Arizona v. United States

The Obama Administration had another bad day in court. Eight members of the Supreme Court heard arguments in Arizona v. United States. Justice Kagan recused herself because of previous involvement in the issue. I am on record as saying that this recusal is unnecessary and is bad policy. It doesn't make much difference, for five votes will still be necessary to render a decision.

Here is SCOTUSblog's summary of the specific provisions of the Arizona law that are under review [my paragraph breaks]:

Four different provisions of S.B. 1070 are currently before the Court. One provision, Section 2(B), requires police officers to check the immigration status of anyone whom they arrest; it also allows police to stop and arrest anyone whom they believe to be an illegal immigrant.

Section 3 makes it a crime for someone even to be in the state without valid immigration papers,

while Section 5(C) makes it a crime to apply for or hold a job in Arizona without proper papers.

Finally, in Section 6, the law gives a police officer the power to arrest someone, without a warrant, if the officer believes that he has committed a crime that could cause him to be deported, no matter where the crime may have occurred.

There are two general issues here. One is whether these provisions involve due process violations. The initial argument in the transcript concerned whether the first provision, Section 2(B), would mean that an individual could be detained for a substantially longer period.

The second and more important issue is the federalism question. By enacting its own law enforcing U.S. immigration laws, is Arizona preempting federal authority? It was on this issue that the Administration took a beating. From the WaPo:

Justices on both sides of the court's ideological divide expressed skepticism that Arizona's requirement that police check the immigration status of people they arrest or detain is an impermissible intrusion on Congress's power to set immigration policy or the executive branch's ability to implement it.

"You can see it's not selling very well," Justice Sonia Sotomayor told the federal government's lawyer. Arizona's attempt to alert federal authorities that a person may be in the country illegally does not force "you to change your enforcement priorities," said Sotomayor, one of the court's liberals and its first Hispanic member.

States cannot act where Congress is has the exclusive authority under the Constitution (deciding who can legally enter the U.S., for example) nor can a state legislate in a way that is contrary to federal law. Neither seems to be the case here. Arizona is insisting only on making its own efforts to enforce federal law within state borders, something the state has an obvious interest in. John Hinderaker at Powerline explains the incoherence of the Administration's position.

Justice Sotomayor [commented on] an extraordinary aspect of the Obama administration's position, to the effect that it is OK if individual Arizona law enforcement officers decide to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, but if the state directs them all to cooperate, it is somehow unconstitutional. The Obama administration literally argued that for a state to engage in "systematic cooperation" with the federal government on immigration is unlawful. We can't blame Mr. Verrilli for his inability to sell that bizarre argument. We do blame Barack Obama and Eric Holder for trying to assert it.

Well, yes, that is a difficult argument to make and it suggests the weakness of the Administration's position. General Verrilli did nothing to recover from his embarrassment in the ObamaCare hearings, but I agree with Hinderaker that the fault was not largely Verrilli's. The problem is the Constitutional Law Professor in Chief.

Justice Scalia pushed what has been called a radical proposal: that states may close their borders to anyone who has no legal right to be there. It is not clear to me what is radical about that. It almost seems tautological.

* * *

This case would have been unnecessary if Congress had been able to fashion a coherent and effective immigration policy. It should be easy for people who are willing to legally apply to come to the United States when there are jobs for them and it should be possible to control the borders. What we have done instead is to keep forbidding obstacles to legal immigration while selectively enforcing those laws. That has served the interests of businesses that depended on undocumented workers and political interests that favored larger numbers of immigrants. It is the ability of the government to selectively enforce the law that the Administration is really defending.

The issue may become moot, as illegal immigrants seem to be voting with their feet. Michael Barone has pointed out that the flow of immigrants from Mexico has come to a sudden stop. Researchers at the Pew Hispanic Center on Mexican immigration to the United States conclude that:

from 2005 to 2010, some 1.39 million people came from Mexico to the United States and 1.37 million went from the U.S. to Mexico. "The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States," they write, "has come to a standstill."

The turning point seems to have come with the collapse of housing prices and the onset of recession in 2007. Annual immigration from Mexico dropped from peaks of 770,000 in 2000 and 670,000 in 2004 to 140,000 in 2010.

As a result, the Mexican-born population in the United States decreased from 12.6 million in 2007 to 12.0 million in 2010. That decrease consisted entirely of Mexican-born illegal immigrants, whose numbers decreased from 7.0 million in 2007 to 6.1 million in 2010.

I am not sure that this doesn't bode ill for the U.S. economy. It does relieve the pressure somewhat. Perhaps now we can get around to a coherent immigration policy.

Comments

[Julio]

If you look at countless other donutecms and videos on this site it becomes self explanatory. Watch the video it plainly spoken by not only experts but the individuals that are calling for it. I have witnessed the spread of this mindset and have personally interviewed a illegal alien that I detained while active in law enforcement that told me this was not only what is being done but it is already beyond our control. There is endless documentation on this subject. As far as our borders not being secure there are endless videos and donutecms on this site and the internet to verify this. I am not sure exactly what statistics you are looking for but if you narrow down your request I will gladly provide you with the information to substantiate it.