the vast majority of these kidnappings have been related to Mexican drug cartels. Illegal immigrants, as the L.A. Times story explains, often are drawn into kidnapping work on behalf of the cartels -- but the violence is a result of their employer's line of work, not the fact that they are immigrants.

As we noted previously, much of the hysteria that was whipped up to push this bill through was based on the murder of Arizona rancher Robert Krentz, who was in fact almost certainly slain by a scout for the drug cartels.

Nonetheless, the Right -- embodied by Fox News -- consistently described his killer as an "illegal immigrant" -- even though the man was not crossing the border to emigrate, but to enable drug crossings on the border.

In other words, the Krentz case was not about illegal immigration, but drug smuggling across the border. The issues, as we've seen are not entirely separate: the cartels and human smugglers work hand in glove to control the trails over the border.

But the power and violence of Mexican drug cartels is not related to illegal immigration. It is related to our misbegotten drug laws, and the fact that the Mexican government is in an ongoing war getting control of heavily armed thugs who obtain their money and weapons through the sale of illicit drugs, largely to American consumers.

If Arizonans were serious about dealing with the crime wave they're seeing, they'd be pushing for marijuana-decriminalization laws, or some other more sane approach that actually tackles the core of the problem.

Instead, they're passing laws that try to tackle drug-war problems by attacking illegal immigrants, who represent a tertiary scapegoat at best. In the process, they're turning Arizona into a police state for Latinos, citizens and immigrants alike, who now must carry "their papers" proving their citizenship with them at all times, or run the risk of being swept up in a Kafkaesque law-enforcement nightmare.

Performances like DiCiccio's and Moore's do little to dissuade people that something is amiss in Arizona. Indeed, they just give us all the more reason to boycott them.