Arizona

The debate over  Arizona's mean-spirited (and probably unconstitutional) immigration law — and the Obama  Justice Department's lawsuit seeking to overturn it — is starting to hit home here in Maryland. Gov. Martin O'Malley will co-chair a National Governors Association panel on homeland security and public safety issues with none other than Gov. Janice K. Brewer of Arizona, champion of that state's new law that encourages police to check the immigration status of people they arrest.

I agree with Arizona's new policy. What part of illegal don't people understand? If you want to live here, you need to come and apply the right way. Illegals do not pay taxes; they send their pay to where they came from. We the taxpayers are picking up the tab for them, such as their hospital bills. As for them doing the jobs others don't want to do, it is because some people are just too lazy to work. Gerald Yamin, Pikesville Event.observe(window, 'load', function()

As I understand it, the law Arizona passed last April is a mirror of federal immigration law. In addition, the Arizona law requires commission of a crime first before lawmen can ask questions. Our own federal enforcers already have this right, yet somehow have avoided racial profiling charges. Could it be that the race-baiting charge is really all about winning over the far-left Latino vote? Because the federal lawsuit against Arizona doesn't have any charges at all about civil rights violations.

The City of Baltimore has joined a friend-of-the-court brief urging a federal court in Arizona to block enforcement of that state's new immigration law, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's office announced. Baltimore has joined Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle and other cities in the brief, which argues that Arizona Senate Bill 1070 is "unconstitutional, impractical, costly, and deeply damaging to the relationships of trust law enforcement agencies have built with immigrant communities," according to a release from Rawlings-Blake.

Leonard Pitts Jr. appears to have been quite confused when writing the column "Silencing history that hurts" (May 16). Either that, or he's intentionally misstating the facts behind Arizona's ban on ethnic studies courses, just as he and many other folks are now revealed to have distorted the facts on Arizona's new immigration legislation. In fact, Arizona's new law barring ethnic studies courses does not in any way prevent the story of America from being accurately told, nor does it promote silence on America's blemishes.

History is not a Hallmark card. Sometimes, history breaks your heart. I know this because I have often recounted history in this space, tales of black men and women bought and sold, cheated and mistreated, maimed and lynched. And whenever I do this, I can be assured of e-mails and calls of chastisement. I still remember one of the first, an earnest lady who pleaded with me to leave this history behind. Telling such tales, she said, could not help but make black people resent white ones.

What if Arizona's "racial profiling" law worked perfectly? In other words, what if Arizona police were always right? What if they could take a look at someone and, using race or ethnicity as just one of many factors (no advocate of profiling has ever suggested that race be the sole criterion), could pick out illegal immigrants from the crowd every time? Would that make it OK? The reason I ask is that, to listen to opponents of the law from the president on down, the chief objection is that legal immigrants and citizens will be mistakenly singled out by law enforcement.

Let courts do work Bill Kline The Morning Call Let's get this straight. The people of Arizona elect their legislators and their governor and they in turn establish a law — for Arizona only — that enforces something that already is illegal. And now others across this nation are calling for Major League Baseball to bigfoot the people of Arizona by pulling the 2011 All-Star Game out of Phoenix. What's next? Should baseball pull the Twins out of Minnesota because the Mall of America emits too much carbon dioxide?