Yes, I’m graduating this Saturday.

I’m excited and all, but I don’t want this to be another end-of-the-year, clichéd column about what I’m going to do post-graduation or what I’ve accomplished in my college career.

I’d like to point out an important topic in a state where I lived for about two and a half years, where I first went to college – Arizona State University – before transferring to Eastern during my junior year in spring 2008.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer recently signed an immigration law that essentially allows police officers to ask for identification from anyone who looks Hispanic – in a Mexico-bordered state no less. This “show me your papers” law sounds all too familiar to a state we’ve heard of before – Nazi Germany.

The law is Arizona’s latest answer to its immigration problem: Complete racial profiling in a state where there are so many different races and cultures. But it’s absurd.

As someone with perhaps a more unique point of view of Arizona than many on this campus, I was surprised and appalled that a state from the west, where America’s “new frontier” lies, would sign such a law.

It needs to be repealed right away, before it goes into effect this summer.

I talked to one of my old roommates, Alex Hall, about the new law on Thursday night. He still lives in Arizona and thinks that though this immigration law is a big step, he thinks it may have been the wrong one.

“I think it’s politicians just trying to do something about this immigration thing,” he said. “No one has done anything worthwhile. No matter how many times they say it’s not racial profiling, it is.”

He pointed out to me how people have been subsequently trying to organize boycotts of the state of Arizona. Because of this, he wondered how it would affect tourism in the Grand Canyon State.

But it’s not the people living in Arizona who should suffer from this atrocious new law.

He said he had heard of people who were trying to get Arizona Diamondbacks fans not to go to their baseball games in Chicago, and he also heard of a group that was trying to boycott Arizona Ice Tea, which isn’t even made in Arizona.

“It’s not like I agree with it,” Hall said. “It’s not like a majority of Arizonans agree with it – it’s our governor.”

My concern with this state creating this law is that it is a step in the wrong direction that I hope no other states will take. Arizona lawmakers have got it all wrong when it comes to dealing with immigration problems. This will likely cause new problems to arise.

Around two million Hispanic people now live in Arizona, roughly 30 percent of the state’s population. Does this mean police officers will demand papers from as many of these people as they come across, on a daily basis until everyone is a naturalized citizen?

Thankfully, President Obama is against this tough law. According to an April 23 article in The New York Times, Obama said the new Arizona law threatened “to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and our communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”

Reform needs to come to the west’s immigration problems before more problems arise with the view of that state, and our country’s acceptance of different people.

Tyler Angelo is a senior journalism major and can be reached at 581-7942 or trangelo@eiu.edu.

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