This is a major issue, with huge Constitutional implications... get ready for valuable historical info, and let's begin...
Annie Blanks, of the Pensicola News Journal reported June 16 that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will send state police resources, including Sheriff-chosen deputies and officers from seven counties, to Texas and Arizona to assist in border protection, at the request of their respective Governors.
The announcement comes a week after Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent a joint letter to the governors of the 48 other states asking them to send additional law enforcement staff and resources to help patrol their states' borders with Mexico.
And Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) joined the move Thursday, June 17, promising to do the same, actions that come as many Americans argue about federal border and immigration policy – a political hot potato that has been burning for years.
’We're here today because we have problems in Florida that are not organic to Florida that we've been forced to deal (with) over many years, but particularly over the last six months, because of the failure of the Biden administration to secure our southern border,’ DeSantis said. ‘And, indeed, to really do anything constructive about what is going on in the southern border.’
This likely will please those who long have worried about criminal elements possibly entering the US, and who also see the potential that illegal immigrants can get hooked on government welfare and become voting assets for the Democrats. And it likely will upset many leftists who seem to care less about the wellbeing of illegal immigrants than they do about getting more welfare recipients (voters) on the doles.
But those positions overlook a great deal about the immigration battle, and this move by DeSantis reveals one of the most important facets – one that almost always is disregarded by those debating the issue.
The fact is, the US Constitution grants absolutely ZERO power to the federal government to control immigration into any state.
To reiterate: The word does not appear in the Constitution.
Sadly, most American’s mistake the power in Article One, Section Eight, granting the Congress ability to create a rule of naturalization with the power to create a rule over immigration. But naturalization is not immigration. Naturalization is how visitors become American citizens, not whether visitors can be on the soil of any US state.
The only passage of the Constitution from which one might possibly infer a link to immigration is in Article One, Section Nine, which reads, in part, “The Migration of Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one-thousand-eight-hundred-and-eight…”
And this provision tells careful readers that, prior to 1808, Congress could not write laws regarding the migration into any of the original thirteen states from outside the US or from other states in the union. Such wording pertained to slave importation, and the philosophy of the Founders, as expressed in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, implies that, unless the Constitution were amended, Congress did not have jurisdiction over importation of slaves in the original states until after 1808, and that it had no power to control the importation of slaves into any new state.
This was reflected in policy, shortly after and the Missouri Compromise was achieved and the Constitution adopted. The Compromise set the standard for the process for admission of states from the territories of the Louisiana Purchase. Thus, the new northern “free states” formed from the territories and southern “slave states” would alternate admission, keeping what many politicians in Congress believed would be a balance between “slave” and “free” states for representation.
If the federal government could block importation of slaves into states beyond the original thirteen (we can discuss the horrible practice of slavery in a different piece), then there would be no need for the Missouri Compromise, because Congress could block the importation of slaves into those new “slave” states, making them de facto “free” states and shifting even more population-based “representative” power to the north.
In fact, it was well understood that immigration was not a federal purview. Thomas Jefferson said so himself in his 1798 Kentucky Resolution Number Four, which was a slap at the “Alien” and “Sedition” Acts pushed by then-President, John Adams:
IV. Resolved, that alien friends are under the jurisdiction and protection of the laws of the state wherein they are; that no power over them has been delegated to the United States, nor prohibited to the individual states distinct from their power over citizens; and it being true as a general principle, and one of the amendments to the Constitution having also declared, that ‘the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the states respectively or to the people,’ the act of the Congress of the United States passed on the 22d day of June, 1798, entitled ‘An act concerning aliens,’ which assumes power over alien friends not delegated by the Constitution, is not law, but is altogether void and of no force.
And, as I have noted in my book, “Live Free or Die,” Texas’s state constitution, approved in 1869, included an article establishing a “Bureau of Immigration” in it.
If the people of Texas believed Congress had the power to control immigration, why would they bother creating their own Bureau of Immigration?
The answer is that Congress DID NOT have such an enumerated power, and the only reason contemporary Americans fight over what the feds “should do” at the border is because of a terrible 1875 Supreme Court ruling in the case of “Chy Lung v. Freeman” which was a challenge to a California statute imposing a charge on boat-owners who were facilitating ingress to Chinese women (seen as likely prostitutes by the politicians). With the ruling, the Justices simply made up federal immigration control, saying, in part, this errant nonsense, which easily can be refuted by actually reading the Constitution:
The passage of laws which concern the admission of citizens and subjects of foreign nations to our shores belongs to Congress, and not to the States.
This led to federal passage of the Page Law that same year, a statute that restricted lower-price Chinese immigrant labor, and established from that point on that the states would suffer the loss of their constitutionally granted power over immigration.
In 1882, Congress became even more draconian, and passed the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” barring entrance into any state by Chinese laborers for ten years, halting Chinese non-labor immigration for SIXTY years, and prohibiting entirely all naturalization by Chinese people – all of which came as a result of heavy lobbying from higher-priced American labor interests that did not want to compete against people who might work for less…
All of which harmed American consumers who were forced to shell out more for products and services, preventing them from saving and having money left to invest in new ventures.
And, all of which was patently, egregiously, unconstitutional.
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If Governors or members of state legislatures believe their “republican form of government” is at risk, they can, according to the Constitution, request federal military assistance.
What DeSantis is doing is one of the few things a contemporary politician has done that actually conforms to the original view of the Founders when it comes to immigration. This is important, manifest, and undeniable.