The first responses to the oral argument yesterday on Arizona v. United States are pretty uniform -- the Justices appear skeptical of the government's argument that the state law would unconstitutionally infringe on the federal government's immigration authority. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post all report that the Court seemed inclined to uphold the requirement that police determine the status of anyone they stop if they believe the person to be an illegal immigrant. Justice Scalia's aggressive questioning, such as the questions below, got particular attention:
The state has no power to close its borders to people who have no right to be there?”
“What does ‘sovereignty’ mean if it does not include the ability to defend your borders?”
“Are you objecting to harassing the people who have no business being here? Surely you’re not concerned about harassing them.”
“We have to enforce our laws in a manner that will please Mexico?”
Lyle Denniston's analysis at ScotusBlog predicted that the Court will come out somewhere between Scalia's view and the government's:
At the end of the argument in Arizona v. United States (11-182), though, the question remained how a final opinion might be written to enlarge states’ power to deal with some 12 million foreign nationals without basing that authority upon the Scalia view that states have a free hand under the Constitution to craft their own immigration policies. The other Justices who spoke up obviously did not want to turn states entirely loose in this field. So perhaps not all of the four clauses would survive — especially vulnerable may be sections that created new state crimes as a way to enforce federal immigration restrictions.
