Serious question: Is Kevlar lily-white? LOL.

He's not the one that mentioned not minding being stopped. Ghostwriter said that (and having Native American blood isn't the same, btw.) Kevlar just mentioned that people get stopped near borders. (I always thought Kevlar was black.) This has been a common argument used by caucasians since they won't be the ones effected by the law anyway. If I wasn't clear, it was because I was typing too fast. Sorry! The statement was meant as a general statement to any caucasian making that asinine claim.

No, I really was curious. LOL. I also thought Kevlar was Black. I didn't know whether Ghostwriter was white, but saw the mention of N.A. I get your point.

I think you're right. Maybe he'll come back and confirm.

No and No.

I never said being hispanic was a crime or that hispanic= illegal immigrant.

No, CBP is in every state that has an international border crossing, including airports that receive international flights.

BTW, they ALL need security clearances.

Not around here, they only operate within 75 miles of the border. After 9/11, there were checkpoints along two roads near my house. It tied up traffic beyond belief. The joke was, you knew it was up there because traffic was all backed up, so we would just turn into a subdivision and get to another major road to get around it. It was a hassle for a couple months, then it went away. I can't imagine they thought it would be effective when there were so many alternate routes around the checkpoints.

Michigan has enhanced driver's licenses now that can be used as passports within North America, to come back over from Canada, mainly. I know a lot of people who travel back and forth frequently got the enhanced license so they don't have to carry their passport with them all the time. In particular, the boaters like them. It can handle water damage, a passport can't. I never
considered whether these are available in any state or just border states or what.

I can't imagine we'll ever have a huge problem with illegal Canadians coming here. They have it good up there!

Common misconception. CBP employees (especially those who patrol the spaces between points of entry) typically go through a Federal background investigation which can usually be done electronically - it's a more in-depth credit/criminal history check.

ICE and other federal employees that need any level of security clearances have to go through a 3-6 month process of polygraph tests, interviews of their families and friends, psychological testing, etc. Depending on the level, it gets pretty long and arduous. These last between 3 and 5 years and have to be renewed.

The clearance levels range from confidential (typically this is for jobs that deal with a lot of personal information, like financial data) to Top Secret/Secret Compartmentalized Information (usually reserved for national security issues but sometimes not).

CBP employees do not deal with the type of information that would require a security clearance to have. ICE employees do, especially because they've been tasked with aiding the FBI in the monitoring of foreign-born terrorist suspects (This is why I say that ICE and CBP do not really enforce the same laws).

To be 100% honest, many of the CBP agents that I know would probably not be able to get a security clearance beyond confidential for one reason or another. They'd have already been working with ICE if they had. CBP is not exactly the most desireable job in the federal government - it takes a certain kinda someone.

About the airports - that may be true, but CBP (especially the patrol) is less concerned with legitimate points of entry than they are with the spaces between. Generally, the spaces between are land-based. If you get stopped in an airport, it's a Customs and Border Protection agent. If you're getting stopped on land, away from a legitimate point of entry, it's Customs and Border patrol personnel (also part of CBP). Which is who we're talking about in this thread, mostly. My mistake for not clarifying.

CBP is always hiring IT security specialists.. those folks require a higher clearance than Confidential, but that's true of a lot of IT security jobs, government or not so I think that's related more to the types of information that those positions can access inherently.

Right. Also, many of the IT-related jobs within the federal government require security clearances, even the support positions, because you may need to work on the computer of someone who has a security clearance and keeps confidential information on their PC.

Not all, but at least a handful. This is especially true of private companies who contract with the federal government.

But stopping someone in the middle of the street for no reason other than they look like an illegal immigrant is basically going to accuse a lot of American citizens of being criminals. At least if you check people for status when you arrest them for other crimes, you aren't harassing otherwise law-abiding citizens.

So how do you identify and illegal immigrant by sight? Do they have it tattooed on their face?

THIS.

Exactly. Might I add the observation that some of the worst crimes in history have been committed by legal residents or those who were in the country legally.

Applying a band-aid to an amputation is not effective. And what we have in AZ is yet another band-aid solution to a problem that's been well covered by publications as diverse as High Country News and the New Yorker.

Sigh. Like I said. This.Makes.Me.Crazy.

I'm white, but am asked very frequently if I am Hispanic or part Hispanic. (As far as we know we're Scotch-Irish, but no one's bothered to research family history, so I probably got all the genes from some ancestor who very well might have been Hispanic, but it was past great-great grandparents.) I'm willing to bet I'd get stopped, and I'm certainly more likely to than a "lily-white blonde".

I agree with the concept, I just don't agree with how this is probably going to play out. And I certainly don't carry a birth certificate or ssn card. I feel like if this were done right, it could be productive. But it would be naive to think this isn't going to result in racial profiling. (Or in carding anyone with an accent).

Calls for boycott follow Ariz. immigration law

San Francisco officials say they will propose not doing business with state

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36791991...new_york_times