The States Protect Immigrant Rights (Empirical Proof Supplied)

Conventional wisdom would have that state and local regulation of immigration works against noncitizen interests.  A story like Hazleton’s (tinpot mayor making political hay out of undocumented immigration) makes for good copy, and it plays into the persistent liberal mindset that the federal government will better protect rights generally and immigrant rights particularly. Amazing how that survived even after the 1996 rout of immigration and welfare reform, in which immigrants took major hits. 

But institutional logic here supports the proposition that — on balance — state and local jurisdictions will be more inclined to give immigrants a fair shake.  Immigrants at the local level aren’t just aggregates, they’re members of the community — churches, schools, unions, neighborhoods.  Local corporate interests have strong incentives not to scare away immigrant workers.

Of course some places are hostile to immigrants, usually places where immigrants are new.  If those jurisidictions that are anti-immigrant aren’t allowed to blow off steam at home they’ll just take things to Washington, where their intense preferences will trump less intense pro-immigrant preferences.  That’s what happened in the mid-1990s, when anti-immigrant hysteria in California blew its stack in Washington.  Better to let subfederal jurisdictions shoot themselves in the foot with anti-immigrant measures than to visit them on the rest of us.

That’s the logic.  Now we have empirical evidence to the same effect, that state regulation tends to favor immigrants.  NYU’s Crisitina Rodriguez and three co-authors from the Migration Policy Institute (the top think-tank in the area) have done a systematic study of immigration-related legislative initiatives at the state level. 

Three key findings:

• Few immigration-related bills introduced in state legislatures are actually enacted (only 16%).  It’s mostly posturing.
• Those measures that are enacted favor immigrant interests.
• States with traditionally larger immigrant populations tend to favor immigrant interests more than those with fast-growing immigrant populations (Texas, California, New York and others v. Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona).  Places where there’s a sense of dislocation are those in which the immigrant threat will be most keenly felt, though it’s a condition that should be self correcting.

Will this be enough to mainstream the concept of immigration federalism?