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Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: Sports commissioners should vow boycott if unjust Arizona law takes effect This is not the time for silence. It's time for our various sports commissioners to speak. Loudly and clearly. That means NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell should make his opinion known. So should MLB Commissioner Bud Selig. The same goes for the heads of the NBA, the NHL and any other sports league that does business in Arizona. Their collective message to Arizona should leave no room for interpretation: If Senate Bill 1070, which requires police to question people about their immigration status and demand to see their documents if they suspect the person is in the U.S. illegally, goes into effect July 29, then you can say goodbye to a plethora of sporting events. That means no MLB All-Star Game in 2011. No more Super Bowls. No more BCS Championship games. And it should mean heavy economic sanctions until the law gets repealed. End of story. No discussion. No compromise. There's precedent. Following the failure of a 1990 proposition to recognize Martin Luther King's birthday as a holiday in Arizona, the NFL moved Super Bowl XXVII from Arizona to California. Arizona finally added MLK Day, and Super Bowl XXX was played in Tempe. In 2001, the NCAA announced a two-year moratorium – the ban continues – on awarding predetermined postseason events to South Carolina. And the Atlantic Coast Conference moved its basketball tournaments in 2011, 2012 and 2013 from South Carolina to North Carolina because the Confederate battle flag, a symbol of slavery and oppression, remains on display at the state capitol. Sometimes, financial penalties are the only way to affect change. Some of you will fire off angry e-mails because you believe columns about politics have no business on the sports pages. You're wrong. Big business is synonymous with politics. Why do you think Cowboys Stadium is in Arlington instead of Dallas? Pro sports, a billion-dollar industry, is one of the biggest revenue-producing ventures in our country. Besides, whether you play professional sports or write about them for a living, we're all Americans, and injustice should never be overlooked. No good can come from a law that essentially legalizes racial profiling. That's why it was good to see MLBPA executive director Michael Weiner take an official stand against Senate Bill 1070. "All of these players, as well as their families, could be adversely affected, even though their presence in the United States is legal," Weiner's statement read. "Each of them must be ready to prove, at any time, his identity and the legality of his being in Arizona to any state or local official with suspicion of his immigration status. "The Major League Baseball Players Association opposes this law as written. We hope that the law is repealed or modified promptly. If the current law goes into effect, the MLBPA will consider additional steps necessary to protect the rights and interests of our members." Maybe those of you who think this law is no big deal will change your mind the first time one of the Rangers' top-rated prospects gets hauled to jail because he didn't have his passport with him on the way from the ballpark. Or when it happens to a prospect on your favorite team. While most police officers respect and protect us, a small percentage will use this law to harass folks. It's naïve to think otherwise. More than ever our sports leagues encompass the best athletes in the world, not just the U.S. It's not just baseball, which has hundreds of Spanish-speaking players from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Venezuela, Nicaragua and other locales. They're a huge part of the community in Arizona during the six weeks of spring training as well as the Arizona Fall League, where some of the best prospects traditionally compete. How many Europeans play in the NHL and NBA? How many compete on the PGA Tour? There's no way our major sports leagues can sit idly by while Arizona puts a law such as this into effect. They must make their displeasure known. Post Comment Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest #1. To: All, *Quisling alerts* (#0) Really? OK...here's the counter proposal then: The MLB and NFL should now hire ILLEGAL INVADER PLAYERS at a FRACTION of what they pay these Unionized scumbags... The Sports Day D-FW should hire Illegals to do columns at 5% of what this pampered POS gets paid! If you LOVE the Illegals so bad, let's have them replace YOU and YOUR job, and undercut YOUR paycheck! BTW, we'll be raising YOUR TAXES while you lose money, to give more to these Illegals whoa re so "hard working"! F this POS, eject them WITH the Illegals! If we are going to be accused of Nazi tactics...let them see what the REAL Nazi tactics were/are! Itzlzha posted on 2010-05-04 7:05:48 ET Reply Trace
Poster Comment: Found on LP and left "as is" except for the deletion of the header from LP. Itz cracks me up.
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