Immigration

by Jeremy Leaming

As noted in this piece from The New York Times, Maryland has been one of the few states to enact a law that is helpful, rather than harmful, to immigrants. Now a group of students, teachers, and voters are banding together in an attempt to save the Maryland Dream Act, which was enacted earlier this year and would allow immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, the ability to attend state schools at in-state tuition rates. The law, as noted by The Times, applies only to those immigrants who have paid their taxes and graduated from state high schools.

The law, however, has been blocked by opponents who supposedly gathered enough signatures to put it before voters on the 2012 ballot. The group of Maryland students, teachers and the immigrant advocacy group CASA de Maryland, in a lawsuit lodged yesterday argues that too many of the signatures that helped pave the way for the law to be put before voters are invalid.

The lawsuit, according to a CASA de Maryland press statement, charges that “more than 50,000 of the signatures turned in by petition sponsors and found valid by the Board [of Elections] were actually invalid under Maryland law.” The group’s lawsuit, filed by attorneys from Arnold & Porter LLP and Sandler, Reiff, Young & Lamb, P.C., also charges that the Board’s certification “suffers from an even more fundamental problem. Because the law directly provide for expenditure of state funds for a state government function, it cannot be referred to a referendum at all under the Maryland Constitution.”

Joseph Sandler of Sandler, Reiff, Young & Lamb, P.C., said, “This law was approved by our elected representatives and is not the type of law subject to a referendum. In any event, through a painstaking line-by-line review of the signatures submitted to the Board, our team of lawyers and community volunteers discovered that the petition sponsors fell far short of turning in enough valid signatures to qualify this for the ballot.”

Kim Propeack, a lawyer with CASA de Maryland, told the newspaper, “If one of the most popular immigrant issues in one of the bluest states does not win, that would be a very bad sign.”

In Alabama, the U.S. Department of Jusitce has taken action to block a particularly onerous anti-immigration law from taking effect, TPM reports. The DOJ lodged a lawsuit yesterday against the law arguing that it is constitutionally suspect.

In a press statement about the lawsuit, the DOJ states, “Alabama’s law is designed to affect virtually every aspect of an unauthorized immigrant’s daily life, from employment to housing to transportation to entering into and enforcing contracts to going to school. H.B. 56 further criminalizes mere unlawful presence and, like Arizona’s law, expands the opportunities for Alabama police to push aliens toward incarceration for various new immigration crimes by enforcing an immigration status verification system.”

The DOJ’s lawsuit asserts that “while the federal government values state assistance and cooperation with respect to immigration enforcement, a state cannot set its own immigration policy, much less pass laws that conflict with federal enforcement of the immigration laws.”

At the  a panel of constitutional law and immigration policy experts discussed the tension between federal and state efforts to address immigration issues. Video of that discussion is available here.

Despite rhetoric from some Tea Party leaders that says the Obama administration is running rough shod over the founding document, the country is not in “danger of flipping the Constitution on its head,” writes Richard Stengel in an extensive piece for Time.

Stengel, in “One Document, Under Siege," continues:

Their view [Tea Party faithful] of the founding documents was pretty well summarized by Texas Congressman Ron Paul back in 2008: ‘The Constitution was written explicitly for one purpose – to restrain the federal government.’ Well, not exactly. In fact, the framers did the precise opposite. They strengthened the center and weakened the states. The states had extraordinary power under the Articles of Confederation. Most of them had their own navies and their own currencies. The truth is, the Constitution massively strengthened the central government of the U.S. for the simple reason that it established one where none had existed before.

If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so. Article I, Section 8, the longest section of the longest article of the Constitution, is a drumroll of congressional power. And it ends with the ‘necessary and proper’ clause, which delegates to Congress the power ‘to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department of Officer thereof.’ Limited government indeed.

Stengel’s article takes a look at some of the more high-profile constitutional debates, such as those focusing on Congress’s power to regulate commerce, in the context of the landmark health care reform law, and the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause.

In the concluding graphs, Stengel touches on the debate over constitutional interpretation, writing:

The Constitution is silent much of the time. And that’s a good thing. Two hundred twenty-three years after it was written, the Constitution is more a guardrail for our society than a traffic cop. The Constitution works so well precisely because it is so opaque, so general, so open to various interpretations. Originalists contend that the Constitution has a clear, fixed meaning. But the framers argued vehemently about its meaning. For them, it was a set of principles, not a code of laws. A code of laws says you have to stop at the red light; a constitution has broad principles that are unchanging but that must accommodate each new generation and circumstance.

See Stengel’s entire article here.

Accompanying the article is a new Time poll, showing that 54 percent of respondents said they agreed that the government should interpret the Constitution “based on changes in society,” as opposed to interpreting “exactly what’s spelled out in the Constitution.” Forty-one percent of respondents said the government should “following exactly what’s spelled out in the Constitution ….”

Regarding the 14th Amendment’s clause, which states that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens, 62 percent of respondents said the provision should not be revised.