CHILLING EFFECT?

Many denounce a new Prince William (Virginia) county ordinance allowing police to check residency papers of people they flag down for any infraction and deprive some basic services to suspected illegal aliens. The measure, said to target Hispanics (which now comprise 20% of Prince William's population), will presumably affect everyone speaking with an accent, looks like J-Lo or Antonio Banderas, and perhaps spells his surname C-R-U-Z instead of C-R-U-I-S-E. No wonder, a lot of people see the Kastila as the Negroes of 21st Century America.

And since we Pinoys share plenty with them, it's not farfetched to think we may suffer some "peripheral damage".

At the surface, I wonder at the uproar. Wouldn't it be logical for the police to ask someone he's pulled over for, say, speeding, if he had papers to stay legally in the US? After all, they say there's 12 million illegals today, nearly 60% of them from Mexico (but also add to that number an estimated 500,000 Pinoy TNTs). And doesn't the state have the right to refuse to feed, house or treat people who don't pay taxes?

Don't we do the same to those chinky-eyed merchants in Binondo whose sole medium of communication is a pocket calculator, or those turbaned money, umbrella-wielding, motorcycle-riding money-lenders?

The "frontliners" -- police and doctors -- are the first to protest the Prince William ordinance. They worry that illegals will stop reporting crimes or seek emergency medical treatment for fear of being arrested and deported. Others say, illegals either will go deeper underground or merely move to nearby towns.

"Now that Congress and the Bush administration have failed to act on comprehensive immigration reform, we can expect a range of policies to be put in place across the country by local and state government," the Center for American Progress declared. The Prince William experience is just the start. More cities with real or perceived illegal immigrant problems are expected to follow suit, each one setting its own standards and penalties. Inequality. Uneven playing field. That is the price of Congress' failure to enact immigration reforms.

The immigration debate is emotional, volatile. Having lived here only recently, I must admit, it scares me. It's so easy to blur distinctions between legal and illegal immigrant because, invariably, the first step to determining that is by looking at the color of someone's skin. Racial discrimination.

Hey, I can understand that if the United States was part of the Third World. I can understand that if over half a million Americans did not die in a civil war to emancipate the Negro slave. I can understand that if the United States did not have the legacy of a Martin Luther King.

I'd best start buying a lot of skin bleach and practice enunciating "apple" correctly -- not a-pol but ap-uhl. With an attitude.