A federal judge in Austin took Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to the woodshed Thursday, explaining to him between swats on the behind that the US Constitution is very clear that the federal government has authority in setting and enforcing immigration policy. That means no, states can’t pass their own laws, like Texas’s Senate Bill 4, set to go into effect March 5, to arrest and deport people the police think might be undocumented immigrants.
US District Judge David Ezra issued an injunction to keep Texas from enforcing the law while the state appeals the ruling to the Fifth Circuit Court, which tends to be friendlier to rightwing nonsense like this than the rest of the federal judiciary, because isn’t there always a permissive parent that puts up with shenanigans from a problem child like Abbott?
Ezra said in his order that the federal government would “suffer grave irreparable harm” if SB 4 went into effect, since that might lead other states to think they too can make up their own immigration laws, like just look at Oklahoma over there just chomping at the bit to strip LGBTQ+ people of citizenship, I AM WATCHING YOU, LITTLE MISTER, YOU JUST SIT RIGHT THERE. Or as the Texas Tribune put it more conventionally,
“SB 4 threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice,” Ezra wrote.
Ezra also wrote that if the state arrested and deported migrants who may be eligible for political asylum, that would violate the Constitution and also be “in violation of U.S. treaty obligations.”
Ezra also had little patience for Abbott’s pet rightwing theory that the Constitution grants him the power to take on immigration enforcement due to an “invasion” of immigrants, because no federal court has ever accepted the claim that “invasion” means anything other than an attack by foreign military forces. Sorry, Governor, but “surges in immigration do not constitute an ‘invasion’ within the meaning of the Constitution, nor is Texas engaging in war by enforcing SB 4.” Ezra went on to provide a very thorough review of what “invasion” and “actually invaded” mean in constitutional terms, and notes that they always refer to “ongoing hostilities by a coordinated armed hostile military force,” not migrants crossing the border. Somehow, with great restraint, he refrained from adding, “You imbecile. You fucking moron.”
Abbott nonetheless clung to his talking points, hoping to move it up through the appeals process all the way to the Supreme Court. On social media, Abbott said he wasn’t worried by the injunction, because “this was fully expected,” and then he lied about the Constitution again, saying, “Texas has solid legal grounds to defend against an invasion.” You know, apart from the multiple pages in the decision explaining those words don’t mean what he thinks they mean.
Still, Abbott remains hopeful the new and improved Alito Supreme Court will come through for him, because many of the justices who shot down most of Arizona’s “show me your papers” law in 2012 have been replaced by crazies who might let states make up immigration law after all.
Seems unlikely to us, since the current Supremes already spanked Abbott’s heinie and pointed at the Supremacy Clause just last June, but maybe he figures they’ll be in the mood to punish some brown people to work off their moodiness over all the mean things people are saying about their helping Donald Trump avoid justice.
Finally, let’s just remind ourselves that, for all the panic the Right is whipping up about migrants at the border, in hopes of scaring enough voters to return Donald Trump to office, America needs immigrants, and no, we are not drowning in a sea of undocumented crime terrorist monsters, even with high rates of people being arrested at the border. Oh, hey, they’re being arrested, and most, as ever, get deported.
But wait! What about the “migrant crime wave”? As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes pointed out Thursday night, Fox News seems to have run out of ways to claim the economy is in the toilet, so now it’s synched up with the Trump campaign to focus almost exclusively on “migrant crime.”
Honestly, you cannot overstate the deluge of coverage. At any given moment all day, Fox is either reporting on crime, finishing a segment on crime, or about to run a segment on migrant crime.
And when you go trying to create a story, there’s always some horrific crime out there to seize on, even if it’s an extreme outlier. It’s true that an undocumented immigrant has been arrested in the murder last week of nursing student Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus, while Riley was out on a morning run.
That’s undeniably awful — but also not typical of murders in the USA, where native-born citizens remain more likely to kill you than illegal immigrants. (Legal immigrants have the lowest murder rate of the three groups, the Cato Institute points out.) That’s of no comfort to grieving families of any murder victim, but we need to set public policies based on facts, not on fear and rage. (This statement is disputed by the American Fear And Rage-Based Policy Institute, a lobbying arm of the Republican Party.)
The reality, as Hayes notes, is that according to an analysis by the New York Times, once crime statistics for 2023 are fully tallied, “the country is likely to see one of the largest, if not the largest, yearly decline in homicides.”
As for the Fox News narrative that crime is now out of control in “sanctuary cities” where Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have sent busload after busload of asylum-seekers, that too is quite simply bunk, Hayes says.
[A]ccording to new analysis from NBC News, “expert analysis and available data for major city police departments show that, despite several horrifying high-profile incidents, there is no evidence of a migrant driven crime wave in the United States.” In fact, in many of the cites like New York that have taken in a huge amount of migrants, and there really have been a lot, crime has gone down quite considerably.
There you have it. It’s not just, of course, the data that matters, because this manufactured crisis is at the heart of Donald Trump’s monstrous vision for a second term.
Now, let’s close on some of the good stuff about what immigrants bring to this country, in addition to the whole thing where they enrich our culture and add even more to the wonderful variety of people who make up “Americans.”
At a very basic economic level, as this handy Washington Post analysis notes (gift link) explains,
About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. And even before that, by the middle of 2022, the foreign-born labor force had grown so fast that it closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
It’s a beautiful country. With the exception of mean pinch-faced creeps like Abbott who don’t understand America one bit, America’s people are beautiful too — including and perhaps especially those just beginning the daunting path to become Americans. Screw “replacement theory” — we are made greater by all those who become Us.
PREVIOUSLY!
[Texas Tribune / AP / US v. Texas order / Media Matters / WaPo (gift link) / Cato]
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