Regulation of Immigration Historically a State Function

Besides dealing with a crucial issue of public policy, the controversy over Arizona’s recently adopted law concerning aliens within its borders illustrates a disturbing lack of familiarity with relevant constitutional law and precedent. The controversy offers a striking example of the deterioration of American constitutionalism.

Congress’s naturalization power, the chief justice concluded, “has nothing to do with the admission or rejection of aliens, nor with immigration, but with the rights of citizenship. Its sole object was to prevent one State from forcing upon all the others, and upon the general government, persons as citizens whom they were unwilling to admit as such.”

1. If the wording of the Massachusetts provision upheld by the court seems harsh or politically incorrect, consider that the federal immigration law enacted by Congress decades later in 1882 denied entry to “idiots, lunatics, and persons likely to become a public charge.”

See complete piece http://www.nhinet.org/epistulae10.htm