Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Upon its passage, Arizona’s immigration law was
considered so outlandish that Attorney General Eric Holder famously rushed to
condemn it without reading it.
Now the Supreme Court has read the law and rejected
Holder’s case against its central element, the so-called “show me your papers”
provision stipulating that police officers should check on the immigration
status of people suspected of being in the country illegally.
If it were possible for a statute to be tarred,
feathered, and run out of town on a rail, such would have been the fate of
Arizona’s law. President Barack Obama inveighed against it. The state was
boycotted. Otherwise reasonable people lost their heads. Former Bush
speechwriter Mike Gerson thundered that the statute was un-American. Whether
the law was deemed racist, fascist, or merely ill-advised, it was an article of
faith that it was very, very unconstitutional.
When it got to the Court, though, it wasn’t even a close
call. All eight justices ruling in the case — Justice Elena Kagan recused
herself — turned aside the Justice Department’s preemptive challenge to the
provision’s constitutionality. Given all the commentary recently from the left
about how partisan the Court is and how 5–4 decisions undermine its legitimacy,
the Court’s unanimous agreement that one of the most controversial laws in the
land can go into effect should comfort those liberals professing to be worried
about the highest court’s future.
The decision is a win for Arizona, although a limited and
ambiguous one. The Court left open the possibility for future challenges based
on how the law is enforced and, in a divided decision, struck down three other
provisions on grounds that they interfere with the federal immigration system.
If Arizona can’t claim total victory, it can claim vindication vis-à-vis all
its hysterical critics. On the most important question, Governor Jan Brewer had
a better grasp of the Constitution than the president of the United States.
What the Arizona-haters always ignored is that there are “show
me your papers” provisions in the federal law. As Justice Anthony Kennedy
recounts in his opinion for the majority, the federal government requires that
aliens carry proof of registration. An extensive apparatus exists to facilitate
state and local enforcement of the immigration laws. Congress has said that no
special training or formal agreement is necessary for state officers to
“communicate with the [federal government] regarding the immigration status of
any individual, including reporting knowledge that a particular alien is not
lawfully present in the United States.” The federal government runs a Law
Enforcement Support Center available 24 hours a day to provide “immigration
status, identity information and real-time assistance to local, state and
federal law enforcement agencies.”
If the feds didn’t want to get any inquiries from police
officers in Arizona, they should have written that loophole into the law.
Certainly, Arizona’s statute is more in keeping with the spirit of federal
immigration laws than the Obama administration’s selective enforcement with an
eye to doing just enough to cover itself politically. It is bizarre that, with
millions of people in the country in defiance of federal laws, the man charged
with faithfully executing them is worried that Arizona police will do too much
to assist the federal government by turning up illegal immigrants in the course
of their work.
In his scorching dissent from the decision overturning
portions of the Arizona statute, Justice Antonin Scalia emphasizes federal
nonenforcement of the immigration laws. The Obama administration’s real beef
with Arizona isn’t that it contradicts federal law so much as that it
contradicts its own choice to ignore federal law as much as practical. Arizona,
Scalia notes, has been particularly hard hit by the federal government’s
decision to enforce at the border primarily in California and Texas: “Must
Arizona’s ability to protect its borders yield to the reality that Congress has
provided inadequate funding for federal enforcement — or, even worse, to the
Executive’s unwise targeting of that funding?”
Arizona had the temerity to answer “no.”
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