This is kind of a political post and kind of a legal post and only verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry slightly a baseball post. If you're like me and you hate political and/or legal blogging, please don't click "Read More" below.

Fellow Bloguinite Gene Zarnick runs an excellent sports blog, with an excellent name: Favre Dollar Footlongs. He writes great, funny stuff. I don't know Gene well at all, but he seems like a great guy (even though a Duke fan). We participated together in the Bloguin Baseball Debates over at ATH Baseball, and I had a very good time debating against him. I have only good things to say about Gene. All of which, of course, is a way of asking you to take the following very, very strong disagreement with him in the respectful tone in which it was intended.

Yesterday, Gene wrote a post with this headline:

Illegal Immigration is like Steroids in Baseball

Creative analogy, as always. But.

First: comparing serious real-world problems to sports gives me the creepy-crawlies. The whole purpose of having sports is to escape from real stuff. It's like when people try to apply the terminology of warfare to football. It's impossible to make a sports-to-something-that-matters analogy without glossing over some seriously important crap. I mean, this is by no means the same thing as using a horrific kidnapping as a jumping-off point to reminisce about the last 18 years in the sporting world, but I do think that anytime you try to compare sports to real life, you risk trivializing the real life thing beyond recognition.

Second: I can agree with that sentence in one way. Illegal immigration and steroids are both problems within their respective spheres -- and when people try to solve either one, they go insanely overboard. But you can probably guess that that's not how Gene means it.

I'm not going to do him the disservice of selectively quoting or paraphrasing his very long and involved comparison of the two issues -- he makes some good points, and I'd suggest reading it for yourself -- but then he gets to the real issue of the day:

What the Arizona Immigration Bill basically did was take a stand early and defiantly against the problem of illegal immigration.  Illegal immigration has been a problem that has been around for years and the only thing the federal government did was put up borders and have extra border patrol surround the area.  That would be like Major League Baseball putting up taller outfield walls and adding a couple outfielders behind them that were able to catch the home runs that actually made it over the new wall to try and dilute the problem.

The bill is a severe measure, but one that needs to be taken.  It would be like baseball back in 2002 creating a policy that banned any PED user after their first offense.  Would it have caused uproar like we've seen with the immigration bill?  Yes, but would it also have changed the culture of baseball immediately and deterred users who kept on using to straighten up immediately?  Definitely.

He and I had a little discussion in the comments (which may well have grown into a big discussion by the time you're reading this for all I know), but I've been thinking a lot about this since then, and decided I had to write something about it.

To the extent that these two paragraphs are true at all, they work only if you ignore -- as Gene does -- what the bill actually says. It's fine to say it's "defiant" and "severe" and that it "takes a stand," but what it is, if you actually read it, is meaningless, worthless, impossible-to-consistently-enforce garbage masquerading as law. To get to the bit that's causing all the problems:

WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE, WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON, EXCEPT IF THE DETERMINATION MAY HINDER OR OBSTRUCT AN INVESTIGATION.

No attempt is made to define what constitutes a "reasonable suspicion" or a "reasonable attempt." Does looking like a Latino(-a) give rise to "reasonable suspicion"? We can choose to believe only the best of our lawmakers and assume not, but we can't know -- not until something happens and a court has to spell it out for us. It's an especially problematic term in this context; we can think of things that might give someone a "reasonable suspicion" that you're carrying a weapon or cocaine, but on the list of things that might lead one to "reasonably suspect" that one is an illegal immigrant, wouldn't happening to look like you're from points south be Item No. 1? And then beyond that, what level of invasion of this person's privacy constitutes "a reasonable attempt"? No way to know.

What the Arizona legislature has done through this bill, in essence, is to declare that illegal immigration is bad and leave it up to the police to do what they can/want to do to stop it. Which Gene essentially admits -- his attitude, expressed in the comments, is that yes, the bill is expansive and theoretically allows for some bad behavior, but we should wait and see if that behavior actually happens before we start complaining about it.

And that's not OK. I mean, it's fine for Gene to think that, but for a legislature, it's absolutely deplorable. The lawmakers are supposed to make the law, and the law enforcers are supposed to enforce the law. If the lawmakers draw up a bad law that explicitly permits racial profiling (or other unconstitutional behavior), that law has to go, and it's just not an answer at all to say "well, we don't know if the police are actually going to do what this law lets them do, so let's wait and find out." It's the legislature's job to tell them what they can do so that they can go out there and do it. And here, the Arizona legislature has failed about as miserably as it's possible to fail. They've completely abdicated their responsibility and handed it to the police. They couldn't come up with a law that reasonably dealt with the problem, so they just gave the police an unconscionably huge amount of power -- over illegal immigrants, legal immigrants and natural-born citizens alike -- in the hopes that they'd handle it.

You really want a baseball analogy? Okay, it's a lot more like this:

Say back in 2002, Bud Selig and his cronies took a stand early and defiantly against the problem of steroids in baseball. And what they said was: look, we really hate steroids, and we want to suspend players who use them, but it's just too danged hard for us to draw up a reasoned, principled solution to this problem. So instead, we're going to just kind of hand it off to the umpires (whose job it is, like the police, to enforce the rules that the higher-ups provide). If an umpire has a reasonable suspicion that a player may have used steroids, we'll just go with that.

Only pretend that instead of just baseball, the rights the umpires were empowered to take away were your fundamental rights as a human being and an American citizen. It's just like that.

(If you agree with me here, or if you disagree and just want to get even angrier, another fellow Bloguinite, Aaron Torres, has written a thoughtful piece about this that's much more thorough and probably more interesting than mine.)