The sweet nothings Hillary Clinton whispered into the ears of
foreign television audiences went stateside on Friday, as America
media outlets began confirming what the secretary of state first
told an Ecuadoran news channel: the Obama administration is
planning a lawsuit against Arizona’s new immigration law.
Publicly, Obama administration lawyers will only admit that a
thorough “review” of SB 1070 is ongoing. But the toothpaste is
out of the tube. Officials in Eric Holder’s Justice Department
are quietly giving word that it is a matter of when, not if, they
will seek to subvert Arizona’s attempt to protect its people from
porous borders.
On cue, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard — the Democratic
gubernatorial candidate — dropped his promised “vigorous legal
defense” of the law. Goddard opposed the statute and had been
sparring with Gov. Jan Brewer, his likely Republican opponent in
the general election, about how it will be defended.
According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll,
Americans side with Arizona by a 58 percent to 41 percent margin.
In late May, Quinnipiac put the numbers at 51 percent to 31
percent. CBS found that 52 percent think the Arizona law is
“about right” while only 28 percent believe it “goes too far.”
Another 17 percent said it doesn’t go far enough. The breakdown
among Democrats was 46 percent “just right,” 40 percent “too
far,” and 10 percent “not far enough.”
These numbers come in spite of a very public campaign to boycott
Arizona and label the new law a tool of racists, Nazis, and
Communists. “While opinions on immigration are complex,”
Atlantic blogger Chris Good
notes cautiously, “it’s reasonable to wonder if the
administration’s decision to sue Arizona will turn out to be an
unpopular move.”
So reasonable, in fact, that the administration went all the way
to Ecuador to find a suitable launch pad for its Arizona trial
balloon — and these are people who are as adept at fencing
themselves off from public opinion as they are incompetent at
fencing off the border. Let us hope that the Justice Department’s
legal case is based on something more substantial than the
secretary of state’s disinformation.
“President Obama has spoken out against the law because he thinks
that the federal government should be determining immigration
policy,” said Mrs. Clinton. But Arizona did not create new
immigration violations out of thin air. It took what were already
federal crimes and made them state ones too, while giving local
police a reasonable opportunity to enforce them. In other words,
Arizona followed the federal government’s immigration policy.
Even the state’s enforcement role is limited. Arizona can’t
deport anyone. It can only refer the people it believes are
illegal immigrants to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agency. The federal government remains the ultimate arbiter of
who is in the country illegally and still sets immigration
policy.
The federal government’s bipartisan dereliction of duty on this
front is precisely what prompted Arizona to act in the first
place. Washington has failed to effectively enforce its own
immigration laws, either at the border or in the workplace. It
has allowed Arizona’s illegal population to explode from 300,000
to 560,000 in less than a decade. The feds only partially
completed a security fence, actually diverting inflows into
Arizona and making it the entry point for more than half the
country’s illegal immigrants.
When Arizonans tried to do something about it, John Morton,
Obama’s head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (which is
under the jurisdiction of Homeland Security), said
his agency might not process suspected illegal immigrants
referred to it under SB 1070. Now, after the president made some
obligatory pro-enforcement noises in a White House meeting with
Governor Brewer, the Obama Justice Department seeks to have
liberal judges overturn the whole thing.
Arizona had already revised the law to address concerns that
Hispanic Americans might be racially profiled. It has already
passed a series of other tough enforcement measures which may
have
helped reduce its illegal population by 18 percent between
2008 and 2009, compared to 7 percent nationally. But the Obama
administration will not give the latest Arizona law a chance to
work or even show that it can be implemented fairly.
Up until now, the political class’s biggest contribution to
controlling illegal immigration has been wrecking the American
economy to the point that many illegal immigrants have decided
they are better off at home. No word on where Arizonans are
supposed to go now that the Obama administration has decided they
cannot protect themselves from a constitutionally indifferent
federal government’s manifest immigration failures.
