That will accomplish exactly nothing. We have gotten ourselves into a situation where we NEED the cheap stoop labor. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who are willing to pick the crops, clean the latrines, etc. So we establish a gastarbeiter system such as they have in Germany. Hundreds of thousands of “guest workers” who do the menial labor because the Germans, just like the Americans, feel that such work is beneath them.

The gastarbeiters stay in Germany for generations. Literally. Their children are born in Germany and consider themselves German. And suddenly someone comes along and says, “ship them home.” Let me know how that works for you. IT DOES NOT. How can you ship home involuntarily a million people? a million!! Perhaps more.

Here it’s compounded by the fact that the children born here are US citizens, whether you like it or not. What we are doing is creating an underbelly class, people who are not really citizens anywhere. In tough times like we have right now people micturate and pule that these foreigners are taking away “good old American jobs.” Horses–t. They are doing the work that Americans have heretofore been too f–king proud to do.

If you kick out all the gastarbeiters you will either starve directly because you have no food on the table because no one would stoop to pick it or you starve to death because the price of the food has grown astronomically because labor costs went way the hell up. Take your choice.

And what sort of bureaucaracy will you have to have to track all those gastarbeiters? Hundreds of thousands of employees.

“The second thing that’s obviously needed is strengthening of border security . . ..”

And just how the hell are we going to pay for that? Even if our porous border were only the Mexican one, that’s still not quite 2000 miles, about 10.4 million feet. If you hired a border guard with a quarter mile beat you would need almost 80,000 guards, three shifts a day, seven days a week. It takes just about 6 people to provide full coverage for a year for each position when you figure in vacations, sick leave, holidays, training days, etc. That comes to about half a million new jobs. At minimum wage you are talking about hmmm $8 billion a year just for the front line grunts. Add at least 50 percent overhead for insurance, employer’s SS taxes, supervision, management, etc. etc.

And still you have quarter mile coverage for each employee. How many illegals can cross the border on a dark night between two minimum wage employees a quarter mile apart with little fear of interdiction?

But that’s not going to seal your border. All it’s going to do is change the entry points. Ever heard of Manteo, NC? I was there last week, sipping a beer in the upscale little harbor when a 42 foot sailboat pulled in DIRECT from Nassau. How many illegals could have been on that boat? I chatted up the owner for a while and he said that the coast was so porous he could bring in several thousand people a year with absolutely no fear of capture.

There are literally tens of thousands of places like Manteo along our water borders. And then of course there’s the Canadian border.

The solution is obvious, but will be implacably resisted by many Americans. Bite the bullet, Tell all the illegals that they can stay here and apply for citizenship, and manage the situation rather than try to Canute the tide. “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws,” concluded Canute when the tide soaked his boots and his robes.

And it’s the same thing here except the tide is already up to our waists.

The principle of “Sovereign Immunity” dates back to the early English kings. The King made the rules and the King decided when they had been violated. The King was supreme.

When constitutional governments came into being the principle was incorporated. In the U.S. the Constitution is the ultimate law. It invests its power in a Congress and Executive who share the rule-making function and a Supreme Court which is the final decision maker. Thus the federal government makes the rules and the government decides when they have been violated. The federal government is “supreme”.

There is no way to change what is in the Constitution except by amendment or, by the back door, Supreme Court reinterpretation of its meaning. *

Could the state of Arizona file suit against the federal government? It could try but it probably wouldn’t get very far.

The obvious approach would be to sue the federal government for breech of contract under Article IV, Section 4:

“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”

This seems unlikely to go very far given established precedent.

There are other avenues. As GL pointed out, there are a few situations where the federal government has waived sovereign immunity. One of them is to allow tort claims against individual federal employees. Thus one can imaging suing Janet Nepalitano in her capacity as head of the HSA for some dollar amount of damages caused by her negligence and dereliction of duty. AZ would have to come up with some demonstrable damages and put a dollar figure on them. Again, I’m not a lawyer.

Interesting to think about.

—W—

* Actually, there’s another really scary way to change the supreme law of the land. That is for the Senate to ratify a treaty with a foreign government. Then that treaty becomes superior to any other U.S. or state law. I shudder at the potential for abuse.

I stand substantially behind my admittedly superficial treatment of the subject. For a short discussion see the article on “Sovereign Immunity in the United States”, on Wikipedia.

—W—

This amendment does not say that. It explicitly grants sovereign immunity to the states, which is a common underpinning of the law pretty much everywhere the so-called English system prevails, but the states AND the government have statutorily waived sovereign immunity countless times over the years.

I found a really interesting statistic a few years ago. The average length of stay of an illegal immigrant in the U.S. is four years. Eighty percent of illegal immigrants return to Mexico within roughly four years of entering the U.S. (Sorry, I don’t remember the source now.)

I was wandering the quiet, dusty streets of a small village outside of Oaxaca (far south Mexico) a few years ago. I ventured into a cantina to see if I could find a cerveza. I struck up a conversation with the owner, whose English was a good deal better than my Spanish. I asked him where he’d learned it. Sure enough, he’d worked picking potatoes in the U.S. for several years, long enough to earn and save enough to buy his little cantina in his home town.

The point of that story is that many, probably most, illegal immigrants have no intention of staying in the U.S. very long. Most don’t care about U.S. citizenship. They have their extended families and roots in Mexico.

In my view we need two things from the federal government. First, we need an immigration program that works; where immigrants can come to the U.S. and work for a period of time. The point of the program is to have temporary immigrants documented and paying taxes into the system commensurately with the community services (police, fire, hospital, …) that they use when they’re here.

The second thing that’s obviously needed is strengthening of border security to the point that it is more desirable from an immigrants point of view to use the immigration system than it is to try to enter the U.S. illegally.

Right now we’re not getting either in federal legislation or action.

—W—

“The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.”

The courts have subsequently extended the meaning outside of the original words, to mean that individuals cannot sue any state and no state or person can sue the federal government. There are a few minor exceptions, but that’s basically it.

—W—