Immigration Laws and the Power of the States
January 7, 2012
Jennine A. Daniels
Should states have more input on immigration laws within their borders? This is one of the many questions that linger in the minds of Americans as new state immigration laws go into effect January 1, 2012. During the past two years state governments in South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Utah and Alabama have all attempted to impose common-sense immigration enforcement statutes in an effort to address and stem the flow of illegal immigration. Although portions of these statutes have been suspended by federal judges, many have survived unscathed and are slated to go into effect sometime in 2012.
E-Verify constitutes one of the major immigration enforcement provisions within these new state laws. Mandatory use of E-Verify represents one of chief policy goals of both state and federal legislators. The E-Verify program requires employers to enter the job candidates’ information into a data system in order to compare this data against information maintained by the Social Security Administration (SSA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The E-Verify program will either confirm that the prospective employee is legally authorized to work or will record a non-confirmation that could indicate fraudulent papers. Only 1 percent of legal applicants are misidentified as non-confirmations.
Many of these newly formulated laws, such as E-Verify, make states less attractive as job magnets for undocumented labor. States such as Alabama and South Carolina suffer from high unemployment rates and cannot afford to absorb illegal immigrant labor, especially with low skilled American workers suffering so gravely in this weak economy.
Recent job reports indicate that the unemployment rate dropped slightly in December 2011. The unemployment rate dropped to 8.5 percent, the lowest rate America has experienced in nearly three years. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate for African Americans has not dropped at all. In fact, the Department of Labor report found that the black unemployment rate inched upwards to 15.8 percent. In all likelihood, the heavy presence of illegal immigrants within particular labor markets like the service sector contributes to African Americans’ persistently high unemployment rates. Historically, illegal immigration especially affects the young, less educated and minority groups because these demographics tend to compete directly with illegal immigrants at the bottom of the labor market. Past academic studies have correlated immigration rates to the declining rates of minority employment. In fact, a 2006 National Bureau of Economic Research study found that 40 percent of the decline in employment for low-skilled black men in recent decades was due to immigration.
Understandably, state legislators and concerned citizens rallied for immigration control measures during recent years because of the major pressures that such immigration places on both job markets and public welfare systems. Many of these new laws were modeled after Arizona’s SB 1070, which was enacted in 2010. Measures like SB 1070 garnered so much popular support in numerous polls, because the majority of citizens in affected states are dissatisfied with how the federal government has handled the immigration crisis.
In the spring of 2012, the Supreme Court will ultimately decide the fate of SB 1070. The Obama administration and federal judges have already suspended many of the provisions of the Arizona law, as well as aggressive provisions within other state edicts. Thus far, federal courts have ruled negatively on provisions that allow the police to check the immigration status of people they suspect are illegal immigrants and provisions that require schools to check the legal status of students. The major questions that the court must settle are whether intact provisions interfere with federal immigration statutes and whether immigration enforcement should primarily remain within federal jurisdiction.
In the past the federal government has failed to aggressively enforce immigration laws and is thus largely responsible for the crisis that the nation now faces. For example, in 1986, the Reagan administration granted 2.7 million illegal immigrants amnesty under the Immigration Reform and Control Act. The 1986 law was not effectively enforced as the federal government did little to build border security measures or punish employers caught hiring illegal immigrants. Unsurprisingly, amnesty and toothless enforcement caused the size of the illegal immigrant population to double by the early 2000s. Obviously, the federal government has made huge blunders in its enforcement of immigration laws and thus should not fault state governments that attempt to address the issue more proactively.
