Thread: Yes, We Can Enforce

June 1, 2011

Yes, We Can Enforce
by Rich Lowry

What the Supreme Court’s E-Verify decision symbolizes.


After it passed a robust immigration-enforcement measure last year, Arizona was practically expelled from the union.

The great and good denounced the state for its Gestapo tactics. The Obama administration sued it. The professionally outraged announced boycotts. Arizona stood condemned before the world, a byword for hatred and defiance of federal law.

And yet the Supreme Court last week implicitly ratified Arizona’s leadership role on immigration enforcement. It’s everyone else who is out of line, not Arizona.

The Supreme Court upheld the state’s requirement that businesses use the federal E-Verify system — a database accessible through the Internet — to confirm the legal status of employees. This is different from last year’s law saying that police should, when practicable, check the immigration status of suspected illegal immigrants, but the echoes are clear enough. The same critics (the business community and civil-rights groups) used the same tactics (loud condemnations and lawsuits) over the same essential issue (whether the state had gone beyond federal law).

Arizona passed the E-Verify law in 2007, and the Chamber of Commerce fought it all the way to the Supreme Court. The organization’s courtroom tenacity shows just how dangerous it is to get between the Chamber and its illegal employees. The dirty little secret of the Chamber is not, as the Democrats shamelessly alleged in the 2010 elections, Chinese money; it’s Mexican workers.

The Chamber maintained that Arizona had gone too far in requiring E-Verify because Congress had only made the program voluntary. But Congress didn’t forbid states from mandating the program. The Arizona law is careful to stay within the bounds set out by Congress. The punishment in Arizona for knowingly hiring illegal workers is the loss of a business license. Federal law says that states may “through licensing and similar lawsâ€

"Si, si puerde" in their faces! Yes, yes we can instead!