Negative Population Growth Sees Supreme Court Ruling on Arizona as a Call to Congress to Increase the Penalties for Illegal Immigration

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 27, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Negative Population Growth President Don Mann voiced disappointment over the Supreme Court's decision Monday to overturn three of the four contested provisions of Arizona's controversial 2010 immigration enforcement law, SB 1070.

"This decision, coming in the wake of President Obama's directive to Homeland Security to defer deportation (perhaps permanently) of some 1.4 million illegal aliens, worsens the paralyzing inconsistency among law, regulation and presumed prosecutorial discretion now confounding rational immigration enforcement." 

Mann saw some encouragement in the court's confirmation of a valid state role in immigration enforcement and in the fact that a number of other deterrents to illegal immigration built into SB 1070 survived.  Those surviving features, he hoped, combined with the Court's recent decision upholding Arizona's requirement of electronic verification (E-Verify) of employment eligibility for most hires in the state, could serve as a model and encouragement to other states beset by heavy illegal immigration.

"But the court's decision," Mann added, "points out the urgency of Congressional action to limit presidential discretion on enforcement and to pass pending legislation and mandate E-verify for all employers."  Mann concluded that if Congress is serious about depriving illegal aliens of means and motive for remaining here, it must legislate penalties on the aliens themselves who remain and work in the U.S. without legal status.

Mann again warned that mass immigration, legal and illegal, now drives America's disastrous population growth – adding nearly 60 million persons in the last two decades.  "There is no prospect of population stability, or even slower growth," he added, "without curbing mass immigration."

Mann saw the court's ruling as a disappointment but not a mortal blow to rational enforcement, reaffirming NPG's continuing willingness to work with federal, state and local elected officials to end the nation's severely impaired system of immigration enforcement.     

SOURCE Negative Population Growth