Texas is challenging 150 years of immigration law | MR Online

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% : "The Arizona case was an emphatic restatement of this core authority... the near-exclusive federal power over immigration," said Peter Spiro, professor of international law at Temple University.
52% : "What the Texas Legislature has passed is unprecedented in that it is a complete override of the federal government's authority in immigration," said Adriana Piñon, legal director of the ACLU of Texas, which has already announced it will sue the state over the law.
51% : If there's anything left to the norm against state action in immigration, [the court] will dispatch with this law.
49% : Both a reactionary opportunist and a savvy lawyer, Texas' top executive has used his enterprise to test the boundaries between state and federal authority and to try to free Texas from strictures imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
49% : Prior to the Great Recession, America had seen high levels of unauthorized immigration for years; now the "Tea Party" revolt was in full swing.
49% : A Kansas attorney named Kris Kobach was helping cook up new policies around the country on the theory that state and local officials had "inherent" authority to enforce immigration law.
49% : "It goes into the core of immigration regulation, which well before the Arizona case, the Supreme Court indicated you can't do," said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
48% : "Either the Arizona decision will have to go, giving states full authority to enforce U.S. immigration law, or [Plyler v. Doe] will have to go," meaning the feds would start footing the bill for educating kids without legal status.
47% : Of three conservative dissents, the most extensive and radical in the Arizona case came from now-deceased Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote that the majority holding "deprives States of what most would consider the defining characteristic of sovereignty: the power to exclude from the sovereign's territory people who have no right to be there," grounding his argument in the historical claim that states during the Republic's first century restricted immigration of "convicted criminals, indigents, persons with contagious diseases, and (in Southern States) freed blacks.
45% : but the State may not pursue policies that undermine federal law.
30% : Spiller claimed the bill was actually not a bid to overturn Arizona: "It's not in conflict with federal law," he said.
21% : In this fall's third and fourth special legislative sessions, Abbott specifically called for bills criminalizing illegal entry and authorizing state deportations.
16% : Last May, during a stop in Houston, Abbott criticized both the Arizona precedent and a landmark 1982 ruling that required states to fund public education for undocumented children.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.