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United States of America v. Arizona / Lawsuit was justified

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Position: Lawsuit was justified

This position addresses the topic United States of America v. Arizona.


For this position


"Despite claims that this law explicitly bans racial profiling, SB 1070 will only make what is already a bad situation far worse. What is happening in Arizona is a regression from the freedoms and values we hold dear as a country. To those who point to the law's popularity, I would remind them that Jim Crow laws were once as popular."
"The Supreme Court has said federal authority can pre-empt state law when the federal interest is dominant and where there already exists a system of federal regulations. The government has done a poor job enforcing its immigration rules, to say the least, but they do exist, and clearly fall under what the Constitution calls “the supreme law of the land.”"

Against this position


"Even liberal Providence, where politicians long opposed any local enforcement efforts, changed its policy in 2008 after the infamous Marco Riz case. Riz was the illegal immigrant arrested by Providence cops twice while under a federal deportation order but released both times. He was then charged with carjacking a woman in Warwick and raping her in Providence. Rhode Island cops now routinely contact ICE when they suspect they’ve come across an illegal immigrant. Since 2006, the number of contacts they’ve made to ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center in Vermont has nearly doubled, the Globe reported. How is this significantly different than Arizona’s proposed law?"
"We are engaged in a struggle with a state capitalist system in Mexico that refuses to live up the tenants of the NAFTA agreement to democratize its own economy - eliminating corruption and failing to provide greater access to capital for the maquiladora manufacturing operations that were intended to create a greater middle class in Mexico. Why, as a country, are we so focused on our own treatment of illegal aliens when the real approbation should be focused on Mexico for the treatment of its own people?"
"Given that federal irresponsibility and inaction created much of the immigration mess, the lawsuit seems premature and unnecessarily inflammatory. The law doesn't even take effect until July 29. The harmful effects are, for now, theoretical. Government lawyers can't yet point to an instance of racial profiling, which would make their case stronger."
"Arizona has been here before. Pro-immigration groups sued over its workplace-enforcement law passed in 2007. All the same arguments were mustered about federal pre-emption. The federal courts rejected them because the state law so closely tracked the federal law and didn't contradict its stated purpose."
"Because other kinds of pre-emption don't apply, the department can only win if it can show a conflict with federal law. But there is no federal statute that Arizona's law conflicts with. The department's legal filings don't offer any answer to this fundamental problem. The opinions of the Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Circuits of the US Court of Appeals (which are all of the circuits that have addressed the issue) also support the authority of Arizona to enact its law."

Mixed on this position


"The feds may well win their case on the Constitutional merits, and we also oppose the Arizona law on grounds that it is a misuse of scarce police resources. One of its provisions criminalizes anyone who stops to pick up an illegal migrant worker even to do yard work. Arizona police have enough to worry about without making criminals of suburbanites who want help in landscaping their cactus gardens. On the other hand, the alarmists are wrong to portray the law as creating a new race-based police state. Nearly all of the law mirrors federal immigration statutes and orders local police to enforce those statutes for the first time."