Religious right reaction to yesterday’s federal court decision blocking implementation of some parts of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, is illustrative of a split within the religious right on immigration reform.
Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice, which filed an amicus brief on behalf of 81 members of Congress defending the Arizona statute, called the court’s ruling “an extremely disappointing decision that further harms the citizens of Arizona.”
But Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel, who has been part of a group of evangelicals lobbying for immigration reform (albeit without equal rights for LGBT people), said:
I agree with the judge’s ruling because immigration is a federal, not a state issue. The rule of law expressly set forth in the U.S. Constitution regarding immigration compels me to conclude that the Arizona law is unconstitutional. If a state concluded that the federal government was doing an inadequate job of stabilizing the Iraqi government against insurgents, then that would not give that state the right to declare war against Al Qaeda. If a state concluded that the U.S. trade laws are bad, that does not give the state a right to develop its own trade policy with foreign countries. Neither may a state develop its own immigration law as Arizona sought to do. The remedy when the federal government fails in its duty to stop illegal immigration is to either change the Constitution to allow the states to do the job or change the federal elected officials and replace them with those who will do the job.
This is truly notable not only because Staver splits with Sekulow, but because he splits with the premise of tea party support for SB 1070: that the federal government is inept, and the states therefore have to defend themselves from what tea partiers portray as lawless intruders. In other words, Staver has rejected not only Arizona’s draconian crackdown; he has rejected the idea that states, rather than the federal government, should take matters into their own hands on immigration.
