When Immigration Matters

 Today, June 25, 2012, the Supreme Court threw out key provisions of Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigrants  but said a much-debated portion could go forward - that police must check the status of people stopped for various reasons who might appear to be in the U.S. illegally. 

"It did not take long for Justice Antonin Scalia to side with Arizona [regarding SB 1070], and it was not much later that Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., showed that he, too, was inclined that way. Justice Clarence Thomas, who said nothing during the argument, is known to be totally opposed to the kind of technical legal challenge that the government has mounted against S.B. 1070. That left Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito, Jr., as the ones that might be thought most likely to help make a majority for Arizona." - Lyle Denniston, Apr. 25, 2012

Supporters of Arizona's anti-immigrant SB 1070 claim that the residents of the Grand Canyon State need to be protected from crime and kidnapping perpetrated by illegal immigrants. But, the truth is, rising immigration is responsible for crime reduction and in Arizona the people most likely to be kidnapped are undocumented immigrants themselves! Before throwing your hands up in frustration and defeat when you hear this myth about the need to have SB 10170, and laws like it, for the sake of public safety, consider responding with these quick mythbusting facts!

FACT:Statistical models suggest that cities with the largest increases in immigration between 1990 and 2000 experienced the largest decreases in homicide and robbery during the same time period. According to sociologist Tim Wadsworth, the findings offer insights into the complex relationship between immigration and crime and suggest that growth in immigration may have been responsible for part of the precipitous crime drop of the 1990s.

FACT:Some police chiefs believe that crime will actually go up if SB 1070 becomes law in Arizona or in any other state. They believe that diverting resources away from the fight against violent crime and breaking down the hard-won trust between cops and the communities where they work will make it harder to keep people safe. Police chiefs have argued that, “This is not a law that increases public safety. This is a bill that makes it much harder for us to do our jobs,” said Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck.

FACT: Most of the kidnappings that do occur in Phoenix are of undocumented immigrants. As Terry Greene Sterling describes in her book Illegal: Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone, most of the kidnapping victims in Phoenix are unauthorized immigrants held for ransom by the smugglers (coyotes) they hire to bring them to the United States. These are “drop house” kidnappings in which “incoming migrants at the border are baited with low smuggling fares. Those low fares are ramped up by thousands of dollars once the migrants are held at gunpoint in a drop house.”

More mythbusting facts on this issue can be found in Separating Fact from Fiction: The Truth about Kidnapping in Arizona, a report from the Immigration Policy Center.

With the Republicans claiming sweeping victories in the midterm elections, politicians in more than 25 states have promised to introduce Arizona-like immigration enforcement bills when their state legislatures convene in 2011. What impact will this have on the rest of the country?

Arizona's notorious anti-immigrant law, S.B. 1070, is proving to be a costly mistake. That is the message of a new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) which estimates some of "the economic and fiscal consequences of the tourism boycott that occurred in response to the passage of S.B. 1070" in April of this year. More precisely, the report quantifies "the effects of lost tourism from meetings and conventions" that were cancelled as a result of the boycott. The report, entitled Stop the Conference, concludes that the cancellation of conventions alone "has produced or will produce hundreds of millions of dollars in lost direct spending in the state and diminished economic output. That, in turn, will lead to thousands of lost jobs and more than $100 million in lost salaries."

Here is an interesting article by Mary Giovagnoli that appeared in the Immigration Impact.

Just hours before the law was to take effect, Judge Susan Bolton of Federal District Court issued a preliminary injunction blocking the most controversial parts of Arizona’s immigration enforcement law that have re-ignited the national immigration debate.

Katie Couric talks to experts on both sides of the Arizona immigration law (SB 1070) that has ignited a firestorm of controversy as well as a federal lawsuit.  She is joined by Christina Rodriguez, a Law Professor at NYU;  Doris Meissner, a Senior Fellow at Migration Policy Institute and a former INS Commissioner; and Dan Stein, President of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). 

The United States v. Arizona
Drawing a Clear Line Between Federal and State Immigration Authority