Immigration and Civil Rights: State and Local Efforts to Regulate Immigration

This Essay explains why U.S. immigration law andenforcement raises some of the nation's most pressing civilrights concerns of the twenty-first century. First,immigration and immigration enforcement implicate agreater diversity of "people of color," including people ofLatina/o and Asian ancestry, than that encapsulated bythe Black/white paradigm that historically hasdominated thinking about civil rights in the UnitedStates. Second, immigration enforcement implicates civilrights concerns different in kind than those raised by themonumental efforts to dismantle Jim Crow anddesegregate American social life, which constituted thelong and hard-fought civil rights achievement of thetwentieth century.This Essay considers how the current legal analysis ofthe constitutionality of the spate of state and localimmigration measures often focuses on federal preemptionand the Supremacy Clause and not the civil rights ofimmigrants. It does so by reviewing the Supreme Court's2011 decision in Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting, whichaddresses a federal preemption challenge to Arizona'seffort to regulate immigration through a businesslicensing law.

The Essay proceeds to consider the impactof the Whiting decision on the court of appeals'invalidation of core immigration provisions of Arizona'sS.B. 1070 in United States v. Arizona, perhaps the mostcontroversial state immigration regulation measure ofrecent memory. I analyze the civil rights concerns at thecore of state and local efforts to regulate immigration.