Red States Can Stop Illegal Immigration Now

Unleash Employer Sanctions

Take away the jobs and they will leave.

Are we truly unable to stop illegal immigration?  Today, that’s basically the consensus across the political spectrum.  But it’s a falsehood, one that’s convenient for both major political parties.

The Democratic Left shrugs and looks the other way as illegals pour into America.  They believe it’s in their political interest to flood the country with immigrants who will eventually support them at the ballot box.  And it pleases them to see our national borders trampled and torn down. 

Republican leaders increasingly shrug and sigh as well.  They insist the solution is to elect more Republican officials at the federal level (with them it’s always “vote for me”).  When their constituents express alarm about our broken borders, they typically change the subject to the next election cycle—so they can avoid accountability and continue to treat elections as a jobs program for themselves.  Judging from most conservative-leaning leaders and media, the Right seems content to blame President Joe Biden, film and upload videos of illegals congregating in border towns, and cheer Republican leaders for doing mere publicity stunts, such as shipping illegals to Kamala Harris’ home or Martha’s Vineyard. 

If that’s the best we can do, we’ll continue to watch our country dissolve.  But it’s not.

There’s a critical tool that states can use right now that will send illegals fleeing back home or, at a minimum, to blue states that eschew such measures.  I know because I helped forge this tool and wielded it with great success.

It’s called employer sanctions.  Every state in the union can and should pass an employer-sanctions law and add this potent weapon to their arsenal.  Any state that fails to do so and use it will be exposed as complicit in the shredding of our national sovereignty.

Take Away the Jobs and They Will Leave

The law that I helped write for Arizona while I was Maricopa County Attorney was named the Legal Arizona Workers Act.  It allows for prosecutors to seek the revocation of business licenses from those businesses that repeatedly and knowingly hire illegal immigrants.  This legal arm was extremely effective once deployed in the Arizona economy.  When we started using it, businesses got the message—and so did their illegal workers.

That law was combined with enforcement of Arizona’s human-smuggling law to roust the state’s population of illegal immigrants.  The latter legislation made it a state crime for an illegal immigrant to be smuggled into the state.  I helped write that law as well, personally intervening during the legislative process to make sure it wasn’t hijacked by do-nothing business interests.  I spoke to its sponsor in the Arizona Senate and told her the original human-smuggling legislation she had drafted, which was acceptable to state business interests, was essentially worthless because it failed to tackle the present danger of illegals flooding our state.  Once she realized this, she amended the legislation, pushed it through both state houses, and plopped a tough human-smuggling law on the Governor’s desk.  Then Governor Janet Napolitano, a Democratic leftist who nevertheless wanted a political future, didn’t dare veto it.

The Legal Arizona Workers Act and human-smuggling law became a mighty tandem.  Those two laws more than any others allowed me, working with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, to reverse the state’s baleful immigration trends and send illegals scampering to other states or their countries of origin.

Unfortunately, only one of these two weapons survives.  The Left and RINO allies in the Chamber of Commerce challenged both laws in court.  The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Legal Arizona Workers Act.  However, the court tossed the human-smuggling law and most other state immigration crackdowns known collectively as SB 1070 (the name of the legislative bill).

Even so, the one major law that remains is good enough.  If enforced, state employer-sanctions laws will sap illegal immigration of its main enticement:  money.  If the work dries up, most illegals will leave.  At worst, they will move from the states that pass and enforce such laws to blue states that don’t.

A Call to Action for the Grassroots

With such a powerful legal device waiting to be implemented, why are states not using employer sanctions?  This is where the familiar dark alliance of the Left and RINOs enters the picture.  In Arizona, our great success with the law infuriated the Left and Chamber of Commerce interests.  I was the only prosecutor willing to use the law.  That made me a prime target, and when the ruling class went after me as they’re now hammering President Trump, other county prosecutors backed off.  I was the only county attorney in Arizona’s 15 counties who ever brought an employer-sanctions case, and I remain so today more than a decade after leaving office.  Prosecutors in other states seem to have gotten the message, as well, as there are no reported cases of state-level employer-sanctions actions in other jurisdictions.

How do we turn this around?  We must insist that state lawmakers, especially in red states, pass employer-sanctions laws.  Also, we must incentivize prosecutors and local law-enforcement officials to use this tool.

That means a couple of things.  First, conservative and patriot grassroots activists must apply political pressure on their state lawmakers to ensure the law is passed and enforced.  Second, and just as important, we must protect the most vulnerable link in the chain of enforcement:  prosecutors.  In recent years, the mirage of legal fairness in this country has disappeared, as we see MAGA politicians unable to find competent attorneys to represent them in court and prosecutors unwilling to intervene in election-integrity disputes because of leftist attacks on pro-MAGA attorneys and their livelihoods.  The Left controls State Bars and the law licenses of prosecutors and are not afraid to use this dirty tactic to shut down the opposition.  Prosecutors understandably are reluctant to become a one-man charge of the light brigade on behalf of border security.

Breaking the Left’s stranglehold on these legal processes is a paramount task and the subject of a future column.  For now, it is enough for red-state leaders to stop saying there’s nothing they can do to fight illegal immigration.  They can enact employer sanctions and carry out their duties accordingly.  Illegal immigration can be stopped now, as we stopped it in Arizona.  Even if we can’t arrest them at the state level as we once did, we can take away their economic incentive for coming and staying.  That is enough to stop the current trends cold.