Repeal Arizona's Immigration Law: It Only Harms Arizona

A powerful irony of unintended consequences of Arizona’s new immigration law is emerging, which is that the law will only harm innocent Arizonans. Perception can be more powerful than reality, and even if the millions of Americans who oppose the new law are wrong, they can bring harm as a result of a law intended to help Arizona.

On May 6, La Raza, the country’s largest civil rights group and 19 other labor and civil rights groups, including the Major League Baseball Players Association, announced a nationwide boycott of all economic activities related to Arizona. The state’s hotel and lodging association, for example, reports that 19 meetings have been cancelled, at an economic loss of $6 million. This is only the beginning. Protesters of the law may or may not be right, but the intensity of their anger will bring punitive action to the state.

We are learning after the fact the deleterious effects of S. B. 1070, reminding us a little of the health care law that Congress recently passed with few knowing what was in the bill or what it would do.

In attempting to clear up the matter of whether this new law violates the constitutional rights of the 4th and 14th Amendments, Kris Kobach, a law professor who helped draft the law, reports that police officers cannot willy nilly simply demand identification without probable cause from someone who “looks Hispanic.” He argues that there must be “lawful contact” and that “the most likely context where this law would come into play is a traffic stop.”

Now look at what Koback just confessed–“a traffic stop.” How many of Arizona’s 500,000 illegal immigrants are going to be caught primarily at traffic stops? A relatively minuscule number. Besides, Arizona doesn’t even need a new law for this because traffic violators must produce a driver’s license that proves legal residency.

Arizona, like virtually all states in the country, is broke, suffering deficits for an indefinite time to come. It has no money to hire probably the thousands of law enforcement officials necessary to find 500,000 illegal immigrants. And if it can only afford the incumbent number of police officers to search for a half million immigrants, their duties will be entirely distracted from pursuing more serious crimes–murder, rape, burglary, and the like.

It gets financially worse: there will be a multitude of lawsuits against municipalities that are already broke, with no kitty or time whatsoever for court battles. City coffers will be further reduced by the loss of tax dollars from tourism boycotts.

So there you have the unintended consequences of the new law: Find relatively few illegal immigrants at “traffic stops”; require identification at a traffic stop that is redundant to a driver’s license; go further in debt to hire the multitude of police officers needed to find 500,000 illegal immigrants; go even further in debt by fighting lawsuits in court; suffer losses in tax revenue from boycotts. And what do you end up with? Huge debt, with few immigrants caught.

The only practical solution to the immigration influx into Arizona is not S. B. 1070, but secure borders–and this the federal government must do now. Arizona’s legislature should repeal the law, which now is bringing only gratuitous harm to the state.

Note: Professor Trowbridge is former chief of staff to Chief Justice Warren Burger and the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U. S. Constitution.