Attorney, ACLU are at odds over ordinance
By Chris Zavadil
Posted: Saturday, June 12, 2010 3:00 am
(9) Comments

The Kansas City attorney who crafted Fremont's proposed illegal immigration ordinance says it's time to restore law and order.

At stake are unemployed Americans, crime and costs to taxpayers, Kris Kobach said.

The executive director of ACLU Nebraska says it's time to stop the politics and leave immigration in the hands of the federal government.

"Kris Kobach has used localities around the country as laboratories to experiment with unconstitutional ordinances that only divide communities and cost them millions of dollars to defend in the courts," Laurel S. Marsh said. "It's time to stop politicians like Kobach from robbing us of our core values of fairness and equality for all people."

Kobach, who by his account has worked on more than two dozen illegal immigration laws for cities and states, including co-authoring Arizona Senate Bill 1070, says it's his ordinance - not the ACLU - that will provide justice in Fremont.

"This ordinance will have a very significant impact in restoring the rule of law in Fremont," Kobach said. "It will protect Fremont citizens in a very difficult job environment right now. Fremonters who are out of work are having a hard enough time putting food on the table, and competing with illegal labor is a burden they should not have to face.

"Whenever illegal aliens enter a particular industry in large numbers, the wages in that industry go down because the employers who violate the law are able to exploit the illegal workers and pay them substandard wages, and we've seen that happen in meatpacking," he continued. "So U.S. citizen workers are in a double whammy; some of them lose their jobs to the illegal alien workers, and others may keep their jobs but their wages go down because of the wage depressant affect of the illegal labor."

On top of that, Kobach said, is an influx in illegal immigration is costing Fremont taxpayers thousands of dollars.

Pointing to a 2007 report by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, Kobach said, "The average illegal alien head of household consumes $19,600 more in government services and benefits every year than it pays in taxes."

Domestic policy analyst Christine Kim worked with Rector on the report.

"If you multiply that times the many such households in Fremont, it's a real significant tax burden for the taxpayers of the city," he said.

That figure, he said, is a combination of services provided and taxes paid at all governmental levels.

Kobach said it is difficult to determine exactly how many illegal aliens live in Fremont, "but it's enough that it's having a significant impact on the city budget, and it's enough that it also has a criminal impact as well, you see a substantial number of illegal aliens violating, committing misdemeanors and, in some cases, felonies."

Police do not keep statistics on how many crimes are committed by illegal immigrants.

Marsh said Fremont residents have contacted the ACLU about the ordinance.

Concerns have varied, she said, but some calls have come from renters and rental property owners who don't like the occupancy license and harboring provisions of the ordinance.

"Clearly you're establishing a class, renters, that are treated differently than another class, home owners, or even homeless," Marsh said.

It may not be the intent of the law, she added, "but it does in fact kind of become a tracking system of the renters who live there if you have to get a new license every time you change residences."

"That certainly seems to be in conflict with a number of values that we have expressed or inferred through our Constitution and our Bill of Rights," she said.

"What we feel is this violates the Supremacy Clause and there are some real 14th Amendment problems with it," Marsh said.

Marsh said the ordinance would violate privacy and rely on databases that may not be reliable. She pointed to a July 23, 2009, letter from the ACLU to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, discouraging mandatory electronic employment verification - a provision of Fremont's ordinance.

"The E-Verify program remains fraught with database errors involving U.S. citizens, permanent residents and lawful workers," the letter stated, claiming mandatory use of the system nationwide would result in 3.6 million workers annually being misidentified as unauthorized to work.

"Immigration status is not an easy thing to determine," Marsh said. "What a person's immigration status is at a moment in time may be different than what is reflected in an individual data base, not because somebody is trying to pull the wool over somebody's eyes, but simply because things change, and databases change, but they're not always updated as rapidly as statuses change.

"I'm not going to tell (Fremonters) that frustrations they feel are invalid, because there are legitimate frustrations that go with cities that change," Marsh said. "But what I'm going to suggest to them is that we are a creative society and we don't have to have our ways of dealing with change channeled into those that create controversy and have been found to be unconstitutional."

Posted in Local on Saturday, June 12, 2010 3:00 am | Tags: Kris Kobach, Aclu Nebraska, Illegal Immigration, Ordinance

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