Today, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a closely watched four-year-old, anti-immigrant city ordinance that made it illegal to rent to or hire undocumented immigrants in the town of Hazleton, PA. Latino and civil rights groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) successfully argued that the ordinance is preempted by federal law. The court concluded:

It is, of course, not our job to sit in judgment of whether state and local frustration about federal immigration policy is warranted. We are, however, required to intervene when states and localities directly undermine the federal objectives embodied in statutes enacted by Congress. The employment provisions of the IIRAO [Illegal Immigration Relief Act Ordinance] “stand[] as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution” of IRCA’s objectives, Hines, 312 U.S. at 67, and thus are pre-empted.

The appeals court decision upheld a U.S. District judge’s 2007 ruling which dismissed the ordinance, stating that “immigration law is the province of the federal government alone.” “This is a major defeat for the misguided, divisive and expensive anti-immigrant strategy that Hazleton has tried to export to the rest of the country,” said Omar Jadwat of the ACLU. “The Constitution does not allow states and cities to interfere with federal immigration laws or to adopt measures that discriminate against Latino and immigrant communities.”

However, a lot of the damage is already done. As many as 5,000 Latinos abandoned Hazleton as shopkeepers reported that their business dropped by 20%. In 2009, Hazleton was forced to ask a federal judge to reconsider a ruling made in favor of the city’s insurance carrier that would hold the city responsible for paying $2.4 million in attorney fees incurred from the lawsuit.

It’s not a coincidence that SB-1070 architects Kris Kobach and Michael M. Hethmon of the Immigration Reform Law Institute not only helped draft Hazleton’s anti-immigrant ordinance, but also defended it in court. Kobach has also been busy unsuccessfully defending a similar ordinance in Farmers Branch, TX. So far the small Texas town has spent $3.2 million to repeal a federal district judge decision which deemed the town’s rental ban ordinance unconstitutional and may have to spend an additional $623,000 this year. He was also recently hired to defend an almost identical ordinance that he helped draft for the town of Fremont, NE.

A federal judge recently enjoined several of the most significant provisions of SB-1070, similarly arguing that that “the United States is likely to succeed on the merits in showing that…[they] are preempted by federal law.”

Earlier this week, state Sen. Russell Pearce (R-AZ), the sponsor of Arizona’s newest immigration law, stated that he plans on introducing legislation that would require undocumented immigrant parents to pay tuition in order for their children to attend public schools in Arizona. However, Pearce’s proposal would be in clear violation of the historic Plyler vs. Doe decision in which the Supreme Court ruled against a state statute denying education funding to undocumented children in 1982. Nonetheless, in response to a question on whether Plyler vs. Doe will be “taken on,” Michael Hethmon, general counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), stated in an interview with the Dallas Morning News that “[w]e have already drafted up the legislation in several different states, and I am sure that to the extent that the wave of this unrest continues you will see it tried.”

To begin with, the IRLI is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant group that has most recently been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. While Pearce sponsored SB-1070, IRLI lawyers with an office based in Washington, DC were the brains responsible for crafting the legislation. IRLI describes itself as “America’s only public interest law organization working exclusively to protect the legal rights, privileges, and property of U.S. citizens and their communities from injuries and damages caused by unlawful immigration.” In other words, they get paid a lot of money to exploit fear and frustration over the nation’s broken immigration system by writing laws for states and localities that push the limits of legality and then make even more money when they get to defend them in court. So, chances are Hethmon has a pretty good idea about what kinds of anti-immigrant pieces of legislation his firm stands to profit from in the future.

With that said, challenging Plyler vs. Doe would likely be a costly legal battle. The majority opinion left little ambiguity. According to Justice William Brennan, the “denial of education to some isolated group of children poses an affront to one of the goals of the Equal Protection Clause: the abolition of governmental barriers presenting unreasonable obstacles to advancement on the basis of individual merit.” In his decision, Brennan cited the Brown v. Board of Education ruling which dictated that education “is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” Brennan also noted that not doing so isn’t even in the state’s interest. “It is difficult to understand precisely what the State hopes to achieve by promoting the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare, and crime,” noted Brennan while also adding that it probably wouldn’t be enough to cause undocumented immigrants to leave.

It would also be a logistical nightmare. Schools officials would basically become de facto immigration agents, checking the immigration status of all the students who register to receive public education. It’s also unclear exactly how high “tuition” would be, but it’s hard to believe it would make up for the exorbitant amount of money, training, and time associated with checking every student’s immigration status — resources that probably would be better spent on actual teaching. And if Pearce hypothetically succeeds in his ridiculous attempt to deny the American-born children of undocumented immigrants citizenship, not even a birth certificate would qualify as proof of legal residence.

Plyler vs. Doe probably isn’t going to stop Pearce or IRLI from moving forward with their attack on poor, mostly brown immigrants. And while it’s hard to say whether their efforts will get very far, their assault on children and babies shows just how far they’re willing to go on their “attrition through enforcement” crusade.

Yesterday, voters in Fremont, NE approved a measure which imposes a ban on hiring or renting property to undocumented immigrants. Renters will be required to apply for a license from the city and businesses will have to use the controversial E-Verify database to verify the immigration status of employees. Unlike Arizona’s unprecedented immigration law, SB-1070, that was recently passed, other localities have experimented with Fremont’s approach. And, for the most part, similar efforts haven’t just been costly and impractical, they’ve also been considered unconstitutional.

One of the first towns to enact the measures that were recently adopted by Fremont was Hazleton, PA. However, Hazleton didn’t get very far. In less than a year, a U.S. District judge dismissed the law and ruled that “immigration law is the province of the federal government alone.” However, a lot of the damage was already done. As many as 5,000 Latinos left town as shopkeepers reported that their business dropped by 20%. In 2009, Hazleton was forced to ask a federal judge to reconsider a ruling made in favor of the city’s insurance carrier that would hold the city responsible for paying $2.4 million in attorney fees incurred from the lawsuit.

The town of Riverside, NJ passed an almost identical law — but it didn’t wait for a judge to decide it was unconstitutional before rescinding it in 2007. At that point the town of 8,000 had spent $82,000 in legal fees defending its ordinance. Hundreds, “if not thousands” of residents abandoned the city, as “hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet.” A case in nearby Plainfield, NJ, hinted at how Riverside’s lawsuit would’ve likely ended had the town continued to pursue it. In reference to a lawsuit attempting to use anti-organized-crime laws to prevent a landlord from renting to undocumented immigrants in Plainfield, a federal judge ruled that “[r]enting an apartment to an alien does not amount to harboring.”

Currently, both Farmers Branch, TX and the state of Arizona are engaged in their own costly legal battles. Farmers Branch, a small town of 30,000 people, has spent $3.2 million to repeal a federal district judge decision which deemed the town’s rental ban ordinance unconstitutional and may have to spend an additional $623,000 this year. Arizona has taken its E-verify and employer sanctions law all the way to the Supreme Court. In an amicus brief filed last month, the Solicitor General wrote that the Arizona law “disrupt[s] a careful balance that Congress struck nearly 25 years ago between two interests of the highest importance: ensuring that employers do not undermine enforcement of immigration laws by hiring unauthorized workers, while also ensuring that employers not discriminate against racial and ethnic minorities legally in the country.”

While proponents of these measures argue that illegal immigration is costing local taxpayers a lot of money, chances are the questionable legality of laws like the one approved in Fremont, NE will cost them a lot more. The ACLU has already promised to take Fremont’s ordinance to court. Unfortunately the only winners of any legal battle are going to be the lawyers at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) — legal advocates who get paid to write laws that challenge the constitution and then make an even bigger profit when their work is tested in court.

When President Obama condemned Arizona’s draconian and potentially unconstitutional immigration law last Friday, he predicted that “if we continue to fail to act [on immigration] at a federal level, we will continue to see misguided efforts to open up across the country.” Indeed, it’s already happening.

Last week, Wonk Room reported on the involvement of the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) — the legal arm of a designated nativist-extremist hate group — in drafting Arizona’s controversial immigration law. IRLI lawyer Michael Hethmon boasting about being “approached by lawmakers from four other states who have asked for advice on how they can do the same thing.” In the aftermath of the passage of Arizona’s law, many states and localities across the country are in fact in the middle of or about to embark on copy cat pieces of legislation:

The more controversial and problematic a law is, the more IRLI lawyers stand to make if they’re involved. Since September 2006, Farmer’s Branch has spent $3.2 million on the legal fight and may have to spend an additional $1.13 million. In Arizona, IRLI lawyer Kris Kobach makes about $300 per hour to train Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s officers in immigration matters. Kobach has kept busy because Arpaio is currently the subject of a racial profiling investigation by the Department of Justice and has 2,700 lawsuits sitting on his desk as a result of his immigration policing tactics.

Arizona might be their biggest profit-making venture yet considering the fact that civil rights activists are confident the new law will make it to the Supreme Court and there is even talk of the federal government suing the state of Arizona. However, IRLI’s gain is Arizona’s loss. Not only will Arizona’s legislation cost the state in terms of litigation fees, if the law succeeds in reaching its goal of ridding the state of undocumented immigrants, it’s estimated that Arizona will lose $26.4 billion in economic activity, $11.7 billion in gross state product, and approximately 140,324 jobs.