As with all things, there is an appropriate response and an inappropriate response. Democrats can emphasize that the situation in Arizona, both the violence that you described in your previous piece and the unwise legislative response to it, underscore the need for a comprehensive, national approach. Is that the best response, or even a realistic one, given the political climate?

Pepper: That would be a responsible approach. Afraid, however, that it will be tempting to play it in a low-politics way. Even the mayor and City Council in Seattle, for instance, have bought into the "punish Arizona" formulation, as if the state as a whole had committed a human-rights offense. One of the commenters on my earlier piece, who identified himself/herself as a former Arizonan of Latino heritage, pointed out that a huge percentage of Arizona citizens are American-born Latinos or Mexican-born Americans. The state is more than 30 percent Latino---not counting the several hundred thousand illegals estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to be present there. Mayors, judges, city council members, Members of Congress, state legislators, journalists, and a whole host of private and public leaders throughout the state have Latino surnames. It is ridiculous to assert that, because of one misguided law (already amended), Arizona is some kind of racist state deserving business, economic and tourism boycotts. There will be a tremendous backlash, in Arizona as well as nationally, against such assertions.

Good point about the Arizona boycott. I told Richard Conlin today that I have "mixed feelings" about the idea, although I think I am against it. I agree that it would be too divisive, and it probably wouldn't accomplish anything other than hurting businesses.

Ted is giving us a nice example of the past 50 years of Liberalism here. First, he sets up the straw man of Democrats demagoguing on the issue of Arizona. And I'm sure we can all agree that we shouldn't "favor all-out efforts to inflame Latinos by whatever means".

That, of course, is not the actual question before us. The real question is what we do when a state runs amok. Imagine, of a moment, that the identity proof were demanded of everyone, not just brown people. Do you have your papers? Will you feel safer if the government can demand them at any time?

Then there are, of course, the actual questions about racism, especially as the bills just keep rolling out of the AZ state legislature- time to ban cultural education now! Of course, by that, we don't mean English or European cultural education, just the Spanish-speaking kind.

Ted's idea of what we should do leans more towards helplessly wringing our hands and talking about how many causes there are for these problems. He leans towards the non-partisan centrist voter, of whom, studies have shown, a full 10% actually enter the voting booth still not knowing who they'll vote for. In Ted's telling these centrist voters are hopeless mushheads who are easy to push around by threatening their security blankets, but this approach might actually work- when Latinos become the majority of the electorate.

This is the same Liberal baloney that has served the black man so poorly over the past half century, leaving a larger proportion of them in prison, on parole, or permanently disenfranchised, than there were in 1963.

Of course, there's also some dark humor in all of this. While our police have always focused most of their efforts on the users of illegal drugs, they have never focused most of their efforts on the users of illegal labor. People aren't coming here for the great life they'll have with no job and no money- they're coming here because people (probably mostly Republicans) employ them. Hurrah! Two opposite police strategies that both make Mexican gangs stronger!

Myself, I'm having a backlash against Ted's apologetics for AZ. I'm not thinking of "one misguided law (already amended)", I'm thinking of my entire lifetime filled with rightwing baloney coming out of AZ, and an almost equivalent amount of equivocating coming out of the Democratic Party. If Ted wants to become a strident advocate of immigration reform, that's one thing. Becoming a strident apologizer for a racist law and state is quite another.

Excerpt:
Obama owed his 2008 election, in part, to the belief by a majority of voters that he intended to break with such partisanship and polarization and move toward nonpartisan problem solving. For a variety of reasons, that has not happened.

Mr. Van Dyk is obviously impervious to the reality that Obama and the Dems tried hard to reach out to Republicans on health care, the economic stimulus, financial reform, climate change, and immigration reform and got the finger in return. Now they realize they have to govern by themselves, as the only adults in the room, since previously sane Republicans like McCain, Grassley, Graham et al have become full-time panderers to the Tea Party. Why is it so impossibly hard for the writer to acknowledge this?

There's absolutely nothing wrong with Harry Reid and the Dems using legitimate outrage over the Arizona anti-immigration law to try to push through a badly needed immigration reform package, just as there was nothing wrong with using heath insurers' huge rate increases to pass health reform. That's how reform legislation has been passed throughout U.S. history, from Teddy Roosevelt's trust busting to FDR's financial reforms to LBJ’s civil rights legislation to clean air laws to post-Enron corporate reforms.

It’s only in Mr. Van Dyk’s dream world that sober “centrists” like himself huddle in quiet rooms, and, like Plato’s philosopher-kings, sagely craft wise solutions. That’s not how noisy, boisterous democracies work. And God forbid that the Democrats benefit politically from doing the right thing and making sure Latinos know what they did. That would be PARTISAN, and that would be a bad bad thing!

Interesting perspective which, in thinking about it, gives me pause not on the immigration issue but on the sociological aspects of Facebook. Most of my exchanges about the Arizona law have been on FB, & I wouldn't say people are coming from a partisan bias but more from the standpoint of human dignity & equity, combined with a sense of moral outrage at this act which seems so fundamentally opposed to the freedom that America is supposed to represent. I haven't been seeing sentiment on this topic around partisan positions. Then again, I must consider the probability that in selecting my FB friends, I've selected an affinity group which is more like me & tends to share my views.

Some of the responses above would appear to prove my point.

Let's take it from the top.

There is a genuine, indisputable illegal-immigration crisis in AZ and elsewhere--but felt most heavily in AZ, which has the heaviest flow of cross-border human, weapons, and drug trafficking. There has been a failure at federal level, where statutory resonsiblity lies, to deal with the issue in any comprehensive manner. A lot of posturing in D.C. but no genuine attempt either by White House or Congress to close on a solution. In this vacuum, AZ passed a hastily considered and flawed law to deal with it. It already has been amended. Inside AZ, as I noted in my original article, lawsuits have been filed against it and a statewide initiative is being prepared to roll it back. It is quite likely, in any case, to be struck down by courts in a short period of time.

The actual language of the law is not far off the language in existing federal statute. But it is its prospective enforcement that worries me and others. The law authorizes law-enforcement officers to check the ID of someone stopped for an unrelated offense---anywhere from drug dealing or armed robbery to a routine traffic violation---for documentation relating to immigration status. A driver, for example, could not be pulled over
just for an immigration-status check. (Various news reports have misrepresented this). But, once pulled over, it would be OK to do so.
Anyone familiar with related history (African Americans being pulled over
"for driving black," etc.) can quickly see the possibilities for abuse.

Arizonans inside and outside the political system are taking active steps
to get rid of the law. Why the self-righteous calls to punish AZ with comprehensive boycotts? Any such boycotts would punish disproportionately Latinos employed in the state. And why the over-the-top attributions of racism to a state with a heavy and influential Latino population?

The law deserves denunciation. It will be extremely short lived. It is
entirely appropriate that protests be directed against federal elected officials for their evasion of responsibility. The rhetoric being directed against Arizona is way over-the-top and will be regarded as such by a majority of Americans.

debbalee makes a relevant point. Imagine a city in which there are many high-rise buildings. Each high-rise is populated by people sharing a political viewspoint. As they ride elevators up and down in their buildings, the passengers agree with each other on just about everything.
But they seldom enter the other buildings or engage seriously with those who live there. Easy to believe in that circumstance that your viewpoint is the only valid one.

"If you are a Democrat, you may say, why should you not favor all-out efforts to inflame Latinos by whatever means?"

Uh... because you would be sacrificing the well-being of our nation for your short-term political point. Not that they are above that (see our state's budget situation).

BTW... polls show a majority of Arizonans support the immigration law. Maybe Washington's Democrats should spend a little less time carpetbagging and a little more time getting their own house in order.

Seconding Harris here, and adding that TVD glosses over the history of one political party using social racial discomfort for political advantage since the end of the Jim Crow era, a time when he made a living as a professional Democrat. 
Southern strategy ring any bells? Philadelphia, Mississippi? Willie Horton? Ding ding? 
Also, where's the ire for corporate cheap labor policies being a major factor in drawing illegals over the border in order to keep profits & stock prices high and to bring unions & pensions low and workers submissive? No, so much easier to discuss the effects rather than the causes. But that's a partisan reaction I'd suppose, better we sing kumbaya with our teabagging friends and solve this issue with a wall or an army on border or issuing national passports or subdermal microchips. At least we'd have the pleasure of watching Southern Bapist heads explode in that case.

False equivalence alert! Racial profiling is wrong, but speaking out against racial profiling is JUST AS BAD, apparently. What would you suggest, Ted? Should Democrats sit quietly and wait for the next election? That worked when Dems were in the minority, but if they're just as passive in the majority, what good are they?

I can only imagine the kind of column Van Dyk might have written on the slavery issue in the 1850s, or on the rise of Hitler in the 1930s.

Hear me clearly, Ted. There is no compromise with racism. Go hide under your bed if you can't stand the heat. Civilizations do not advance by protecting fearful people's comfort zones.