The Supreme Court ruled that the Arizona law penalizing employers who knowingly employ illegal aliens is constitutional.

Note that this law is a distinct entity from Arizona’s “Papers Please” law, this law simply applies penalties on employers who are found to have deliberately hired illegals, which is a pretty high bar in the real world:

The 2007 law in question, known as the Legal Arizona Workers Act, or LAWA, allows state authorities to suspend, and if necessary, to revoke the business licences of employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. Even more striking, the law also mandates that employers adopt a workplace verification system known as “E-Verify” to screen prospective employees based on their legal status.

Two lower courts ruled in 2008 that LAWA was constitutional, despite furious challenges from a coalition of civil rights and immigration rights organisations, and business groups, which saw the sanctions law as likely to interfere with their ability to hire cheap foreign labour. The two lower courts, and now the US supreme court, cited a critical but little-known 1976 supreme court decision upholding a state employer sanctions law in California, as well as the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA, which established a new federal employer sanctions regime, but explicitly excluded issues relating to “business licencing” from the scope of the law.

I have mixed emotions on this.

On the whole, an aggressive program of sanctions against employers who flout immigration laws to save money is a good thing, but I also believe that this action should be done at the federal, not the state level.