This might be a dumb question but...how does one prove they're legal? Not saying I don't agree with it.
Wouldn't you need an original copy of your birth certificate?
From my reading, it would be the ordinary documents, such as a driver's license in the case of a citizen, immigration papers in the case of a non citizen.
But if you believe the law simply empowers police to ask for papers when they're stopping you for something else, you'd better double check, because I don't think this law would be very controversial if that were all it did.
Taking care not to quote the demon liberal press, I append here a snippet from Fox:
The law makes it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally. It also requires local police officers to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are illegal immigrants; allows lawsuits against government agencies that hinder enforcement of immigration laws; and makes it illegal to hire illegal immigrants for day labor or knowingly transport them.
Now much of that is reasonable enough and ought to be standard anywhere, I think. But it appears that the real fear here is that because illegal immigration is itself a crime (now under state law), and since the law also makes it a misdemeanor for an immigrant not to be carrying immigration papers at all times, suspicion of that crime by itself is sufficient cause to accost a person and demand proof of status. If that is actually how it goes down, then the potential for abuse is there. One of the obvious gray areas is the fact that as far as I know, there's no law anywhere that requires citizens to carry papers, but anyone can (and in fact, according to the new law,
must) be stopped if they look to any police officer as if they might be illegal immigrants.
Whether this actually happens, of course, is another matter. There's a lot of hoopla about the possibility of kids being arrested on their way to school, and so forth, and the possibility is theoretically there. But I suspect that if the law survives at all, police are going to be treading very carefully, and the whole thing could end up being a big noise over very little.