Mexico & Nafta - September 2010 (ISSN 1741-444X)

SB1070: On 28 July, less than 24 hours before Arizona's controversial SB1070 law criminalising illegal immigrants was due to come into force, a federal judge issued a partial injunction. The Arizona state government immediately appealed. The legal arguments are likely to go all the way up to the Supreme Court and therefore remain a political issue in the forthcoming mid-term elections in the US this autumn. Nevertheless the Mexican government welcomed the ruling by the judge, Susan Bolton.
In her judgment, Bolton accepted many of the arguments made by the US federal government and civil rights advocates that Arizona was usurping some of the powers that the federal government enjoys. Bolton stopped the most important parts of SB1070, principally the requirement that police officers could stop suspected illegal immigrants “on reasonable suspicion" and that immigrants had to carry papers showing that they were in the US legally at all times.
Bolton did not, however, move beyond SB1070 to try to curb the way Arizona already enforces immigration laws. Arizona's local law enforcement agencies already turn over more illegal immigrants to federal authorities than any other state. In Maricopa County alone, the populist Sheriff Joe Arpaio (under federal investigation for civil rights violations) has assisted in the deportation of 26,000 illegal immigrants since 2007, about one-quarter of the total deportations from the US in that period.

Florida: On 11 August Bill McCollum, the lagging candidate in the Republican primary for the Florida state governorship, proposed immigration reforms that go further than Arizona's controversial SB1070 law. McCollum, currently Florida's attorney general, was challenging for the Republican nomination for the state governorship in November. His lurch to the Right failed and he was narrowly defeated in the primary by Rick Scott, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, who had been more outspoken about immigration.
McCollum advocated a law that would require immigrants to carry valid documentation or face 20 days in jail followed by deportation. Even more controversially, McCollum also advocated imposing stiffer penalties on undocumented migrants than on legal residents that commit the same offences. He also suggested making it harder for undocumented migrants to get bail.  McCollum argued that his proposal was more targeted than the Arizona law, because it defined the terms on which the police could arrest a suspect for being an illegal immigrant. They would either have to admit that they were in the US illegally or present a fake driving licence. A driving licence serves as an identity card across the US.