L'Ombre de l'Olivier

The Shadow of the Olive Tree

being the maunderings of an Englishman on the Côte d'Azur

17 August 2006 Blog Home : August 2006 : Permalink

Enforcing Immigration Law

Showing the contempt for the concept of the law that seems to be typical of the media, I discovered this story in the Yahoo/Reuters odd news section. The story doesn't seem to me to be the usual odd news though, it seems to be rather more important in that it is about the attempts by the town of Hazleton to enforce laws against illegal immigrants and how the civil rights brigade are suing to stop them:

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Civil rights campaigners sued the Pennsylvania town of Hazleton on Tuesday, seeking to block one of America's toughest local laws against illegal immigrants.

The suit says Hazelton's City Council violated the U.S. constitution when it passed a law denying business permits to companies that hire illegal aliens and fining landlords who rent homes to them.

The ACLU and friends make a couple of claims that seem to me to be destined to be proven incorrect and thus lead them to lose:

They accuse Hazleton of overstepping its authority on the federal matter of immigration and say the law discriminates against immigrants.

"This mean-spirited law is wrong for many reasons but the most obvious is that the city does not have the power to make its own immigration laws," Omar Jadwat, an attorney for the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, said in a statement.

Firstly the law does not, as described, discriminate against all immigrants, merely those that are here illegally. Those that are legal residents in posession of a genuine visa/green card etc. would seem to have no problem. Those that are here illegally are well "illegal" and how can I put it, the point of laws is that they are to be obeyed. If laws are being disobeyed then the city sure has the right to attempt sanctions on those that disobey them. This also means that the city is not in fact creating its own immigration laws - it is not attempting to limit immigration beyond that of the federal immigration agencies, if the feds say some one is a lawful resident the city agrees.

I certainly cannot imagine the current US supreme court, if not lower courts, agreeing with the ACLU challenge unless there is something more to it than this as all the city doing is requiring businesses and landlords within the city to obey the law - something that they are implicitly required to do anyway.


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