theweek has the longer segment where john dresses down and impersonates an illegal after one of the customers confronts the cop actor and tells john he could be profiled as well, play alternet's version for a better intro, it should be noted that the show is watched nationwide so with more of these segments making the air, it can be influential to enlighten more viewers to the real dilemma and not just the fabricated lies of beheadings along the border and violence on the border states which have never before been safer

http://theweek.com/article/index/211...mmigration-law

http://www.alternet.org/rights/14984...migration_law_


The Arizona Republic reports that Speaker of the House Kirk Adams sent out a media release demanding ABC retract and apologize for “a fake news story the show produced about Arizona’s new immigration law for the purposes of entertaining viewers with a ‘Candid Camera’ style set-up.” “This is an outrageously inaccurate portrayal of SB-1070 by ABC News,” he said.

In all fairness, SB-1070 does not grant a private security guard the authority to ask anyone about their immigration status. Instead, it requires police to demand proof of legal residency during a legal stop when reasonable suspicion that a person is undocumented exists. That is typically understood to mean that the person being approached about their immigration status must be suspected of breaking some other law before that inquiry takes place.

It’s illegal to impersonate law enforcement, so that’s why ABC carefully avoided that scenario. Meanwhile, SB-1070 establishes a pretty low threshold for what kind of infractions should elicit immigration questioning. A minor traffic violation or a broken tail light could suddenly catapult into an immigration interrogation. Also, since anything from an accent to “dress or appearance” can be used to establish reasonable suspicion that a person is undocumented, the racial profiling taking place in the sketch itself is unfortunately not that far-fetched.

Ultimately, the takeaway of the segment for me wasn’t so much how SB-1070 will be implemented, but rather, how people come to think about its implementation. ABC mentions that “[e]ven though the law triggered a wave of protests, polls showed that over 50 percent of Arizona voters supported the bill.” However, ABC fails to cite the data that makes their whole candid camera stunt noteworthy. Despite the fact that SB-1070′s proponents have claimed otherwise, over 70 percent of all Americans thinks it’s “somewhat” to “very” likely that Latino citizens will be asked for their papers by police who think they are undocumented immigrants. In Arizona, almost half of all voters think the SB-1070 immigration debate has “exposed a deeper sense of racism in our community.” The high level of support for the law seems to imply that the general public is willing to accept these serious drawbacks.

Yet, ABC’s segment suggests that when people actually witness racial profiling, most of them are pretty appalled by it. Granted, it’s certainly possible that the individuals ABC caught on camera aren’t necessarily a representative sample of the electorate. It’s also true that not everyone stood up to defend the people being persecuted. But at least one woman claimed the event changed how she thought about SB-1070, telling ABC that she had “never given a thought to the consequences of the anti-immigration law.” Now, she said, “I’m definitely going to be taking a different view against it.” My guess is she wasn’t the only person who came out feeling that way. As unlikely as it may be that the scenarios depicted by ABC would become the norm under SB-1070, it alarmed at least a few people that something even resembling what was shown could take place in America.







The video: On ABC's "Primetime: What Would You Do?" actors play out a scene with moral or ethical implications to see how ordinary citizens will react. Last week, the show journeyed to Arizona, home to the country's toughest — and most controversial — immigration law. Actors posing as a Hispanic civilian and an off-duty security guard repeatedly enacted a scene at a Tucson restaurant, the "guard" aggressively pestering the Hispanic man for his identification papers. The restaurant's customers consistently intervened, said a publicist for the show: Over a two-day shoot, "we never once encountered someone who defended the security guard's point of view." The state's immigration law has garnered popular support in polls, but will Arizonans back it in practice?
The reaction: "It's a TV show, not a scientific study," says Dan Amira in New York, "but this does tell us something about attitudes in Arizona, or at least in Tucson, toward the immigration debate." The citizens' bold actions demonstrate that, "at the very least, anti-immigrant sentiment hasn't reached a point where it's socially acceptable to proclaim your support for racial profiling in public." But the speaker of the state House, Kirk Adams, says that "What Would You Do" misled viewers by implying that a police officer has the power to deport anyone who looks Latino. In a press release, as quoted by The Arizona Republic, he blasted ABC for airing "a fake news story...." Watch the revealing video