Note to start with, the headline is very clear with the word "Illegal" when talking about Illegal aliens and immigration laws. If a reader doesn't understand the difference between immigrants here legally and those that have broken the laws of the country and entered illegally, many of which bringing children with them, then I would suggest a dictionary, not a blog post.A couple stories about immigration laws have come to my attention today and how they cracked down on illegal aliens, those that abet them, hire them and house them. Now the Alabama Governor Robert Bentley has signed a new bill into law that will require public schools to verify citizenship status.
As with the the Arizona law now being fought in the courts with the Obama administration fighting against it, this Alabama law will also require police to detain someone they suspect of being in the country illegally if the person cannot produce proper documentation when stopped for any reason.
Furthermore, the law will allow the state to revoke or suspend a company's business license for employing someone that does not have legal status.
Recently in a 5-3 Supreme Court ruling it was reported that the Supreme Court backed the Legal Arizona Workers Act from 2007 which also allows the state to suspend or revoked the business license of company's hiring illegal aliens.
That was the Commerce v. Whiting case.
AmSpec reports the connection between that law and another Supreme Court case that has national implications for states cracking down on illegal immigration because the federal government refuses to enforce their own laws.
The case is called City of Hazleton v. Lozano.
Enter the Hazleton case. The city of Hazleton went farther than Arizona did. The city doesn't merely target business hiring; instead, it also suspends the rental licenses of landlords who knowingly and recklessly allow illegals to dwell in the landlords' property.
If one buys into the Left's spin, one would think that Whiting would have little bearing on Hazleton, because the ordinance in the latter is so much broader. Surely, according to this logic, the Supreme Court would reject Hazleton's law out of hand, just as the Third Circuit Court of Appeals had done last Sept. 9.
Think again. On Monday, the Supreme Court vacated the Third Circuit's decision against Hazleton's law, and remanded it back to the appeals court to reconsider specifically in light of the Whiting decision. In other words, Hazleton's law still stands against landlords who knowingly rent to immigrants, at least for now.
All these cases and laws have one specific commonality, they all deal with a state's right to protect itself from the reported 11.2 million illegal immigrants (as of March 2010) that have broken U.S. laws (yes that is a crime, making them criminals), especially with the federal government's inability or refusal to do so.
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