(yes, I'm reposting this from another forum, efficiency is needed right now...)

The recent near riot in Pheonix, Arizona over the newly signed bill shows some tensions running really high in that neck of the woods.

The bill is one which seems to be stepping on the toes of the 4th amendment of the constitution by giving police more powers to stop people on the street under the suspicion that they are illegal immigrants. The problem with this is that it is pretty clearly a racial profiling bill. How else would the police determine that a person on the street looks suspect?

An interesting way to put this in context would be to imagine that in Quebec they enacted the same type of legislation. This type of bill might be used as a way for Quebec police forces to stop anyone not speaking French to see if they were illegal immigrants.

I'm watching AZ fairly closely right now. It is one of the areas which I have identified as being the most volitile in the US because of the unemployment numbers. In the South West (AZ + CA + Navada), there are about 5.8 million unemployed people based on official, Feb 2010, data. If even 0.1% of them were angry enough to begin shooting, that's 5,800 people to begin fighting each other.

For some context, remember what two snipers did in Washington years ago, or 4 kids in Colerado, or one guy with a rifel in downtown Toronto, etc.

For some sensationalisim, there were about 600 brownshirts originally.

... and this is only the South West. There are more than 5 million unemployed in each of the Mid West, the North East, and the South East.