Earlier this year, the state legislature in Arizona passed one of the strictest immigration laws in the United States. Faced with the massive monetary and social consequences of illegal immigration, you can’t blame Arizona for taking drastic action. Many states—and even individual localities like Prince William County, VA—have been forced to tighten local enforcement of the previously largely-unenforced federal immigration laws in order to maintain their own financial solvency.
Unsurprisingly, immigrants who choose to flaunt our laws to get into this country too-often continue to flaunt our laws once they’re here. Localities with large illegal immigrant populations invariably have skyrocketing rates of both property and violent crime—and increases in the associated costs of police enforcement, jails and prisons, public defenders, prosecutors, judges, etc. This alone would have been sufficient reason to crack down, but then you add to that the costs associated with educating the children of illegal immigrants, providing public medical care for illegal immigrants, and so on—when illegal immigrants generally aren’t paying taxes on their ‘under the table’ incomes—the argument in favor of Arizona-style laws gets even more clear.
Immigration policy, generally speaking, should really be a federal issue . . . unlike, say, health care, education, medical research, auto manufacturing, banking, or most of the ten-billion others things our government does without any Constitutional authority. Curiously, while our government has no apparent problem dabbling in all these places they have no right to dabble, it has essentially abdicated its role in immigration enforcement. Illegal immigrants go about their activities without consequence; businesses hire illegal immigrants with impunity and without any serious fear of prosecution. The federal government just looks the other way and, meanwhile, the states and the people are forced to absorb the real costs of the invasion.