Shortly after signing Arizona’s draconian immigration bill into law, Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) attempted to ease concerns about civil rights abuses, stating that she “will NOT tolerate racial discrimination or racial profiling in Arizona.” The truth is, she already is.

Arizona’s 3TV News reports that a U.S. citizen Latino commercial truck driver was pulled over at a weight scale check spot and handcuffed and detained at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building in Phoenix until his wife came and provided both of their birth certificates. Abdon, who did not want to use his last name, said that though he provided his drivers license and his Social Security Number, police officers wanted more proof that he was legally present in the country. Abdon believes that he was ultimately “targeted for his race and forced to provide his birth certificate.” Watch the 3TV report (starts at 2:16):

The City of Phoenix Police Department is enrolled in ICE’s 287(g) Task Force Officers program which allows local Phoenix police to enforce immigration law — as all Arizona police will soon be required to do. Abdon isn’t the first Latino to fall victim to the deputization of immigration law and he certainly won’t be the last once Arizona’s new law goes into effect.

Maricopa County, in which Phoenix is located, is all too familiar with the problem of racial profiling. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is subject of a Department of Justice investigation into rampant allegations of racial profiling and discrimination and has been named in 2,700 lawsuits. In North Carolina, researchers found that 287(g)’s have “created a climate of racial profiling and community insecurity” in communities across the state. According to a report by the ACLU, racial profiling in Gwinnet County, Georgia has been exacerbated by the 287(g) program. The ACLU received complaints from drivers, pedestrians, and Gwinnett community members showing that police officers are targeting immigrants and people of color for stops, searches, and interrogations.

A representative at ICE told 3TV that the incident was “standard operating procedure.” According to the spokesperson, the agents “needed to verify Abdon was in the country legally and it is not uncommon to ask for someone’s birth certificate.” Abdon’s wife however, has a different take, stating, “It doesn’t feel like it’s a good way of life, to live with fear, even though we are okay, we are legal…still have to carry documents around.”

Just a few days before Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) signed into law an immigration bill that is essentially based on the presumption that undocumented immigrants are dangerous criminals, a heroic Guatemalan immigrant lay dying in the street in Jamaica, Queens after saving a woman from her attacker. Several people walked by Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax’s bleeding body until someone finally called the police, more than an hour later. While some have identified the circumstances surrounding Tale-Yax’s death as an unfortunate, but fascinating psychological study in bystander behavior, others have pointed to a more simple explanation: immigration status.

The New York Times describes the area where Tale-Yax was killed as a “hardscrabble neighborhood with large populations of Central American immigrants and of homeless men.” At the Iglesia Cristo Peniel, Uber Bautista, who identified himself as a church elder, said that he believed the inaction of Queens residents might have stemmed from undocumented immigrants’ trying to escape detection. “So they’re going to be very afraid to call the authorities if they see something,” he told the New York Times. “It’s not that people don’t care.” Grainy surveillance video released by the New York Post documents what happened:

Undocumented immigrants have traditionally been reluctant to talk to the police, even in places like New York City, where police officers are not allowed to enforce immigration law. In neighborhoods where local law enforcement is empowered to act as immigration agents — as all Arizona police officers will soon be compelled to do — it only makes matters worse. A 2009 report released by the Police Foundation indicated that immigration enforcement by local police exacerbates fear in communities already distrustful of police in addition to diverting scarce resources and increasing law enforcement’s exposure to liability and litigation. One police officer pointed out, “How do you police a community that will not talk to you?”

The bill that Brewer signed off on aims to “identify, prosecute and deport” undocumented immigrants and will give local police officers the power to detain anyone suspected of being in the U.S. illegally. While the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police, the Mesa and Arizona Fraternal Order of Police, and the Law Enforcement Engagement Initiative have all opposed Arizona’s new law for reasons similar to the ones cited by the Police Foundation, Brewer justified her decision by stating that “there is no higher priority than protecting the citizens of Arizona.” “We cannot sacrifice our safety to the murderous greed of drug cartels,” said Brewer. “We cannot stand idly by as drop houses, kidnappings and violence compromise our quality of life.”

Aside from the fact that many have pointed out that Arizona’s law will make the state less safe, a century of research has shown that immigrants are not murderous, greedy drug cartel operatives as Brewer suggests. Numerous studies have confirmed that immigrants “are less likely to commit crimes or be behind bars than the native born.” While the anti-immigrant right is always quick to jump on stories of immigrant criminality and portray them as the norm, Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax, “a Guatemalan immigrant [who] eked out a living working odd jobs” and “recently [was] out of work and lost his home in Queens,” lived a quiet, humble life that more closely resembles the average immigrant experience. His death, meanwhile, represents a sad and violent ending which may say as much about the broken U.S. immigration system as it does about human nature.

Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass turns in a very strange Wall Street Journal op-ed today (rather misleadingly titled, presumably by the Journal’s editors, “The Palestine Peace Distraction”) in which he grants at the outset the key strategic premises of U.S. involvement in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking that the piece is ostensibly devoted to challenging.

“To be sure,” writes Haass, “peace between Israelis and Palestinians would be of real value“:

It would constitute a major foreign-policy accomplishment for the United States. It would help ensure Israel’s survival as a democratic, secure, prosperous, Jewish state. It would reduce Palestinian and Arab alienation, a source of anti-Americanism and radicalism. And it would dilute the appeal of Iran and its clients.

That’s pretty much the game right there. But, for some reason, Haass decides there’s a strawman needs killin’:

There are times one could be forgiven for thinking that solving the Palestinian problem would take care of every global challenge from climate change to the flu. But would it? The short answer is no.

While this is obviously meant as a caricature, it hardly needs pointing out that there is no one — no one — who seriously believes anything like this. The only people who traffic in the idea that “solving the Palestinian problem would take care of every global challenge” are the people who do so to knock it down.

Haass goes on to list a number of problems, in addition to climate change and the flu, that peace between Israelis and Palestinians would not solve: Iraqi political infighting, counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, the Iranian nuclear program, and Arab authoritarianism. Even granting all of these — and I think there’s evidence that, even if it wouldn’t “solve” them, Israeli-Palestinian peace would impact them in a positive way — so what? Given what Haass has already acknowledged that achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians would do, it doesn’t make much sense to back off peacemaking just because it wouldn’t also ease Iraq’s political tensions, rebuild Afghanistan, end the Iranian nuclear program, and reform Arab governments.

But it’s in his discussion of radical terrorism that I think Haass steps seriously wrong:

Alas, neither would terrorism fade if Israelis and Palestinians finally ended their conflict. Al Qaeda was initially motivated by a desire to rid the Arabian Peninsula of infidels. Its larger goal is to spread Islam in a form that closely resembles its pure, seventh-century character. Lip service is paid to Palestinian goals, but the radical terrorist agenda would not be satisfied by Palestinian statehood.

Why is “lip service paid” to the Palestinian issue? Because it’s an issue of great salience among Al Qaeda’s target audience. Resolving the issue wouldn’t end Al Qaeda terrorism, but it would blunt Al Qaeda’s appeal (just as Haass acknowledges it would Iran’s), denying it an important propaganda tool and shrinking its pool of potential recruits.

What is more, any Palestinian state would materialize only amidst compromise. There will be no return to the 1967 borders; at most, Palestinians would be compensated for territorial adjustments made necessary by large blocs of Jewish settlements and Israeli security concerns. There will be nothing more than a token right of return for Palestinians to Israel. Jerusalem will remain undivided and at most shared. Terrorists would see all this as a sell-out, and they would target not just Israel but those Palestinians and Arab states who made peace with it.

Leaving aside that Al Qaeda has already targeted moderate Palestinians and Arab states who’ve made peace with Israel, I find it hard to believe that the president of the Council on Foreign Relations is really offering “the terrorists won’t like it” as a reason to not do something, especially something that he has already acknowledged “would be of real value” to the United States in the region.

When you cut through all the atmospherics, Haass’s argument pretty much comes down to the idea that President Obama shouldn’t announce his own comprehensive peace plan, because the likely failure of such a plan “risks discrediting good ideas, breeding frustration in the Arab world, and diluting America’s reputation for getting things done.” But, of course, as Gen. David Petraeus noted in his recent report to Congress, these are also among the consequences of a lack of progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace. What Haass has given us here, then, is not an argument for abandoning the peace process, but for how important it is — for reasons of both security and credibility — that we not fail.