Federal Go-It-Alone Immigration Foolishness

It was only in 1875 that the Supreme Court decided that immigration policy was a federal responsibility.  In 1882 and 1891, Congress passed immigration acts.  The 1891 Immigration Act set up the Office of the Superintendent of Immigration to admit, reject, and process immigrants.  In 1893 the Office of Immigration had 119 employees at Ellis Island with a total staff of 180 employees.  Many of those other employees staffed other points of entry for immigrants.  How many employees remained for the task of finding and deporting illegal immigrants?  Clearly no more than a handful, if any.  So who did such work as was done to find illegal immigrants?  The answer has to be that this was the work of local and state governments.  The federal government defined and determined who could enter the USA legally, but it lacked the manpower to hunt down illegal immigrants.

By its own admission it still lacks the manpower to hunt down illegal immigrants and to deport them.  Logically, the states and local governments have continued the role they have always had in using their police power to do the task the federal government does not do now and really never has done.  Yet, I heard an Obama administration official just today claim that the federal government is the quarterback and states such as Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia have no role in finding illegal immigrants.  The Obama administration wants to be the quarterback who will hike the ball to himself and pass the ball to himself.  What a concept!

Of course, the federal government should do just what the 1891 Immigration Act said it should.  It should admit, reject, and process immigrants.  But, as the quarterback, it should understand that state and local governments are on the same team and have a vital interest in the law abidance of immigrants.  Of course they are tasked with protecting their local citizens from murder, theft, and other illegal activities of immigrants, as with anyone else.  Since the main reason there are immigration controls at all is a combination of concerns to keep criminals and terrorists out of the country, to control the effects of immigrants on wages and jobs, and to limit the number of people not yet well assimilated into the population and not familiar with the concepts of individual rights and limited constitutional government, these same concerns must be concerns of local and state governments.  To the extent these concerns are rational, then local law enforcement must not be denied a role in finding and removing illegal immigrants.

I am not anti-immigration at all.  I believe we allow too few legal immigrants.  I would like to see a large increase in the number of professional immigrants allowed into the country.  I also favor easy entry on work visas for less skilled workers, who upon completion of a few years of law-abiding work would be readily accepted as permanent residents should they choose to apply for such status.  I very much would like to see our immigration policies made freer, easier, and more welcoming.  Whatever the policy on immigration is, however, the laws should be enforced.  The only way the laws will be enforced is if the vainglorious quarterback becomes a team player and works well with the states and local governments.

This being the case, the only rational decision the Supreme Court can make on the Arizona illegal immigration bill called Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act or SB1070 is to overturn the lower court ruling that much of it is unconstitutional.  The Arizona law does not interfere with the federal government deciding who can legally emigrate and who cannot.  It simply requires that people within the Arizona borders obey the law, whether local, state, or federal law.  This is entirely the proper function of the state government.  It is a straight-forward excise of protecting the local people.  If it is not viewed as protecting the people to keep illegal immigrants out of the state, then the federal policy for deciding who can legally enter the country is clearly wrong.  Unfortunately, federal policy is rather poor, but it is not entirely without rational basis and the states are obliged to enforce the federal law as though it were rational and justified.  If the federal policy is too egregiously wrong, then the states are still obliged to rationally protect their citizens even if that brings them in conflict with the federal government.

Consider the defense of America from foreign invaders.  This is clearly a federal responsibility also.  Despite this federal responsibility, the states have a National Guard and while they do not set defense policy, they do provide manpower to make it possible to defend the country.  More to the point yet, if a company of enemy troops were to sneak into Tulsa, Oklahoma and attack the people there, would we not expect the Tulsa, Broken Arrow, Jenks, and Catoosa police forces and any local National Guard units to converge upon that company of foreign troops and protect the people of Tulsa from the invasion force before the federal government could get troops there to provide the protection.  Of course we would.  The fact that the federal government has the responsibility to set immigration policy is irrelevant to the need for local government officers to see to it that the law is obeyed locally and the people are protected.

The most severe problems of illegal immigration are diminishing due to a combination of factors.  According to an article in the 13 December Wall Street Journal, there are now 21,500 agents along the Mexican border, an increase of a factor of two since 2004.  The slowdown in the U.S. economy has made us much less enticing, especially since the Mexican economy is growing faster than ours.  Another big factor is that Mexican families are becoming smaller and the population growth is now at a replacement level.  In 1970, the average Mexican woman had 6.8 children.  In 1990, that number had fallen to 3.4 and now it is the stasis rate of 2.1.  According to the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. reached a maximum in 2007 of 12 million.  That number is now about 11 million.  Mexican immigrants are about 60% of the illegal immigrants.  In 2000, a total of about 750,000 Mexicans came to the U.S., counting both legal and illegal immigrants.  That year, the U.S. Border Patrol caught 1.64 million people along the Mexican border.  A net of only 150,000 Mexicans are believed to have made it into the U.S.  last year and 340,252 were apprehended at the Mexican border.  Deportations hit a record high in the last fiscal year of 397,000.  While the problem is diminishing, 11 million illegal immigrants is still a huge number of illegal immigrants.