Critics contend that the law will lead to racial profiling. Even Mexican President Felipe Calderón has blasted the law as violating basic human rights.

Whether you agree with the law or not, here’s the point of this post: it turns out that despite its bluster, Mexico actually has very similar laws on its book against the country’s own Honduran illegal immigrants!

Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said the law "violates inalienable human rights" and Democrats in Congress applauded Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s criticisms of the law in a speech he gave on Capitol Hill last week.

Yet Mexico’s Arizona-style law requires local police to check IDs. And Mexican police freely engage in racial profiling and routinely harass Central American migrants, say immigration activists. [...]

"There (in the United States), they’ll deport you," Hector Vázquez, an illegal immigrant from Honduras, said as he rested in a makeshift camp with other migrants under a highway bridge in Tultitlán. "In Mexico they’ll probably let you go, but they’ll beat you up and steal everything you’ve got first."

Chris Hawley of USA Today has the full story: Link (Photo: Sergio Solache/USA Today)

Boy Scouts’s motto "Be Prepared" apparently extends all the way to modern day’s terrorism. In this post 9/11 world, you can’t be too careful, so the Border Patrol in Imperial County, California, has a – shall we say, unique – program for the Scouts:

The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.

“This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. “It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts.”

The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out “active shooters,” like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.

Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times has more: Link

The man, arriving at Manchester Airport from Los Angeles, claimed he was on a brief visit to a friend who was opening a restaurant in England’s North West.

But he admitted planning to work illegally after border officers found the card and pages of Mexican recipes.

Link -via reddit