Five Contortionists In the Supreme Court

Contortionists are no longer just part of a circus act. They are now part of the Supreme Court.

Today, five contortioning Supreme Court Justices made their chiropractors happy by nearly breaking their spines bending over backwards in an effort to uphold one of Arizona’s anti-immigrant laws in Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America v Whiting.

These five contorting Justices toppled the careful balance between the prohibitions against hiring people not authorized to work in the United States and the prohibitions against discrimination that Congress built into immigration law. In doing so, they ignored the historical precedent that gave rise to that balance. These five contorting Justices have now given states a free hand to disrupt the careful balance created by Congress, and by extension, have given employers in those states that disrupt that balance, to willfully discriminate against potential employers. Under the regime set up by these five contorting Justices, the cost of discriminating becomes nothing more than a cost of doing business, as discriminating becomes nothing more than a minor penalty compared to the penalty for hiring someone who is not authorized to work.

These five contorting Justices bent their spines around a strained definition of “license”. According to these five contorting Justices, the word “license” in the Federal statute means whatever a state decides it means! That simply is not how the law works, and these five contorting Justices know it. The rules of statutory construction require that a word be given its ordinary meaning when it is not defined in the statute. Here, the Justices broke than rule with their contortion antics, giving the word “license” a strained meaning that falls outside its ordinary meaning, and which covers anything a state may wish to call a license.

The opinions expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of Eng & Nishimura.

Hypocrites

Senator John “Hypocrite” Cornyn voted against comprehensive immigration and the Dream Act in 2007, but claims to support both. He again voted against the Dream Act in 2010, but claims that “you have my commitment that a version of the Dream Act needs to pass as part of a larger immigration reform solution and I will vote for it.” Then, why does he keep voting against it?

Senator Kay Bailey “Hypocrite” Hutchinson claims that “To me, it is a clear-cut issue that we should not deport young people who have been educated in our school, who many times have a college education, who we encourage to go to college.” But, of course, she voted against the Dream Act. She claims to have done so because she does not want to give foreign-born students “automatic citizenship.&rquo; Had she bothered to read the text of the Dream Act, she would have known that it did not offer “citizenship,” much less “automatic citizenship.” What it offered was a chance to get legal permanent status, which would then give them the chance to apply for citizenship in the distant future.

Congressmen Lamar “Hypocrite” Smith, Elton “Hypocrite” Gallegly, and Steve “Hypocrite” King claim that they want to create jobs for Americans. Yet, they are seeking to mass deport people who, by US Department of Agriculture estimates create 3.1 jobs each for Americans. They claim to want an improved economy, yet they want to impose between $2.6 and $17 billion, yes, billion, of additional costs on struggling American businesses by requiring them to use the flawed E-Verify.

As to the three hypocrite congressmen, they would rather call faux experts with a long, long, long history of intellectual dishonesty, including manufacturing data, misinterpreting data, reaching conclusions based solely on flaw and unverifiable data, etc, all in the name of white nationalism, than real experts who have not only studied the immigration issues, but can back their studies and conclusions on real and verifiable data.

The opinions expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of Eng & Nishimura.

Arizona Liars

Representatives Kavanagh, Burges, Fann, Fillmore, Gowan, McLain, Proud, Seel, Smith D, Stevens, Ugenti, Senators Gould, Pearce R: Representatives Barton, Crandell, Goodale, Gray R, Harper, Judd, Lesko, Pratt, Senators Biggs, Bundgaard, Gray, Klein, Melvin, Murphy, Smith of the Arizona Legislature have introduce two bills in which they either demonstrate complete ignorance of the US Constitution, or are outright lying.

These bills state that, for purpose of the bills, “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States’ has the same meaning as it does in the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, but then proceed to redefine that meaning.

In the Fourteenth Amendment, the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States’ means everyone on US soil except for those that are not subject to US laws. In the US today, the only persons not subject to US laws are those holding diplomatic immunity. All others are “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.’

In the bills introduced by these Arizona legislators, “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States’ has an entirely different meaning. It means “a person who owes no allegiance to any foreign sovereignty,&rquo; and includes a glaring contradiction to its own definition. It includes immigrants “accorded the privilege of residing permanently in the United States” despite the fact that by virtue of their being just immigrants, they still owe allegiance to their country of citizenship.

These bills are discriminatory in nature, and violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

The opinions expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of Eng & Nishimura.

ICE Caught With Its Pants Down

ICE has been aggressively pushing its so-called “secure communities” program across the US, even on communities that do not want it. Its claim has been that the program will enable local law enforcement to quickly check if a person has a prior deportation, or other immigration violations.

Now that The Washington Post is reporting that “secure communities” failed to flag a rape suspect, ICE is now claiming that law enforcement should have run a manual check, even though it had sold it package of goods as obviating the need for just such a manual check. It is also blaming the failure of “secure communities” on the fact that before 2005 deportees were manually fingerprinted. Be that as it may, the fact remains that it is ICE’s responsibility to submit those manually taken fingerprints to the FBI. In other words, the fact that the alleged rapist was manually fingerprinted when deported is not an excuse for him not to have been in the “secure communities” database.

We note that The Washington Post also deserves a slap on the wrist here, for unbalanced and biased reporting. It quotes Jessica Vaughan from the faux think tank Center for Immigration Studies, but does not quote any credible or knowledgable immigration practitioners.

The opinions expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of Eng & Nishimura.

ICE Has a Problem

In announcing the indictment of attorney Parmesh N. Dixit of Alpharetta, Georgia, ICE issued a press release that states “Dixit filed applications for citizenship containing false information, altering the facts so that aliens who were not eligible for work visas would appear eligible.”

ICE’s statement reveals that either ICE cannot write, ICE is willfully perpetuating myths about immigration law, or that ICE does not understand the very laws it is supposed to be enforcing. The bulk of the press release appears to indicate that it is not a problem with writing.

Other than the statement accusing Dixit of filing applications for citizenship containing false information, a statement that is contradicted by the language following the comma, there is no allegation that Dixit filed any such applications. Rather, it appears he is being accused of filing fraudulent visa applications. Visa applications are not applications for citizenship. They are applications for either a non-immigrant or temporary visa, or applications for an immigrant, or permanent visa. Moreover, applications for citizenship do not require that the applicant prove eligibility for a work visa, as they can only be filed by those who already are legal permanent residents, and hence, do not require a work visa.

It is particularly disturbing that an agency charged with enforcing immigration law, either does not understand the very laws it is supposed to be enforcing, or willfully perpetuates public misunderstanding of the law for its own benefit.

The opinions expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of Eng & Nishimura.

Republicans Swap One Anti-Immigrant for Another

It was expected that the House Republicans would elect Rep. Steve King, a hard-line anti-immigrant, to head the House Immigration Subcommittee. They did not.

Unfortunately, though that would appear to be good news, it isn’t.

The Republicans have named Rep. Elton Gallegly to head the House Immigration Subcommittee. Rep. Gallegly is also a rabid, hard-line anti-immigrant, who has already stated that his first hearings will be on the oversight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement worksite enforcement, and the E-Verify employment screening program.

The reason for the Republicans’ election of Rep. Gallegly appears to be that he has a slightly less prominent media profile, and therefore the Republicans hope that hispanics will not notice that he is just as rabidly anti-immigrant as Rep. King. Hispanics, though, are not stupid, and will quickly see recognize Rep. Gallegly to be a rabid anti-immigrant.

The opinions expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of Eng & Nishimura.