This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 17th, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

New immigration restrictions in Arizona are a response to many problems.

Some of those problems are imagined if you look carefully at the data.

So says Dan Griswold, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies,

and author of the new Cato book Mad About Trade.

Frustration in Arizona is understandable.

We've been waiting here at Cato for Congress to do the right thing on immigration for years,

and of course that is to expand opportunities for legal immigration, high skilled and low skilled.

Congress hasn't done that.

And the result has been we have widespread illegal immigration.

Arizona probably has the highest percentage of illegal immigrants of any state.

I think they've, these workers have been good for the state overall they've helped to build

their economy there but people are getting very frustrated with the inaction in Washington

so they pass this really quite sweeping state law which empowers police in Arizona in the course of stopping

somebody for another infraction if they have a reasonable suspicion quote-unquote

that somebody's in the country illegally they can ask for their papers and then that's a misdemeanor under state law they can be

Arrested given a jail sentence a fine. It's not going to do anything to solve illegal immigration.

That's driven by deeper labor market factors, but it's aroused a lot of

passions on both sides, a lot of heated rhetoric on both sides, and I've spent

quite a bit of my time in the past couple of weeks trying to bring some reason and research to those passions.

Among the heated bits of rhetoric surrounding this issue,

what are the key pillars of support that people offer up for this kind of law.

...