Upon reading this thread, I notice that there is a huge focus on the Hispanic population in the conversation. My perspective might be a bit different because I grew up in a large city...

Considering that there are illegals from many different countries, I find it unacceptable that these kinds of laws tend to focus on hispanics. Do you think that they are demanding the papers of the people with Romanian accents? It has been my experince that people generally don't. They aren't 'suspected' even though it is obvious that they are foriegn born.

NYC, and the surrounding areas, is as much a collection of little neighborhoods as it is a large city. It's not hard to find legal and illegal Russian, Jamaican, Korean or any other flavor of immigrant. Still, even here, people seem to focus on the Mexicans, like they are the source of all of the ills of this society and economy.