Thread: White House doesn't want to enforce immigration

Heather MacDonald: White House doesn't want to enforce immigration

By: Heather Mac Donald
OpEd Contributor

August 4, 2010

The real motivation for the Justice Department's lawsuit against Arizona's new immigration statute was the only one not mentioned in the department's brief: The Obama administration has no intention of enforcing the immigration laws against the majority of illegal aliens already in the country.

It is that policy alone which conflicts with SB 1070: Arizona wants to enforce the law; the Obama administration does not. Reasonable minds can differ on whether that conflict puts Arizona in violation of the Constitution's Supremacy Clause.

But what is indisputable is that the failure of the federal government to openly acknowledge the real ground for its opposition to SB 1070 has rendered incoherent not just its own public arguments against the law, but the judicial ruling which largely rubber stamps those arguments as well.

The Arizona statute affirms the power of a local police officer or sheriff's deputy to inquire into someone's immigration status, if the officer has reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally, and if doing so is practicable. Under SB 1070, such an inquiry may occur only during a lawful stop to investigate a non-immigration offense.

Both the Justice Department and U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton, in striking down most of SB 1070, couched their opposition to the statute exclusively in terms of its effect on legal, as opposed to illegal, aliens. SB 1070, Judge Bolton wrote, would impermissibly burden legal immigrants already in the country by subjecting them to unwarranted immigration checks.

There are two problems with this line of argument: First, it ignores the fact that Congress has already anticipated and approved precisely the sort of local immigration inquiries that Judge Bolton now finds unconstitutional. Second, the argument would make all immigration enforcement impossible.

In 1996, Congress banned so-called sanctuary policies, by which cities and states prohibit their employees from working with federal immigration authorities regarding illegal aliens. It was in the federal interest, Congress declared, that local and federal authorities cooperate in the "apprehension, detention or removal of [illegal] aliens."

In pursuance of that mandate, the federal government operates an immigration clearinghouse, the Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC), to provide just the sort of immigration-status information to local and state law-enforcement officials that SB 1070 seeks.

It is therefore absurd to now claim, as Judge Bolton and the Obama Administration do, that such local inquiries conflict with the federal immigration scheme. It is even more absurd to argue that the risk that a legal alien will be questioned about his immigration status makes the alleged conflict unconstitutional.

Any immigration enforcement carries the possibility that a legal alien or U.S. citizen will be stopped and questioned. The only way to guarantee that legal aliens are never asked to present their immigration papers is to suspend immigration enforcement entirely. (The same possibility of stopping innocent people for questioning applies to law enforcement generally; that possibility has never been held to invalidate the police investigative power.)

If Congress intended to create such a blanket ban on asking legal aliens for proof of legal residency, it could have revoked the 1952 law requiring aliens to carry their certificate of alien registration. Such a requirement makes sense only on the assumption that legal aliens will upon occasion be asked to prove their legal status.

Such unpersuasive reasoning suggests that something else is going on. That something is the fact that SB 1070 would have put the Obama administration in the uncomfortable position of repeatedly telling Arizona's law enforcement officers that it is not interested in detaining or deporting the illegal aliens that they have encountered in the course of their duties; the law, in other words, would have exposed the administration's de facto amnesty policy.

And SB 1070 would have shown that immigration-law enforcement can work simply by creating a deterrent to illegal entry and presence. Even before it went into operation, the Arizona law was already inducing illegal aliens to leave the state, according to news reports.

Illegal aliens are virtually absent from the Justice Department's brief or from Judge Bolton's opinion. Despite this studied avoidance, it's time to have a public debate about how much immigration enforcement this country wants and which enforcement policies--the administration's or Arizona's -- best represent the public will.

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White House doesn't want to enforce immigration

Yep. I figured as much.

But they are going to point to the increases of deportations of "criminal aliens"---and that will be their justification for allowing every other one to stay. I have mentioned quite a number of times that younger illegal alien males are committing a federal felony if they don't register with the Selective Service System. Nobody seems to want to take up that issue, not even the military veterans in Congress or groups like the VFW or American Legion. That would greatly expand the population of serious criminal activity.