Clayton E. Cramer: Arizona Immigration Law Not Historically Unusual
[Clayton E. Cramer is a software engineer and historian. His sixth book, Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie (Nelson Current, 2006), is available in bookstores. His web site is www.claytoncramer.com.]
For all the screeching about Arizona’s new immigration law, you would think that this is a new question: may a state enforce federal immigration law? I know better than to predict how the U.S. Supreme Court will decide this question, but if we look to history, this should be easy. We have plenty of examples of states enforcing immigration laws that were actually stricter than federal immigration law....
In 1824, New York state had become rather tired of poor immigrants arriving by ship and becoming public charges on New York City’s charities. They passed a law requiring that ship captains post a bond “not to exceed $300, for every passenger, to indemnify and save harmless the mayor, &c., of the city of New York, and the overseers of the poor of the city, from all expenses of the maintenance of such person, or of the child or children of such person, born after such importation; in case such person, child or children, shall become chargeable to the city within two years.” (And many other Atlantic Ocean states did likewise.)
Does this sound familiar? Arizona’s argument for this law is that illegal immigrants are a strain on a variety of public services. That was New York’s argument in 1824 as well. But note that New York was not simply enforcing federal immigration law. It was imposing an additional set of requirements beyond federal law. The defendant in that case actually made much the same argument as opponents of the Arizona law: “that this was a regulation of commerce, and that the power to regulate commerce was exclusively vested in congress. Hence this law, passed by a state, was unconstitutional.”
Yet when the U.S. Supreme Court decided this case in New York v. Miln (1837), the Court concluded that unless Congress was explicitly given exclusive authority, or the states were prohibited from exercising that power, states were free to exercise that power as well....
Read entire article at Pajamas Media
For all the screeching about Arizona’s new immigration law, you would think that this is a new question: may a state enforce federal immigration law? I know better than to predict how the U.S. Supreme Court will decide this question, but if we look to history, this should be easy. We have plenty of examples of states enforcing immigration laws that were actually stricter than federal immigration law....
In 1824, New York state had become rather tired of poor immigrants arriving by ship and becoming public charges on New York City’s charities. They passed a law requiring that ship captains post a bond “not to exceed $300, for every passenger, to indemnify and save harmless the mayor, &c., of the city of New York, and the overseers of the poor of the city, from all expenses of the maintenance of such person, or of the child or children of such person, born after such importation; in case such person, child or children, shall become chargeable to the city within two years.” (And many other Atlantic Ocean states did likewise.)
Does this sound familiar? Arizona’s argument for this law is that illegal immigrants are a strain on a variety of public services. That was New York’s argument in 1824 as well. But note that New York was not simply enforcing federal immigration law. It was imposing an additional set of requirements beyond federal law. The defendant in that case actually made much the same argument as opponents of the Arizona law: “that this was a regulation of commerce, and that the power to regulate commerce was exclusively vested in congress. Hence this law, passed by a state, was unconstitutional.”
Yet when the U.S. Supreme Court decided this case in New York v. Miln (1837), the Court concluded that unless Congress was explicitly given exclusive authority, or the states were prohibited from exercising that power, states were free to exercise that power as well....