Illegal Immigration & States Rights

The Arizona Legislature has taken a step in the right direction...by passing a law requiring law enforcement officers to detain anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant.  Governor Jan Brewer signed the bill into law yesterday.  For the first time, a state is baldly accusing the federal government of failing in it's Constitutional duty to secure the borders.  This requirement is found in Article IV, Section 4. and states: 

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

The flood of illegal workers almost certainly consitutes an invasion.   With the federal governments failure to secure the border, the several states then must do so themselves.

What is being proposed by the Democratic party and their supporters in the SEIU and La Raza isn't "comprehensive immigration reform" at all.  It's merely another amnesty that we were promised would never happen again...but then in politics no promise is ever "forever" and only lasts until it becomes expedient to cast it aside, something at which this president is becoming an expert.

By passing this legislation, Arizona has once again stepped into the fore front of the battle to gain control of our porous border.  Immediately the democratic enablers have decried it violates "their civil rights. 

President Barack Obama called the measure “misguided” on Friday and said his administration will “closely monitor the situation and examine the civil rights and other implications of this legislation.”

Forgetting for a moment, the non-citizens who are in fact felons de facto and de jurre, and thus HAVE no civil rights.  There there is Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) who immediately denounced the measure and called upon on the president to

...instruct federal agencies not to cooperate with the new law. “This is a discriminatory policy that cannot be enforced without committing grave breaches of due process and equal protection. The law will not withstand legal scrutiny, and I call on the president immediately to reject it in the strongest possible terms,” he said in a statement. Checking someone’s immigration status requires cooperation from Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

And then there is the SEIU

...“This could happen in other states if Congress doesn’t pass real reform,” said Eliseo Medina, a vice president at the Service Employees International Union and a key voice on immigration reform. Medina said SEIU, joining with other organizations, “will be turning up the pressure on Congress and the President to address this crisis once and for all and pass true comprehensive immigration reform.”

who don't want genuine reform, but rather more dues paying union members.  Then of course there is La Raza who don't want reform, but rather would see the southwestern US annexed by Mexico...

National Council of La Raza President Janet Murguía called the bill a “watershed moment for the president and Congress. Will they continue to abdicate their responsibility and allow other states to follow suit or will they show leadership and respond to the state of emergency that our communities face by enacting comprehensive immigration reform?” she said.

I suspect that once voters desires are taken into account, the Democrats will learn Iraq wasn't the only reason George Bush's poll numbers began to sag so preciptously after his reelection. 

Whenever President Bush talked about immigration, his approval ratings went down. It was like clockwork: liberals never understood that the fatal decline in Bush's popularity during his second term had at least as much to do with his advocacy of "comprehensive immigration reform" as with war-weariness. Now President Obama has entered the lists, urging Congress to take up immigration. One can only wonder what Congressional Democrats make of this. Maybe they figure their own approval ratings can't possibly get any lower. But Obama's can, and they will if he keeps talking about immigration.

Most of those people I know in my neck of the woods, suburban Baltimore, Maryland, support measures like this because they see it as a way to put Americans back to work.  There are 15-20 million illegal workers here in country.  Many people here feel that right now, they're taking jobs from people who are literally desperate for work...30 million strong.   If we as a nation actually enforced the laws that we have on the books, and by enacting legislation that would remove the business licences and give heavy fines to those who employe illegal workers, there wouldn't BE a problem.  There would be no work for them to do.

THEN, once the air is clear, we could begin to work on a plan that not just makes sense, but is genuine reform.  But giving those who are here illegally a free pass and push them to the head of the line for citizenship isn't the right way to approach this at all.