S.B. 1070: Federal preemption and why the Court won’t address civil rights issues
Kevin Johnson

Posted Monday, July 11th, 2011 10:33 am

Kevin Johnson, Dean of UC Davis School of Law, discusses S.B. 1070 for our on-line symposium.

The following is an essay for our symposium on Arizona v. United States by Kevin R. Johnson, Dean of the UC Davis School of Law and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies. He is one of the founding editors of the ImmigrationProf blog. Dean Johnson has published a number of books and articles on immigration law, including Opening the Floodgates? Why America Needs to Rethink Its Border and Immigration Laws (NYU Press 2007).

For well over a century, immigration law and its enforcement in the United States have been the near-exclusive province of the federal government. State and local governments, generally speaking, cannot directly regulate immigration. California provides a famous example of a state unsuccessfully seeking to regulate immigration comes; in 1994, the Golden State’s voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 187, which was similar in important respects to Arizona’s S.B. 1070 and was struck down by a federal court for impermissibly intruding on the federal power to regulate immigration.

Despite the federal supremacy in the realm of immigration, the Supreme Court has reserved some room for states in the field. In DeCanas v. Bica (1976), the Court unequivocally stated that the “[p]ower to regulate immigration is unquestionably exclusively a federal power.â€