http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_3536336

RIP, state immigration bills


DenverPost.com

Don't count us among the mourners for six bills ostensibly meant to address the state's problems with illegal immigration. They died in a Colorado House committee Tuesday.

The problem is real enough, but any meaningful solutions must come at the federal level.

An estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants are in the United States, including as many as 250,000 in Colorado. Critics claim they take away jobs from legal residents, drive down wages and add to the costs of providing health care and education. The futility of border security is galling, leading to such serious vulnerabilities as drug trafficking and the danger of terrorist infiltration.

In the House State, Veterans & Military Affairs Committee, six Republican bills were dispatched by Democrats on party-line votes. Among them was a particularly ridiculous anti-business proposal that would have held an employer liable for any crimes an illegal immigrant employee committed on or off the job. Another would have required local cops to make immigration busts, disregarding the fact that the feds now regularly decline to pick up illegal immigrants because they don't have room to hold them. Anyway, local law enforcement is not adequately funded to play immigration police.

The only bills that survived were harmless enough - one calling for an audit of a 2003 law on identification cards and an analysis of the susceptibility of birth certificates to forgery, and a bill that would bar bail bonds for persons wanted for immigration violations. Another bill to ban illegal immigrants from working for state contractors was delayed.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the more extreme bills were meant to crash and burn: Anti-immigration activists see the "failed" legislative effort as an excellent launching pad for Defend Colorado Now's ballot initiative to preclude providing some state services to illegal immigrants.

But as long as federal law, regulations and court rulings say undocumented immigrants are entitled to emergency medical services, for example, or that their children are entitled to attend public schools, state efforts are largely symbolic. Worse, misguided state laws that conflict with federal law could end up leaving the state with huge legal bills and damages.

Meanwhile, Colorado lawmakers should enact legislation so the state and its subdivisions can track medical care, K-12 schooling and other costs for illegal immigrants and their children - and then present Uncle Sam a bill for these unfunded mandates.