JALSA  congratulates the members of the Boston City Council, who have unanimously expressed their outrage at the un-American actions of the State of Arizona.  In a triumph of ignorance and bigotry, that state’s legislature and governor have created a discriminatory system of interrogation and arrest for the offense of not having your passport or your birth certificate with you while looking like a foreigner.  We are all immigrants, some recent, some generations or millennia in the past, but all with the potential to look strange to somebody.  Encouraging local law enforcement to demand “papers” from suspicious-looking strangers comes right out of the totalitarian play book– a scene from Casablanca.   The City Council gets it, and has spoken up for all of us.  Perhaps if enough voices like theirs are raised, the misguided folks in Arizona will get it too.

– Also See Jewish Community Condemns Arizona Law signed by JALSA