Whether or not you believe Gregg Doyel loses all credibility in calling Phoenix, AZ “one of the biggest and brightest cities in this country”, CBS Sports’ resident shit-stirrer is quick to offer a defense of SB1070, insisting “you’re not hearing about the creeping third-world kudzu spreading into Phoenix and throughout Arizona.”

It’s easy for George Vecsey, and for people like him, to urge MLB players and other rich athletes to make a stand against Arizona’s immigration law when people like Vecsey, and most of those rich athletes, aren’t the ones trying to live there.

People are dying in Phoenix. They are being yanked from their homes on a daily basis and tortured, mutilated, killed. Why? Because there are some bad people in Phoenix. Not the legal citizens of Phoenix, no. I don’t mean them. I mean the illegals. Not all of them or even most of them, obviously, but by and large illegal immigrants are responsible, according to police, for most of the home invasions and kidnappings and tortures.

I know that property values in Arizona are dropping faster than almost anywhere else in this country. And I know that Arizona has massive crime issues, particularly of the drug-and-violence variety. In recent years its murder rate has been two and even three times the national average, and police blame the disproportionate nature of those numbers on the influx of illegal immigrants.

Is there the possibility of racial profiling in Arizona, where police with “reasonable suspicion” can ask for verification that a person isn’t an illegal immigrant? Sure there is. Police aren’t looking for thieves or drug dealers, who by definition could be anyone. They’re looking for illegal immigrants. If you can remove the issue of “race” from the search for “illegal immigrants,” please tell me how to do that. Until someone figures it out, I’m inclined to let the police of Arizona do their job.

If there’s such a strong relationship between plummeting property values and illegal immigration, how is it that Forbes‘ January 2010 list of cities with the fastest falling home prices included not one Arizona burg? Sure, City No. 1, San Diego, is close enough to the border, but is immigration from Mexico really what’s plaguging property owners in  No. 2, Salt Lake City?