Lying To Make Friends

This week, Fremont, Nebraska residents passed a local anti-immigrant measure that aims to ban hiring or renting to “illegal immigrants.” Unlike the laws passed in Hazleton, Pennsylvania and Farmers Branch, Texas, this law was enacted by voter referendum. Otherwise, though, the law is pretty similar to its predecessors — it requires local employers to use a federal database to check the status of employees, and bars landlords from renting to any person in the country “illegally.”

The ACLU has already announced they will be filing a lawsuit to challenge the law.

These cases will take years to make their way to the Supreme Court — the Hazleton case has been going on for about 4 years now, and for some reason the Third Circuit has still not issued its decision. So, practically speaking, it was pretty dumb of Fremont to go down this road. Considering the ACLU (not to mention MALDEF, etc.) have aggressively litigated these types of cases elsewhere — and won — Fremont is in way over its Constitutional head.

The reason these local immigration laws get shut down so readily is that our immigration laws are made by the federal government, and they are immensely complicated. I put the term illegal in quotes above because immigration status is rarely that easy to determine. Even if a person enters the country without papers, they will often acquire valid status later – through marriage, or work, or other operation of the laws.

By way of example, the New York Times recently told the incredibly moving story of a deaf man who came to the U.S. illegally in the mid-nineties and was enslaved in New York until federal prosecutors finally discovered the slavery ring. He was allowed to stay in the country, went to a school for the deaf and then a New York City jobs training program, and now has a green card and works — amazingly enough — as a janitor on Ellis Island. The journeys of immigrants are complicated, and the twists and turns of the immigration laws even more so. Suffice it so say that a town like Fremont has no idea which of its non-citizen residents will end up getting a green card if they end up in federal custody and which will be deported.

I think it also bears mentioning, though, that in addition to be misguided for the aforementioned reasons, so-called anti-immigrant measures should more accurately be called anti-Latino measures. Since immigration status is ambiguous and impossible for local officials to determine, the real purpose of laws targeting “illegals” is generally to harass and intimidate Latino residents. The picture above comes from a bar in Hazleton in 2007, and it gets republished often because it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the ubiquitous signage of the Jim Crow era. I doubt the thousands of undocumented Irish have to worry about landlords giving them a hard time.

All I can hope is that the passage of this law will put even more pressure on the Obama administration to work for meaningful immigration reform in this term.

-AS