and in Minnesota, of all places

Gov. Tim Pawlenty is crackin' down with a get-tough policy in this article.

I don't mean to slam the guy, but here's a clip from the article.

"In a place like Minnesota, which I think has a generous welfare program, the image can be, `Oh, these people come in and take advantage of this,'" said Rodolfo de la Garza, a political science professor at Columbia University. "You pander to cultural conservative types and to economically frightened types."

The strategy has brought withering criticism from people who work with immigrants.

"He's reacting out of fear and he's also using fear as a tool to encourage people that are undecided to vote for him," said Ernesto Bustos, who organizes migrant farmworkers in Owatonna.

In Pawlenty's first campaign four years ago, he promoted a system of tracking immigrants through their driver's licenses, running a TV ad that said, "Terrorists are here." He was criticized for that, too, but went on to win.

Soon after his immigration report, Pawlenty rolled out a plan to go after illegals. He proposed to deputize state agents to enforce federal immigration laws, criminalize possession of fake IDs and ban local ordinances that keep police from asking about immigration status.

And further:

Although 95 percent of Minnesotans were born in the United States, the number of foreign-born residents is growing faster here than almost anywhere else in the country, said Katherine Fennelly, a professor who studies immigration at the University of Minnesota.

Pawlenty's figure for those living illegally in the state came from estimates by the Urban Institute and Pew Hispanic Institute. If the estimates are correct, Minnesota has less than 1 percent of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States.

It stands to reason that the Hispanic population is going to "explode" if there are a disproportionate amount of Hispanics living in MN. These scare tactics: I can't say that they promote cross-cultural understanding. You probably wouldn't want to talk with the immigrants next door or down the street if they were gun-toting, marijuana-selling meth users (see the rest of the article), now would you? Regardless of why they are in the US, or whether or not you think they should be in the US, they deserve dignity.