If you watch TV, you’ve probably seen Roy Blunt’s recent border-security ad about ten zillion times an evening. A folksy, jeans-clad, plaid-shirted Blunt strolls along a segment of the border wall with a jolly looking gentleman whom one assumes is a border agent, and declares with a strange, semi-ecstatic smirk that, among other things, he supports Arizona’s new anti-immigrant law. Indeed, Blunt has been forthright about his support of the Arizona law since its inception, declaring it to be “just common sense.”

Of course nobody with half a brain would have expected Blunt to say anything different, but, until today, I just assumed that he was simply pandering to the nativist fears of his GOP base. However, a new report by NPR suggests his motivation for supporting Arizona’s SB1070 might not be so clear-cut. Given the implications of NPR’s findings, Blunt may actually have an eye to cultivating new sources of financial support as well as playing to the anti-immigrant paranoia of the GOP base:

NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.

The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.

Sounds like a natural fit for Blunt. I’m betting he’d like to get Missouri in on the goodies – a new, privately run prison for undocumented women and children maybe (and big future campaign donations for Blunt) in return for an ugly, probably unconstitutional law intended to make rich people richer. From Blunt’s point of view, it has to be a win-win position; play to the prejudices of the slaveringly anti-immigration GOP right-wing, while supporting laws at state or federal level that are almost guaranteed  not to address immigration problems. After all, why kill a cash cow?

* 2nd paragraph edited slightly for clairty.

Via FiredUp! we learn that Rep. Roy Blunt is still trying to ride the Arizona immigration pony because “there’s nothing wrong with states trying to do what’s necessary to protect people in their state… .” While there may be nothing wrong with trying to protect the citizens of Arizona, there’s lots wrong with Blunt’s implication that Arizonans need to be protected from criminal immigrants.  As Linda Chavez writes:

Crime in Arizona has consistently gone down over the last 15 years, even while illegal immigration was increasing. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports show that the violent crime rate statewide in Arizona has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1995, and property crimes have followed the same pattern.

So what we have is a case of perception vs. reality. In this situation anecdotes are substituted for statistics – horrific incidents such as the recent drug cartel related murder of Arizona rancher Robert Krentz stand in for real data.

Contributing to the situation are politicians who seek political traction by exploiting the fears of the poorly informed – think good ol’ Roy – and the media that loves them – think Fox News, which recently ran a story suggesting that the data shows immigrant-related crime exploding in border states like Arizona. The article concedes, however, way at the end, burried in the last paragraphs, that the correlation is not well-substantiated:

Jessica Vaughan, a co-author of the Center for Immigration Studies report and policy director at the think tank, said the bottom line is that connections between illegal immigrants and crime are hard to draw.

“We didn’t find any evidence to support the idea that either immigrants are more prone to crime or less prone to crime than … legally resident Americans,” she said. “It’s very tricky.”

And what is the most frequent crime committed by immmigrants according to a study Fox relied on for its data documenting a crime-wave?:

But for those immigrants who are being caught and convicted, their immigration status itself is often the offense.

Ah, Fox News …  

In an interview this morning on radio KZRG, Roy Blunt stated that he thought that the Arizona immigration law was “just common sense.” It’s aimed at folks who are here illegally, isn’t it? Other highlights:

Blunt’s biggest (only?) “on-going fight” with Bush was to take issue with the old softie’s warm and fuzzy approach to undocumented workers.

While dancing in the best terpsichorean political style around the interviewer’s question about whether or not the congressman agreed that President Obama was “promoting lawlessness” when he called the Arizona law misguided, Blunt allowed as to how Obama was “even more misguided” than Bush.

According to Blunt, Obama’s statement was intended to “send a message” to the undocumented that he is on their side and not on the side of rule by law, by extension indicating that it is misguided to “enforce the laws of America.” Blunt could have saved himself lots of trouble and just said straight out, without all the circumlocution, that he agrees with the KZRG spokesman.

Oddly, Blunt was neither asked nor did he volunteer any opinions about the constitutionality of the law and its potential to violate the civil liberties of U.S. citizens. The failure to give due consideration to the obvious constitutional issues was especially odd given Rep. Blunt’s effort to pander to Tea Partiers and good ol’ boys, who, as we all know, have their collective panties in a bunch over issues of constitutionality – or what they have been told are constitutional issues – most recently in terms of Obama’s perceived encroachment against their freedom to die without access to health care.

But then, strangely enough, neither do the Tea Partiers themselves seem too worried about defending freedom this time around: