SB 1070 : What the Majority Opinion in the U. S. Supreme Court accomplished is a grave juridical precedent of limitations and prohibitions for the States and more power for the Federal Government - Victory for the Obama Administration

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The proponents of "State Rights" since the American Civil War should not be happy uncorking champagne to celebrate the verdict. Only an ignorant like Governor Jan Brewer can be elated with the bone that the Supreme Court threw to her.

SCOTUS Blog
Opinion recap: Immigration and judicial styles
Analysis
Monday, June 25th, 2012


By Lyle Denniston, Reporter

Lyle Denniston has been covering the Supreme Court for fifty-fouryears. In that time, he has covered one-quarter of all of the Justices ever to sit, and he has reported on the entire careers on the bench of ten of the Justices. He has been a journalist of the law for sixty-four years, beginning that career at the Otoe County Courthouse in Nebraska City, Nebraska, in the fall of 1948. He is not an attorney.

Opinion recap: Immigration and judicial styles


Some excerpts :

The outcome thus was declared in the opinion written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.  In sum, that opinion barred Arizona from enforcing three provisions of its controversial anti-immigrant law, S.B. 1070, and put off a constitutional reckoning on a fourth provision.  But beyond those bare conclusions, the Kennedy opinion was a strong victory for the notion that immigration policy, under the Constitution and federal laws, is for the federal government, not for the individual states, including those on the borders most affected by illegal entry.

Here is what the Kennedy opinion accomplished:

First, as an overall proposition, the Court reaffirmed that the national government is the “single sovereign” in charge of “a comprehensive and unified system to keep track of aliens within the nation’s borders.”  (That was directly contradictory to an argument by Justice Scalia, for himself alone, that states have the same power as the national government does to use their borders as barriers to entry of unwanted individuals.)

Second, the Court made clear that states are barred from adopting virtually any provision that seeks to establish a state-level program requiring undocumented immigrants to sign in officially as non-citizens.  That broader conclusion is what nullified the specific Arizona provision (Section 3) making it a crime to be in Arizona without legal immigration papers.

Third, the ruling concluded that states may not set up their own regime to close off jobs within their borders to undocumented immigrants. That broad declaration led to rejection of a specific Arizona provision (Section 5(C)) that made it a crime for a non-citizen illegally in the state to apply for a job, or work at one.

Fourth, the decision forbids states to set up their own policies that would lead to deportation of undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, unless the federal government explicitly asks for such help.  The wide conclusion undermined a specific Arizona provision (Section 6) that directs state police to arrest — without a warrant — anyone believed to have committed any crime that would lead to deportation.

Those four parts of the Kennedy opinion could have an immediate impact on the validity of other states’ laws that imitate or go beyond Arizona’s attempt to carry out a program of “attrition through enforcement,” as Arizona labeled its objective of making life so uncomfortable for undocumented immigrants that they would opt to leave the state.  Some other states’ laws, like Alabama’s, go beyond what Arizona has done, and some of those, too, might be vulnerable because of some of the sweeping statements Justice Kennedy made about the breadth of federal control of immigration policy.

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