in the case of enforcing the AZ law.  In order to 
>> prosecute a crime, the prosecution must be able to state with specificity 
>> what crime was committed and when.
> 
>   Well, one *could* argue that illegal immigration *is* a specific,
> existing crime being committed right now... 

No. It's a category of crimes. You know only statistically whether it's 
being committed. You know there's a whole bunch of it going on, but you 
don't know a *specific* case of it. Just like you know there's muggings 
going on right now, but you don't know a *specific* victim.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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