Morning Bell: How State and Local Governments Can Help Control Illegal Immigration

Conn Carroll / August 27, 2009

Meeting with his counterparts from Mexico and Canada earlier this month, President Barack Obama said that he expected the Democratic-controlled Congress, after completing work on health care, energy and financial regulation, to draft comprehensive immigration reform bills this year. This time frame acknowledges that no immigration legislation will be passed until at least 2010. But as Heritage visiting fellow Matt Meyer points out in a new report there is still plenty that states can do, in the meantime,  under their own constitutionally-protected traditional police powers to tackle the problem right now.

Illegal immigration is a relatively new public policy problem. In 1980, there were only 3.5 million illegal aliens in the United States, which represented 1.5% of the total U.S. population. That year, 1.5 million illegal aliens lived in California — 6.6% of its population—making the Golden State the only state in the union whose illegal aliens comprised more than 3% of its population. It was only after the 1986 immigration reform bill, which provided amnesty to more than three million illegal aliens, that an ever increasing surge of people began entering the U.S. illegally. There are now an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States representing almost 4% of our population and 18 states have joined California with illegal populations exceeding 3%. (more…)