Earlier this month, ThinkProgress reported that immigration from Mexico into the United States reached a “net zero” level. Yet a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center reveals that more Mexicans appear to be leaving the United States for Mexico than are leaving Mexico for the U.S.A for the first time since the Great Depression.

The report notes several factors that are likely behind the change including tighter borders, including a weakened U.S. economy and a rise in deportations. But most interesting are two factors that may indicate that the trend may be lasting. First, the birthrate in Mexico has dropped. Between 1960 and 2009, the average Mexican woman went from having nine children to just two. As such the Mexican population has dropped. Second, the Mexican economy has improved. With a relatively strong economy, there is less incentive for citizens to emigrate.

For years, the U.S. immigration debate has been built around an assumption that there are large numbers of Mexican nationals trying to move into the U.S. — legally and illegally. This report suggests that this assumption may need to be re-evaluated. As Princeton Professor Douglas Massey, who co-directs the Mexican Migration Project, told the Washington Post, “I think the massive boom in Mexican immigration is over and I don’t think it will ever return to the numbers we saw in the 1990s and 2000s.”

In Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court justified its conclusion that corporations and wealthy individuals can spend unlimited money to influence elections because it believed that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” According to a recent survey conducted for the Brennan Center for Justice, however, this places the five conservatives who joined this opinion in very lonely company. According to the poll, “69% of respondents agreed that ‘new rules that let corporations, unions and people give unlimited money to Super PACs will lead to corruption.’ Only 15% disagreed.”

To put this in perspective, a 2007 poll found that 19 percent of Americans believe in “spells or witchcraft,” and that’s just one of the supernatural beliefs that are more common than agreement with the conservative justices’ bizarre reasoning in Citizens United:

Put Conrad, a homemaker from Hampton, Va., firmly in the camp of the 34% of people who say they believe in ghosts, according to a pre-Halloween poll by The Associated Press and Ipsos. That’s the same proportion who believe in unidentified flying objects — exceeding the 19% who accept the existence of spells or witchcraft. . . .

A smaller but still substantial 23% say they have actually seen a ghost or believe they have been in one’s presence, . . . Three in 10 have awakened sensing a strange presence in the room.

To be fair, only 14 percent of Americans believe that they have personally seen a UFO, or one percent less than those who think that Citizens United was correctly decided.

Mitt Romney had the most conservative immigration policy of any Republican presidential candidate during most of the primary, but now that’s he trying to appeal to Hispanic voters as he pivots to general election, the presumed GOP nominee has been shifting back towards the center. Yesterday, he opened to door to a Republican alternative to the DREAM Act — a law he vowed to veto during the primary — and earlier, he said that he never called for making Arizona’s harsh immigration law a “model” for the nation.

But that’s not how one of the key people behind that law, former Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, sees it. The former Republican lawmaker, who was ousted in a recall election, was the key force behind turning SB-1070, authored by Romney adviser Kris Kobach, into law.

He told reporters today that he “absolutely” believed Mitt Romney had endorsed the law as a model for the country. The Huffington Post’s Elise Foley reports:

“The folks that he’s said [are] his advisers on this, I have worked with for years and have great confidence and trust in them,” Pearce told reporters after a Senate subcommittee hearing on the immigration law. “I know Romney is a compassionate man, most of us, I’d like to think, are. But I think he also understands the crisis and the damage to this republic and the need to enforce our law.” [...]

Romney also has advocated for what he called “self-deportation,” or making things difficult for undocumented immigrants until they decide to leave, one of the central tenets of the Arizona law. [...] “[Self-deportation] is in SB 1070,” Pearce said.

Previously, Pearce has said that Romney’s “immigration policy is identical to mine.”

Romney has tried to distance himself from Kobach, who also helped author the controversial immigration crackdowns in Alabama, South Carolina, and other states. But Kobach quickly contradicted him, saying he regularly advises senior members of Romney’s staff.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions knows something about what it means to be unfit for the federal bench. In 1986, the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected Session’s nomination to a federal judgeship in Alabama after a Justice Department attorney revealed that Sessions called the NAACP and the ACLU “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” Unfortunately, rather than gaining some humility from this incident, the now-Sen. Sessions seems to be finding questionably qualified nominees under every rock he can lift:

Sessions was one of [Justice Elena] Kagan’s toughest critics on the Senate Judiciary Committee when she was nominated by President Obama in 2010. Last week, he revived his complaints about her when he became one of only two committee members to vote against Maine lawyer William J. Kayatta Jr., whom Obama nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit.

Kayatta’s transgression, according to Sessions, is that he was the lead investigator for the American Bar Association panel that gave nominee Kagan its highest rating — “Unanimous Well-Qualified.”

Given that Kagan had never been a judge and had little experience in private practice, Sessions said, such a rating “was not only unsupported by the record but, in my opinion, the product of political bias.”

For the record, Justice Kagan was the sitting Solicitor General, a former Dean of the Harvard Law School, a former White House attorney and senior policy staffer and a former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall when she was nominated to the Supreme Court. The idea that she wasn’t well qualified for her current job is absurd.

The legal doctrine at the heart of tomorrow’s Supreme Court argument concerning Arizona’s harsh immigration law is known as “preemption.” Because the Constitution makes federal law the “supreme law of the land,” federal law preempts any state law that conflicts with it and it can even invalidate laws which undermine the goals of federal legislation. Thus, the Obama Administration argues, the Arizona law is invalid because it systematically undermines the balance struck by our federal immigration system.

Under existing law, there is little question that the administration is correct. For at least seventy years, the Supreme Court understood that state immigration laws are almost always preempted, and for good reason. Foreign nations do not take kindly to mistreatment of their citizens within the United States, and such mistreatment can have catastrophic consequences. In the Court’s words, “[e]xperience has shown that international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war, may arise from real or imagined wrongs to another’s subjects inflicted, or permitted, by a government.”

As a bipartisan group of senior State and Defense officials warned the justices in an amicus brief, Arizona’s law “risk[s] embroiling the national government in disputes not of its making,” forcing the entire nation to live with the consequences of just one rogue state’s actions. Foreign policy decisions should be made by officials elected to govern the entire United States, not just one of fifty states, and so the Supreme Court has historically respected the federal government’s exclusive authority over immigration policy.

Significantly, the rule favoring preemption of state immigration law distinguishes immigration from most other areas of law. Neither America’s national security nor its foreign policy is as clearly implicated by laws protecting consumers, workers, children or the elderly, so state laws protecting these groups has not historically been subject to sweeping claims of preemption. In these cases, the courts apply a “presumption against pre-emption,” and seek to preserve state law unless Congress clearly intended otherwise.

In other words, the balance of power between the federal and state governments has been clear for many decades. Just as Arizona is not allowed to declare war on Mexico or negotiate a free trade agreement with China, it also may not set its own immigration policy because foreign policy matters must be decided by the national government. Arizona is free, however, to protect the health, safety and economic prosperity of its citizens by regulating businesses and ensure that all products sold within the state are safe.

Both parts of this balance of power are now threatened by the conservatives on the Roberts Court.

On the domestic front, many of the Court’s conservatives appear eager to simply eliminate the presumption against preemption in favor of a new presumption in favor of wealthy corporations. Thus, several of the Court’s conservatives joined a dissent claiming that the existence of FDA regulation of the drug industry immunized drug companies from a lawsuit brought by a woman who lost her arm and her livelihood to a dangerous drug. And this is hardly the only example of the conservative justices aggressively trying to wipe out state laws protecting ordinary Americans from corporate excesses.

Tomorrow’s case asks the justices to reverse the equally well-established rule against permitting states to set their own immigration laws. If the justices take Arizona up on this request, the consequences will not simply be felt by the thousands of immigrants forced into the shadows by Arizona’s illegal law. It will be felt by all Americans as our nation’s foreign policy suffers, and as the Roberts Court once again shows their disregard for the law.