Americans must soon make a major decision: Do we want our government to enforce existing immigration laws, or do we want to continue down the current path of ignoring those laws and allow 20 million more illegal immigrants to enter this country. In other words, does the United States have a border or not?
If citizens and our congressional representatives and presidential candidates don’t answer this basic question, the courts will do it for us. In fact, judges have already struck down some of the 1,400 state and local ordinances governing the activities of illegal immigrants, ruling that the statutes compromise the federal government’s jurisdiction. So local communities that are forced by federal inaction to confront the effects of illegal immigration are losing the legal tools they need to protect their residents and budgets.
When Herndon closed its day labor center after a Circuit Court judge ruled the town’s anti-solicitation ordinance violated the First Amendment, the outreach director of the Los Angeles-based National Day Labor Organizing Network told a local radio station that the group’s lawyers would sue if elected officials attempted to use zoning regulations to prevent displaced illegal immigrant workers from gathering at a town park.
Last November, a federal judge ruled that seven anonymous day laborers who gathered at a public park in a New York City suburb were victims of racially-motivated harassment. This ruling was based on the workers’ claim that a police officer “stares at us for long periods of time.” The suburb’s mayor said the police were stationed there because workers fought, blocked traffic and trashed the park. What about taxpayers’ right to enjoy public facilities free from such nuisances?
At least 70 local governments are currently engaged in similar legal battles, many because of suits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. In July, a federal judge ruled unconstitutional ordinances prohibiting employers and landlords in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, from hiring or renting to illegal immigrants. Another federal court in San Francisco even stopped the Department of Homeland Security from cracking down on employers who hire workers with false Social Security numbers!
The federal government won’t do anything about the growing problem of illegal immigration, and local governments are being toldthey can’t do anything about it, either. With the courts interpreting the U.S. Constitution to protect the rights of border-jumpers over those of U.S. citizens and legal residents; the Founders must be spinning in their graves.
