San Diego (CNN) -- With the Supreme Court poised this week to hear arguments in the legal challenge to Arizona's immigration law, it's a good time to explain what this law and the ruckus surrounding it are really about. The left says it's about racism and political extremism; the right claims the issues are border security and public safety. Wrong. In the two years since Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law, it's become clear that this law, and the debate over it, are really about three things: fear, power, and freedom. It's about fear. As someone who lived in Phoenix and wrote for the Arizona Republic in the late 1990s, I can tell you that Arizonans only recently reached the conclusion that they wanted to get rid of illegal immigrants. The 'Zonies I knew couldn't live without them.
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Ruben Navarrette: Arizona's immigration law not all about racism or border security
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Navarrette: It's fear the Latino immigrants who made Arizona boom will take over
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It's dangerous because it makes deputies out of local and state police, he writes
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It's also wrong, he says, because it takes away U.S.-born Latinos' freedom
It's about the rights of those @placeholder citizens and legal residents whom the untrained and uninformed might mistake for illegal immigrants.