"Show Me Your Papers" Laws

CORE MESSAGE

"Show me your papers" is not the American way, and it won't fix our broken immigration system.

Connect: We're all frustrated with our broken immigration system, but we still want a workable solution that protects our basic rights and upholds our values as Americans.

Define: Arizona's anti-immigrant law breaks with our values to make our broken system worse. "Show me your papers" is not who we are or what we need as a nation.

Discredit: Creating police states that force everyone to live in fear and immigrants to flee to other states doesn't solve anything. Immigration is a national challenge that only Congress can fix.

Values: This is America, not the Soviet Union -- American citizens shouldn't have to "carry papers" for the police and families shouldn't have to live under suspicion just because of how they look.

Contrast: Arizona's anti-immigrant law threatens what we love about America and what we need to fix our broken system: comprehensive reform, not a patchwork of different state laws.

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ATTACKS AND RESPONSES

"States like Arizona are taking action on immigration because the federal government won't."

• Americans have every right to be frustrated about our broken immigration system and politicians who refuse to fix it because they're more interested in scoring political points.
• A patchwork of immigration laws by the states each doing their own thing won't solve the problem -- tough, fair and practical immigration reform will.
• Arizona's anti-immigrant law breaks with our values to make our broken immigration system worse. "Show me your papers" is not the American way and not what America needs.

"Arizona's immigration law is constitutional and already working."

• Sure, if the goal was to wreck Arizona's local economy and create a climate of fear and suspicion that's dividing the community and harming citizens, you could say the Arizona bill is "working."
• Let's be clear on what Arizona's anti-immigrant law does: it turns American citizens into criminal suspects just because of how they look and talk. That threatens what we love about America and breaks with our values as Americans.
• Actually, our Constitution gives the exclusive authority over immigration policy to our federal government. It doesn't make practical sense either to have a patchwork of fifty unworkable laws by the states each doing their own thing.  

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

• The majority of Americans, including Republicans, want a comprehensive approach to immigration policy -- one that includes both a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and effective immigration enforcement.
• The case before the Supreme Court, United States v. Arizona, is the first legal challenge to a state anti-immigrant law to reach the Court. More information and additional links are available here and a round-up of amicus briefs filed with the Court is available here.
• Under the Constitution, our federal government has the exclusive authority to regulate foreign affairs, including immigration policy.
• However, in the last two years, over half the states have tried to copycat Arizona's anti-immigrant law and five states so far have passed such proposals -- at the expense of their local economies.
• Not only would it be physically and logistically impossible to round up and deport 11 million people (the size of Ohio) at the same time, it wouldn't make any financial sense either -- mass deportation would cost a quarter trillion dollars and drain $2.5 trillion from the U.S. economy.
• Most of the 50 million Latinos in the U.S. are native-born Americans, and nearly three-quarters are U.S. citizens.

We develop messaging by aggregating, analyzing and distilling polling, tested messaging, and expert recommendations, and monitoring the media to identify what is and isn't working. See here for some of the experts and organizations we draw on.