A law with potential

Arizona’s new immigration law has the potential to do great good.

Also great harm.

We hope the former will prevail.

At a minimum, Arizona’s Legislature and governor deserve credit for taking on a ticklish task that neither Congress nor the current and past presidents have had the stomach for.

Arizona officials acknowledged a simple fact that other political leaders seem content to obscure with rhetorical pablum: America actually has laws that prescribe the steps non-citizens must take to live legally in this country.

After all, even the federal government concedes there are many millions of people living inside our borders today who are by their mere presence breaking the law.

Apparently they comprise a special class of lawbreaker, though.

The feds, at any rate, don’t seem eager to deal with illegal immigration.

And laws that aren’t enforced, to indulge in cliche, are worth about as much as the paper they’re printed on.

We’re troubled by the obvious implication of this reluctance to enforce, which is that we’re really serious about some laws, but we’re willing to pretend that others don’t exist.

This hardly sounds like that “nation of laws” we keep hearing about.

Arizona officials, by contrast, seem to believe that all laws are, well, created equal.

Their proposed techniques, though, have rankled people who contend the state’s methods could have been copied from a Gestapo manual.

Arizona’s law sounds to us rather less nasty.

This is what the law says about police officers who have detained a person for a legitimate reason — speeding on the freeway, for instance: “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.”

This, by the way, is a practice that courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have in general upheld as constitutional.

Yet critics contend the law will lead to Arizona cops stopping anybody with brown skin, and generally harassing a lot of people who have the misfortune of “looking Hispanic” — a sort of racial profiling writ large.

This is a legitimate concern.

And if evidence emerges that Arizona police are in the main hassling people who are bonafide U.S. citizens, then we’ll endorse a campaign to either revise or overturn the law.

We’ll withhold judgment, though, until the law takes effect this summer and we have something more valid than speculation to consider.

In the meantime, Congress could do something that would aid in enforcing immigration laws without potentially trampling on anybody’s civil rights.

We’re talking about E-Verify. That’s the program by which employers can determine whether employees are legally eligible to work in the United States.

E-Verify is available in every state but is mandatory in fewer than half.

If every employer was required to use E-Verify, and liable for big fines if they don’t, then the incentive that lures most illegal immigrants — a paycheck — might soon wither.

And our legal system would gain much-needed credibility.