Reply #22: I read some analysis saying it was being played up so that the current admin could

[Hannah Bell]

institute their *own* "immigration reform," using the arizona, etc. (maybe colorado too) brouhaha as justification.

"In fact, the White House and the media have seized on the extreme right-wing Arizona law to promote their own reactionary and anti-democratic immigration agenda—legislation proposed by Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, of New York, and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina.

Schumer and Graham spelled out the contours of their initiative in a March 17 column for the Washington Post. The bill’s central component would be the creation, in all but name, of an internal passport system. It would require “all US citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs,” to carry new, biometric Social Security cards “to ensure that illegal workers cannot get jobs.” In spite of Schumer and Graham’s protests that personal data “would be stored only on the card” and that “no government database would house everyone’s information,” the high-tech cards would offer the government a powerful new tool for monitoring the entire population."

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/immi-a28.shtml