Federal Judge Blocks Parts of South Carolina Immigration Law

by Nicole Flatow

A federal judge yesterday blocked parts of a South Carolina immigration law that was modeled after the controversial Arizona law the Supreme Court will review this term.

Courts have blocked portions of similar immigration laws in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana and Utah.

“This is all really just a way station on the way to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Arizona case,” Temple University law professor Peter J. Spiro told The New York Times. “The South Carolina ruling is important in the short term in putting the law on hold. But the Supreme Court will have the final say.”

U.S. district Judge Richard M. Gergel blocked provisions that would require immigrants to carry their registration documents and make it a crime to harbor or transport illegal immigrants.

In the opinion, he noted the “traditionally predominant role of the federal government in the field of immigration.”

Santa Clara University law professor Pratheepan Gulasekaram explains the federal government’s dominance in the field of immigration law and policy in his ACS Issue Brief, “No Exception to the Rule: The Unconstitutionality of State Immigration Enforcement Laws.”

Gulasekaram asserts that last term’s Supreme Court decision in Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting, upholding a state law that regulates employment of unauthorized immigrants, “sheds little light” on the court’s review of SB 1070.

Whiting, he writes, “may be a welcome sign for sub-federal entities desirous of using legal sanctions to discourage local businesses from hiring unauthorized workers,” but “does not otherwise alter the division of power between the nation and states vis-à-vis immigration policy.”

“While states may carve out limited regulatory power in the business-licensing area, the larger and more important field of immigration enforcement and policy should remain the sole province of the federal government,” Gulasekaram asserts.

Read the full Issue Brief here.