One broader lesson people need to take away from the legal wrangling over the Arizona law: Any enforcement provisions of "comprehensive immigration reform" that Congress might pass would be tied up in the courts for years. As my colleague Steve Camarota wrote recently: Read more...

The other local immigration law that was set to go into effect tomorrow is in the town of Fremont, Nebraska. The ordinance was approved by voters last month and would have prohibited the hiring of, or renting to, illegal aliens.

But the town council there voted last night to suspend the measure because of the prohibitive costs of fighting the ACLU and MALDEF in court: Read more...

It's no surprise that key parts of the Arizona immigration law were just suspended by Judge Bolton, pending the full trial. Assuming the state doesn't give up, which it won't, everyone understood this would take several years and reach the Supreme Court. It’s a stupid way to make policy, but with ACLU lawyers (both those inside and those outside the government) fanatically committed to open borders, there's no alternative.

The Secure Communities program is intended to make systematic and universal the identification of illegal aliens in police custody — not people pulled over for speeding or broken taillights but those actually booked and fingerprinted. The whole point of the program, politically, is to move away from deporting "ordinary" illegal aliens (i.e., those guilty only of tax crimes, identity-fraud crimes, employment crimes, etc.) and focus only on illegals who have committed "real" crimes. Read more...

The Arizona immigration law is set to go into effect Thursday (unless a judge decides it shouldn't), but it's working already:

The two women are among scores of illegal immigrant families across Phoenix hauling the contents of their homes into the yard this weekend as they rush to sell up and get out before the state law takes effect on Thursday.

I participated a panel on the Arizona law, and immigration more generally, at the libertarian Cato Institute yesterday; the video of the event is now up, assuming you want to watch all 82 minutes of it. Much of the discussion was the usual stuff, but two things stood out.

First, one of the panelists, Cato's Tim Lynch, spoke about how the Arizona law will lead to false arrests and showed an excerpt from this video: Read more...

There's too much wrong-headed commentary about immigration to bother with most of it, but the op-ed in today's Washington Post by the last two heads of the INS is worth comment, both because of the venue and the particular myths its authors purvey. Read more...

Well, imagine that! The "Temporary" Protected Status of certain illegal aliens from El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua was just extended, again, for another 18 months. Read more...

At least that's the conclusion of one economic historian:

America's settling down: How Better Jobs and Falling Immigration led to a Rise in Marriage, 1880 – 1930
Tomas Cvrcek
NBER Working Paper No. 16161

A few days ago, Reihan Salam at National Review Online questioned whether David Frum was correct that one of the reasons we have a higher rate of child poverty than other developed countries is immigration. As Reihan wrote, "I personally think our immigration policy should change. But I don't think child poverty rates are the reason." Read more...

So, I figured the president’s major address on immigration might reveal something important. I’m at Cub Scout camp out in western Virginia, but I had to go to the laundromat anyway, so I watched the stream of the address using their free wi-fi while the clothes spun and tumbled. And what was the news that came out of it?

Nothing. Bupkes. Zilch. Read more...

Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal has come around to enforcement-first perspective; his column can be summed up by its subtitle: "Secure the border and a healthy debate might follow."

McGurn opens his column well enough, but after condemning "those who effectively oppose real enforcement of any immigration law," he resorts to a false equivalence: Read more...

A group of senators sent a letter to the president this week to warn him against something that's apparently being tossed around inside the administration: granting an amnesty unilaterally, without input from Congress. Apparently, this plan would apply only to visa overstayers and other illegals who've applied for green cards as a delaying tactic knowing they won't qualify — but that would mean maybe 5 million people. Read more...

Fox reports that 17 members of the Afghan military have gone missing over the past two years from Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. While this is an obvious security vulnerability because "Each Afghan was issued a Department of Defense Common Access Card, an identification card used to gain access to secure military installations," I suspect it's more likely that they're washing dishes in the back of a cousin's restaurant in San Francisco or Northern Virginia. Read more...

A column in yesterday's Globe and Mail on the "honor-killing" of Aqsa Parvez in Canada by her Pakistani immigrant family gets to the policy point too many want to avoid:

Decades ago, illiterate Italians also immigrated to Canada, bringing with them a harsh, patriarchal culture where religion dominated all. But they didn't marry cousins imported fresh from the old country. And so they began to raise their children differently.

As the name suggests, supporters of “comprehensive immigration reform” have long resisted the mere suggestion that they should try a piecemeal approach and pursue smaller, less politically toxic amnesties. About a year ago, I was on a panel with Frank Sharry of America’s Voice, one of the chief pro-amnesty activists, and Esther Olavarria, the policy director for DHS who used to be Kennedy’s immigration person. Read more...

Well, knock me over with a feather! The "Temporary" Protected Status for a total of about 70,000 Honduran and Nicaraguan illegal aliens, which was set to expire in July, has been extended til January of 2012. You know when they were first given this "temporary" amnesty? Almost 11 years ago. Only in Washington, where $1 billion is chump change and terrorism is a "man-caused disaster," would 11 years be considered temporary. Read more...

Despite (or maybe because of) the sustained elite attack on the Arizona law, public support is holding steady. A new poll from Investors Business Daily finds 2 to 1 support for the bill nationwide, about the same as the NYT/CBS poll (combining the 51 percent who said it was about right and the 9 percent who said it didn't go far enough) and Rasmussen. Read more...

The mass-immigration crowd's latest argument against the E-Verify system is that it's just not tough enough, dammit! A piece in the Washington Post over the weekend argued that I specifically, and restrictionists in general, back E-Verify precisely because it doesn't work perfectly — the intent being, if I can divine the true nature of the conspiracy, to prevent amnesty by preventing a solution to illegal immigration. Or, as the authors write: Read more...

Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post had an analysis piece yesterday making the argument that the Reid-Schumer-Menendez amnesty outline shows how much the immigration debate has moved "to the right" (obviously not the proper adverb, given Grover Norquist, Linda Chavez, Dick Armey, et al., but you get the idea). Read more...

Related Content: Arizona Law SB 1070 Topic Page

The Arizona immigration law is catnip for Michael Gerson's brand of moral preening. In his column today he writes, "It sorts Republicans according to their political and moral seriousness." (I'm in the morally unserious camp, in case you're keeping score, along with George Will, whose column ran right below Gerson's.) Read more...

I have pity on Linda Greenhouse's students at Yale Law School. The former New York Times Supreme Court correspondent has a column on the Arizona immigration law in her old paper peddling all the usual cliches about Nazism, apartheid, blah, blah, blah. But what's hilarious is that Greenhouse, the "Senior Research Scholar in Law, Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence, and Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law," based her whole column on the wrong version of the bill. Read more...

Arizona Gov. Brewer dealt with the immigration bill very neatly this afternoon — she signed the bill, supporting it unapologetically, but at the same time issued an executive order directing the development of a training program on how to implement the law without racial profiling. Read more...

The president's comments today criticizing the Arizona bill were pretty anodyne. He described it as an example of "irresponsibility" (at least he didn't say they "acted stupidly"), but implicitly justified it in a clinging-to-their-guns-and-religion fashion by saying it was the kind of thing that would happen in the absence of amnesty. Read more...

As I've written before, there isn't going to be a "comprehensive immigration reform" bill reaching the president's desk this year; it's just not going to happen. But there is going to be a lot of sturm und drang about it, as the president signaled in his comments today on the subject. Read more...

The Arizona Senate yesterday approved the final House version of an immigration bill, sending it to the governor for her signature (which is expected, though she hasn't committed to it yet). The bill describes its intent this way: Read more...

Անօրինական ներգաղթի մասին հարցազրոյց Մարկ Գրիգորեանի հետ.

An interview on illegal immigration with Mark Krikorian. Read more...

Millionaire huckster Morris Dees, whose venomous and malevolent Southern Poverty Law Center exists almost exclusively "to separate wealthy liberals from their money," in the words of Harper's Ken Silverstein, has done remarkably well for himself. (See a CIS profile of Dees' foray into the immigration business here.) You can see for yourself just how well he's done in this slide show of his Montgomery, Ala. estate. I'm not sure which I like better — the pool house, the guest house, the studio building, or the main mansion. Read more...

George Will has never been particularly good on immigration, so I was a little surprised by his column calling for an end to automatic citizenship at birth (specifically, for the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens). Read more...

Things aren't quite spinning out of control yet in Mexico, but it's not looking good, as seen in this weekend's murder of three people associated with our consulate in Juarez, right across the river from El Paso — three among 100 people killed over the weekend in what has turned into a war against the state itself. Read more...