Like clockwork, the American Civil Liberties Union, along with other groups and individuals, sued in federal court over Senate File 2340, one of the worst, most far-reaching immigration laws ever passed in the state of Iowa. They said the law is unconstitutional. It is common sense the state has no primary role in policing immigration. I expect the ACLU will prevail and the governor has to know it.
Maybe if the Iowa delegation to The U.S. Congress had done their job on immigration this year, things would be different. Instead we have this crappy law and civil rights groups are not going to let it stand.
While states can pass legislation to deal with federal immigration concerns, if the U.S. Supreme Court has a shred of honesty in jurisprudence left, they will reject these state laws when they trickle up to the high court.
I made the post below, called “Rain and Immigration Reform,” on Jan. 29, 2013. It shows in eleven years the country has gotten exactly nowhere on immigration reform.
LAKE MACBRIDE— The sound of rain tapping against the bedroom window woke me this morning. At 4:30 a.m. it was 55 degrees. This broke the record high temperature of 53 degrees set in 1919. According to weather.com, today’s forecast is to hit a high of 60 degrees around 11 a.m. this morning, then temperatures start to fall to below freezing in the next 24 hours. Today is more temperate than the heat last summer, however, it is a variation on a theme of being freaked out because of our changing climate and dealing with adaptation.
Equally freaky was yesterday’s public statement by a bipartisan group of eight U.S. senators in an effort to find common ground on how the country should move forward on immigration reform. They said in a written statement,
We recognize that our immigration system is broken. And while border security has improved significantly over the last two Administrations, we still don’t have a functioning immigration system. This has created a situation where up to 11 million undocumented immigrants are living in the shadows. Our legislation acknowledges these realities by finally committing the resources needed to secure the border, modernize and streamline our current legal immigration system, while creating a tough but fair legalization program for individuals who are currently here. We will ensure that this is a successful permanent reform to our immigration system that will not need to be revisited.
I have written a lot about immigration reform. Dealing with the 11 million undocumented people who live in the United States, many of whom have been here for decades, is a long standing problem and political lightning rod. That the senate’s bipartisan framework calls for a path to citizenship for these long-term residents, and an effective employment verification system, gets to core problems. Particularly, recent history has shown that if there is available employment in the U.S., undocumented people will come to fill those jobs. If the path to getting a job is restricted by better verification of applicant status, the number of people crossing our borders will be reduced.
Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have attempted to reform immigration, but met resistance. What has changed?
The demographics of the 2012 electorate are now known and President Obama won 70 percent of the so-called Hispanic vote. Hispanics accounted for 10 percent of the votes cast for president. It is a political reality that Republicans cannot walk away from this large and growing segment of the population if they want to remain relevant. Immigration reform is a key issue for Hispanic voters.
Senator John McCain was featured in corporate media sound-bites, reading these three sentences from a press statement yesterday,
What is going on now is not acceptable. In reality, what has been created is a defacto amnesty. We, the American people, have been too content for too long to allow individuals to mow our lawn, serve us food, clean our homes and even watch our children while not affording them any of the benefits that make our country so great.
If the political component of immigration reform was the focus yesterday, there is another issue, related to agriculture. Undocumented immigrants and legal guest workers provide low-cost agricultural labor that natives seem reluctant to offer. In his Jan. 5, 1967 inaugural address as governor of California, Ronald Reagan set the theme on immigration that would follow him through to his presidency, “restrictive labor policies should never again be the cause of crops rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters.” Reagan advocated for and signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which was intended to permanently address immigration reform.
Any immigration reform faces an uphill battle in the Congress. That’s why nothing has been done since 1986. That states like Iowa are taking matters into their own hands is laughable. It is also am injustice to immigrants who have been here for years. It is cynical political posturing by which Republicans hope to cement their power in government. Will the problem continue unaddressed for ten more years? Something has to give and the states cannot be the driving force in immigration reform.
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