These Cities Are Trying to Bully Undocumented Immigrants Out of Town

Mindy Schauer/The Orange County Register/ZUMAPress

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


As House Speaker John Boehner continues to block immigration reform, a couple of US cities are pushing laws that would run immigrants out of town.

Last month, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and Farmers Branch, Texas, asked the Supreme Court to hear cases challenging city ordinances that make it illegal for landlords to rent to undocumented immigrants. Both cities say that the high court should uphold their local laws, which have been struck down in lower courts, because a US appeals court recently upheld similar legislation passed by the town of Fremont, Nebraska.

But immigrant advocates say that the two cities’ laws are doomed because they are very similar to Arizona’s draconian immigration law, passed in 2010, which also criminalized being an immigrant. The Supreme Court invalidated most of the provisions of Arizona’s statute in June 2012 because they interfered with the federal government’s authority over immigration. Both the Hazleton and Farmers Branch laws were struck down by lower courts for this precise reason.

“The Supreme Court spoke clearly in the Arizona decision about overriding the federal role of immigration enforcement,” says Sam Brooks of the Souther Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project. Not only are these types of laws likely unconstitutional, he adds, they encourage racial profiling by community members worried about giving leases to the wrong people.

Other towns have proposed laws that would stop landlords from renting to undocumented immigrants. San Bernardino, California, was the first to consider such a law in 2006. It was eventually voted down. Valley Park, Missouri, enacted this type of ordinance in 2006. It was challenged twice but upheld by a federal court in 2008. Scores of other municipalities and states have considered legislation that mimics the city housing ordinances and Arizona’s law.

Most of the anti-immigrant statutes can be traced back to one man: Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas and chief counsel at the conservative Immigration Law Reform Institute (ILRI). Kobach helped craft the laws in Arizona, Hazleton, Farmers Branch, Fremont, and Valley Park, and has defended them in court.

ILRI is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which was founded by John Tanton, an English-only advocate who has ties to white supremacists.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate