state, only three businesses have been charged under this law. only three. that doesn t seem significant. that actually isn t quite accurate, because we ve made many, many raids on businesses under the employer sanctions law. so because there s a lot of components to it. now and there are still many in the court process. bill: a raid is one thing, but charging them with something illegal is something entirely different. right. well, again, the standard is there. but let me tell you the impact. it s working. i got a call just yesterday from a business, very worried about his hiring availability. the impact of having this law, businesses are much more vigilant. we shouldn t have bad guys out there. but it is huge. and because of this, because over 100,000 illegal aliens have left arizona, according to liberal think tanks, that our violent crime rate is up three times that of the
be joined by howard fisher, chief of capital media services. he med with congressman giffords about a month ago. yes, i was in washington for the supreme court hearing on the state employer sanctions law, and we went to breakfast, talked about politics and the nation. i ask an obvious question. how much more difficult is it to cover a story like this, horrifying to those of us who have never met gabi giffords when she s somebody you know. and i ve known gabi giffords when she was first elected to the arizona legislature. it is hard and as your guest talked about earlier, as journalists, we try to figure out what do we do? we don t want to jump to conclusions, we don t want to let our emotions get ahead of us. when you know somebody, when you had breakfast with them, how do you separate that out? and then there is trying to make sense of the whole thing. the initial report was this
ignoring the situation along the border. we have an employer sanctions law in arizona that s going before the u.s. supreme court in this next term, that s important, we have a human smuggling law, sheriff arpaio and i enforced that in maricopa county. the federal government is not part of the st. louis, they re part of the problem and they have to let arizona deal with it. but it is a federal government issue as well but of course it s right there, it s literally close to home, it s there. sorry, alisha, but andrew, a final question, i need to know specifics, sir, i understand the laws that you want to put in place. i want to know action, right now, is it more troops you need, what is it you need to help you fight this problem down there? we need everything. we need more troops on the ground along the border, we need the justice department to stop trying to torpedo our torpedo our laws and we need the federal government to not be pushing for amnesty but all that does is encourage
i don t want a national i.d. card. that s not necessarily the same thing. why not? again, a lot of people in this state and other states don t trust the federal government. there shouldn t need to be a national i.d. card. there s no reason that the state cannot in a parallel fashion enforce the current immigration laws, and that s what this bill would have done. are you telling me there s no illegal hiring in arizona? there s a lot less than there used to be because we have an employer sanctions law that is in place. are all the people working in your state are working legally? i didn t say that at all, chris. what i said is we need to actively enforce the law, and we need to penalize those people who are getting jobs or who are hiring people illegally or who know that they have false papers. okay. i know. okay. but obviously this i.d. card system is not working and you don t want to make it any tougher? i don t agree with that. i don t think a national i.d. card is the