Linda Greenhouse, writing for the New York Times Opinionator blog, rightly points out that Arizona’s new anti-immigrant law quite literally creates a new crime of “breathing while undocumented” due to a provision that someone lacking authorization to be in the country is “trespassing,” even on public land.

Greenhouse wonders what Arizonan libertarian and conservative icon Barry Goldwater would have to say about the law, writing, “Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?”

She discusses possible responses to the law and importantly notes that even though the law might seem blatantly unconstitutional to many:

[Her] confidence about the law’s fate in the court’s hands is not boundless, however. In 1982, hours after the court decided the Texas case [Plyler v. Doe, which overturned a Texas law depriving undocumented immigrant children of public education], a young assistant to Attorney General William French Smith analyzed the decision and complained in a memo: “This is a case in which our supposed litigation program to encourage judicial restraint did not get off the ground, and should have.” That memo’s author was John G. Roberts Jr.