The straw man argument of the year is Eric Holder’s challenge to Arizona’s law that deals with illegal immigrants which, is no different from federal law. You will recall all the hoopla by Obama and his people crying about the Arizona law being all about racial profiling, which is illegal. Apparently Eric Holder does not believe his boss’s assertion, otherwise he would have filed his suit against Arizona on that basis. He didn’t.
Holder’s case is based on the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution. I’m not a lawyer, I make sandwiches, but it seems to me that you can’t prove a supremacy argument by laying down and not enforcing federal law like Eric Holder and President Obama are doing.
Besides, it’s not like this issue has not been before the Supreme Court. Ann Coulter, who is a lawyer, sums it up as only Ann can . . .
The court -– per Justice William Brennan — said that the federal government’s supremacy over immigration is strictly limited to: (1) a “determination of who should or should not be admitted into the country,” and (2) “the conditions under which a legal entrant may remain.”
So a state can’t start issuing or revoking visas, but that’s about all it can’t do.
Manifestly, a state law about illegal immigrants has nothing to do with immigrants who enter legally or the condition of their staying here. Illegal aliens have neither been “admitted into the country” nor are they “legal entrants.”
Indeed, as Brennan noted in the De Canas case, there’s even “a line of cases that upheld certain discriminatory state treatment of aliens lawfully within the United States.” (You might want to jot some of this down, Mr. Holder.)
So there’s no “field pre-emption” of state laws dealing with aliens, nor is there an explicit statement from Congress pre-empting state regulation of aliens.
Related Links:
- NEW BLACK PANTHERS, YOU’RE FREE TO GO — NOT SO FAST, ARIZONA
- Reading Is Fundamental, Unless . . .
- Arizona law SB1070
- Arizona law HB2162
