That’s the title of an essay I wrote for SCOTUSblog as part of their symposium on United States v. Arizona. This is the big immigration case that will hit the Supreme Court’s doorstep later this month when Paul Clement, recently hired by Arizona, files his cert petition.
Here’s an excerpt:
…state governments, feeling tremendous pressure from their citizens to address the consequences of the federal failure to meet this nation’s immigration needs, are acting for themselves. Arizona happens to be the “tip of the spear,” but we’ve also seen various other immigration-related laws passed in states as different as Utah, Georgia, and California. Whether related to enforcement, expanded work permits, sanctuary cities, or other types of policy innovations, Congress’s abdication of its duty to manage our immigration system has spawned a host of federalism experiments.
And so we come to S.B. 1070 (as amended by H.B. 2162), which exemplifies the crucial distinction between law and policy that both liberals and conservatives tend to forget. A law that is good policy might be unconstitutional or preempted by some higher law. Here we see the converse: while S.B. 1070 is (with the exception of one provision) constitutional, it’s bad policy.
