@Brandon9000,
Brandon9000 wrote:Pick one clause [demonstrating a federal power to regulate immigration, T.], quote it here, and let's see.
On second thought, I actually
would like to answer that. While I continue to maintain that you are in a weak position to make this request, I am not here to please
you. I am here to contribute reasoned arguments to anyone bothering to hear them.
When gaging the original understanding of the US constitution, I usually follow a two-step process. Step 1: Read the clause in question. Step 2: Look up the clause in
The Founders' Constitution, compiled by originalist jurists for the University of Chicago Press. It will point to founding-era documents illuminating what the clause was understood to mean by the people who passed it, and by the first generation or two of jurists who applied it to real cases. (Usually the last entry for each clause comes from Supreme Court Justice Josef Story's
Commentaries (1833). In my opinion,
The Founders' Constitution is as close as any layman can get to figuring out how the founders understood the constitution.
With these preliminaries taken care of, let's start with the Migration and Importation Clause. It reads: "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person."
From going through
The Founders' Constitution's page on the clause I learned that the main concern at the time was the slave trade. But here and there, I also saw that it applied to voluntary immigration, too.
Story (1833) sums it up best:
Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, interpreting the migration wrote:$1331:
This clause of the constitution, respecting the importation of slaves, is manifestly an exception from the power of regulating commerce. Migration seems appropriately to apply to voluntary arrivals, as importation does to involuntary arrivals; and so far, as an exception from a power proves its existence, this proves, that the power to regulate commerce applies equally to the regulation of vessels employed in transporting men, who pass from place to place voluntarily, as to those, who pass involuntarily."
So even by the original understanding of the constitution, the Commerce Clause gives the US government the power to regulate immigration. But does that mean the states have no say in it? Can't they make their own laws regulating commerce? Even before Story, the Supreme Court's
Chief Justice Marshal decided they don't.
Handing down the Supreme Court's decision in Gibbons v. Ogden (1817), Chief Justice Marshal wrote:In argument, however, it has been contended, that if a law passed by a State, in the exercise of its acknowledged sovereignty, comes into conflict with a law passed by Congress in pursuance of the constitution, they affect the subject, and each other, like equal opposing powers.
But the framers of our constitution foresaw this state of things, and provided for it, by declaring the supremacy not only of itself, but of the laws made in pursuance of it. The nullity of any act, inconsistent with the constitution, is produced by the declaration, that the constitution is the supreme law. The appropriate application of that part of the clause which confers the same supremacy on laws and treaties, is to such acts of the State Legislatures as do not transcend their powers, but, though enacted in the execution of acknowledged State powers, interfere with, or are contrary to the laws of Congress, made in pursuance of the constitution, or some treaty made under the authority of the United States.
Like it or not: The US constitution gives the federal government exclusive power to regulate immigration, and Arizona has no say in it. Far from this being the opinion of a liberal activist judge, this has been the state of the law since the Founding Era. It's
that simple.
