First They Came for the Latinos

About a mile or so west and a little south of my house on the south side of Chicago, there's a mall called the Discount Mall in Little Village.  [...]   Nearly everyone who patronizes the mall is of Latino heritage. I guess that makes it a good place to look for illegal immigrants. You would also find a lot of legal ones, and many just plain U.S. citizens.

However, you could just as easily find the same percentage of illegal immigrants to legal immigrants to just plain U.S. citizens at lunchtime in what residents of Chicago call The Loop, the downtown business district. So, let's say you threw a Gestapo-style cordon of Federal Agents carrying high-powered rifles and wearing bullet-proof armor around a block of lunch places and storefront businesses on Wabash between Madison and Monroe and didn't let anybody in or out of that cordoned area while you checked everyone's “papers.”  [...]

What? Why not? Oh, I see—because totalitarian police state-style behavior tends to upset people who work for banks, law firms, city, county and state offices, foreign consulates, and stylish department stores. [...] Yes. It's a little out of place in an open society, a democratic republic such as the United States of America, to cordon off a section of the public thoroughfare as if it were a block of apartments in the Warsaw Ghetto.