A question was posed to me: "How can a cop tell if someone might be an illegal alien?" To which I answered, "There are some no one could spot, and there are some just about anyone could spot."

There are some, in fact, even a blind person could spot. If you were to come to Los Angeles and, indulging your adventurous streak, make your way to, say, the corner of Seventh and Alvarado Streets, a bustling crossroad at most hours of the day, you could stand on the sidewalk and swing a dead cat till your arms ached and have little worry of inconveniencing even a single American citizen. Not only that, but there is a fair chance you and your cat will have smacked at least one illegal immigrant engaged in the enterprise of selling drugs or counterfeit identification cards to the others.

Every cop who works that area knows these things. Every cop who has ever worked that area for the last thirty years knows these things.

And yet these conditions persist. But this is Los Angeles, California, after all, which politically speaking is a universe away from our neighboring state of Arizona. Here in California, our elected officials tolerate and even encourage such conditions as an incidental cost of maintaining our vibrant multicultural tapestry. But over there in Arizona, home of Barry Goldwater, don't you know, the people have said, "Enough!" Or, perhaps more accurately, "¡Basta!"

Other pursuits have prevented me from paying much attention to the news lately, but what I gather from some of the heated commentary on Arizona's new immigration law is that police officers in that state have now been empowered to snatch up all of the following:

•Anyone who speaks Spanish.
•Anyone who speaks English but with a Spanish accent.
•Anyone whose skin pigmentation is swarthy beyond a prescribed limit.
•Anyone with an inordinate penchant for spicy food.

Anyone who, though not exhibiting any of the above characteristics, engenders even the slightest suspicion that he might be an illegal immigrant.

And, having snatched these people up, the police are instructed to bundle them off to the Mexican border and heave them over the fence, said heaving to be accompanied by a stern "And stay out!" Giving the law some needed teeth is the provision that anyone who attempts to escape or even raise an objection to being so snatched, bundled, and heaved is to be shot, clubbed, or otherwise permanently silenced.

"Wait, wait, wait!" you say. "All wrong! The law [1] says no such thing. No snatching, no bundling, no heaving, shooting, clubbing, or silencing. Merely a reasonable attempt to verify citizenship after a stop based on reasonable cause."

And so one asks, what's the problem?

The problem, we are told, is that the people of Arizona, acting through their state legislators, have had the cheek to ask their state's police officers to enforce federal laws that the federal government has chosen not to, a choice borne heavily by the state's taxpayers. And rather than being thanked for their willingness to pick up the slack, Arizonans instead see scorn heaped upon them by their sophisticated betters along both coasts, including the president, the speaker of the House, and even the archbishop of Los Angeles.

The president says [2] the law will "undermine the basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between the police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe." He apparently believes, as he is wont to believe, that in enforcing this law the police will behave stupidly.

Sounding almost rational is Mrs. Pelosi, who says [3] the law is "misguided and irresponsible." But the prize for hyperbole goes to Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles, who says [4], "I can't imagine Arizonans now reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people are required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation." (I know it makes no sense, but there you are.)

When they call you a Nazi, you know you've won the argument.

But even as the law's opponents are revealed as hysterics, it will still be uncomfortable for those police officers who must now go out and enforce it in an atmosphere of intense media scrutiny. You just know the B-rolls are already being shot, the stories are already being written with the details to be filled in later. Someone will be found, some doe-eyed victim will peer out from behind the bars of a jail cell and become the face of the resistance when he is detained on his way either to school, church, or the hospital bedside of his ailing mother who, having been denied a last visit with her cherished son, passes away a broken woman. I see a 3,000-word tear-jerker starting above the fold on page A-1.

For it will be the law's supposed victims rather than the actual victims of our absurdly porous southern border who will hold the media's focus. People like Robert Krentz [5], who was murdered on his Arizona ranch last month by someone who evidently fled into Mexico, can be forgotten easily enough if it furthers the unstated but transparent goal of amnesty for illegal aliens. But right now there is some poor, unsuspecting cop in Tucson or Phoenix or some smaller town who will one day be out on patrol under a blazing desert sun, and when it is he who arrests that doe-eyed victim, it won't take more than a day or two before everyone in America knows his name.

And I bet he won't be invited for a beer at the White House.