“People come here to have babies,” he said. “They come here to drop a child. It’s called “drop and leave.” To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child’s automatically an American citizen. That shouldn’t be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons.”

Plans to remove automatic citizenship for people born in the U.S. are floated from time to time, mostly to combat what Graham called the “drop and leave” phenomenon: immigrants having babies who can later help them obtain citizenship (see also: “anchor babies“). The 14th Amendment grants citizenship to anyone born in the U.S., but since children must be 21 to petition for their parents to come to the U.S., immigrant’s rights groups contest the idea that “anchor babies” exist at all.

That hasn’t stopped lawmakers: 92 House members signed on to a 2009 bill that would restrict citizenship to children born to at least one parent who is a citizen, legal permanent resident or military member.

Still, even if these ideas became law — opposition from the left and the difficulty of amending the Constitution virtually assure they would not — the effort would probably be shot down by the Supreme Court. The Court ruled twice in favor of citizenship for people born in the U.S. regardless of their parents’ status.

Now that the Justice Department has shown that it will fight — and triumph over — states that try taking the lead on immigration, the Associated Press runs down what the judge’s ruling means for copy-cat states:

Lawmakers or candidates in as many as 18 states say they want to push similar measures when their legislative sessions start up again in 2011. Some lawmakers pushing the legislation said they would not be daunted by the ruling and plan to push ahead in response to what they believe is a scourge that needs to be tackled. [...]

In the meantime, other states like Utah will likely take up similar laws, possibly redesigned to get around Bolton’s objections.

“The ruling … should not be a reason for Utah to not move forward,” said Utah state Rep. Carl Wimmer, a Republican from Herriman City, who said he plans to co-sponsor a bill similar to Arizona’s next year and wasn’t surprised it was blocked. “For too long the states have cowered in the corner because of one ruling by one federal judge.”

Other state and local lawmakers have also said they plan to continue pushing Arizona-like legislation. In Tennessee, state senators told The Tennessean they will introduce legislation similar to SB 1070 when the legislature returns in January, while the South Carolina GOP vowed in a statement that the SB 1070 ruling would not deter them from creating a state immigration law.

If the SB 1070 ruling isn’t a deterrent, the high cost of lawsuits might be. On Tuesday — before the SB 1070 ruling — litigation from civil rights groups pushed a Nebraska city to suspend its tough immigration law.

Most Americans were dissatisfied or angry with the number of illegal immigrants currently in the country, but whites indicated the most discomfort: 54 percent said they were dissatisfied with the level of illegal immigration, while 24 percent said they were angry. CNN breaks down some of the results:

“Anger is highest among blue-collar white men,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Thirty-seven percent of white men with no college degree say they are angry about illegal immigration. That figure drops to 27 percent among white women with no college degree, and to 15 percent among whites who graduated from college.”

At Huffington Post, activist Randall Amster makes a case today for why people are angry and afraid — and the dangers of this fear for Hispanics:

One of the unspoken tragedies and implicit intentions of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, is the promotion of a climate of fear among certain segments of the population. This fear-mongering strategy has been cooked up by the bill’s leading proponents and most likely beneficiaries: the governor, rightwing state legislators, and an unscrupulous sheriff who shall remain nameless. As the political leadership of a failing state, they should be squarely on the hot seat, but instead they have managed to deflect scrutiny and pass the buck down the ladder to the bottom rung instead.

Here in Arizona, constant talk of murders, beheadings, escalating crime, and a rising tide of violence due to the presence of illegal immigrants has fanned the flames of terror and suspicion. It is empirically false but emotionally persuasive, in the true spirit of propaganda and demagoguery.

When Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer endorsed Jane Norton’s bid to oust Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) this past weekend, for instance, she emphasized Norton’s tough-on-immigration reputation: “Jane will fight Barack Obama’s heavy-handed and unconstitutional attempt to block Arizona’s landmark immigration law. She supports the right of states like Arizona and Colorado to do what the federal government hasn’t – fight back against illegal immigration – and that’s why I’m honored and excited to support Jane Norton.”

Norton said at a forum last week that she supports the Arizona law. “Our immigration system is absolutely broken, and the Arizona law is a natural response to a policy that is not doing what it’s supposed to be doing,” she said.

The reason? Despite controversy over the law, it’s popular overall, particularly in Colorado. Most Coloradans are in favor of passing an Arizona-style immigration law — and conservative politicians are using that to their advantage. At our sister site, The Colorado Independent, John Tomasic reports on Tom Tancredo’s use of immigration politics to jump into the race for governor:

Former Colorado Congressman Tancredo ran for president in 2008 on what he has called a one-topic platform that focused exclusively on illegal immigration. Tancredo hosts a talk radio show in which he often discusses immigration as a centerpiece part of his conservative politics. He made news in the spring for traveling to the U.S. border in Arizona and tweeting the murder of a borderland rancher and the pursuit for the killer, an alleged illegal immigrant or trafficker in illegal immigration. He has also spoken at events in support of Arizona’s controversial new immigration law, SB 1070.

Sunday, he told listeners on his KHOW radio show that he was prepared to draw on his 20,000-member donor list to jump into the race immediately. The candidacy of Tancredo, an icon of the far right in Colorado, will sink any chance the struggling GOP candidates have of winning Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter’s office.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that supporters of enforcement are satisfied with Obama administration immigration policies, as Peter Slevin reports at The Washington Post:

While the administration focuses on some illegal immigrants with criminal records, others are allowed to remain free, creating a “sense of impunity. As long as they keep their heads down, they’re in the clear. That’s no way of enforcing immigration law,” said Mark Krikorian, a supporter of stricter policies with the Center for Immigration Studies.

“Even the ones who haven’t committed murder or rape or drug offenses, all of them have committed federal felonies,” Krikorian said. He favors employer audits, but also the roundups that Obama has largely abandoned.

Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) similarly believes the administration is showing “apathy toward robust immigration enforcement.” He said at a House hearing in March that the approach is nothing more than “selective amnesty.”

Lower rates of illegal immigration have not softened harsh rhetoric from the right, either. Gregory Rodriguez at the LA Times questions why immigration has become such a big issue this year even though illegal immigration is down:

The easy answer, of course, is that the economy is tough and historically people have looked for targets to blame for their feelings of impotence.

But today I think there are other contributing factors. The political discourse overall is pretty horrific, and while immigration has always brought out the worst in people, today’s polarized climate only makes matters worse.

Furthermore, the right wing, where much of the anti-immigrant frenzy comes from, no longer has an authoritative voice of reason pressing for decency on the issue. Four years ago, after President George W. Bush unsuccessfully launched his own effort at comprehensive immigration reform, he warned against “harsh, ugly rhetoric.” Today, Bush is hardly heard from and the right has an “open borders” policy on over-the-top rhetoric. [...]

There may be those who see hatred as a justifiable means to an end. Perhaps they hope that all this harsh rhetoric will keep even more illegal immigrants at home. But they’d be silly to think that such invective only makes life harder for immigrants. Unfortunately, it also actively degrades our culture, our public square and our democracy.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano today confirmed that it still doesn’t.

Sen.Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) just asked her what progress has been made. Napolitano responded that while they’re tracking people more effectively when they fly into or out of the country, they still haven’t figured out how to know when and how many people have overstayed their visas.

“I don’t think we can say with precsion what percent of people are staying over their visas,” said Napolitano.  Immigrants who’ve overstayed their visas may be discovered if they get arrested for a crime, she said, through the recently expanded Secure Communities program, which fingerprints everyone in local jails and sends that information to DHS. “We hope in the next few years to have it in every jail across the country,” said Napolitano.

Feinstein seemed exasperated. “I’ve been trying at this for nine or 10 years now,” she said. “When will we have a system when we will be able to know if visa waivers have left the country? We keep increasing the pool of countries. We’re now [at] 35 countries that people can come in without a visa. Yet we don’t have the data as to whether they leave. So the blame of the illegal immigration problem is put on poor people who come over the border, when they may not be the main part of the problem. We have no way of knowing.”

For far too long, America failed to secure its borders. As a result, people failed to respect those borders and millions of illegal immigrants swept across. But efforts in recent years to restore the rule of law—such as building barriers and increasing prosecutions—are sending a clear message to the world. As a result, illegal border crossings are down. Statistics show that border apprehensions fell from over 1.6 million at the beginning of the decade to around 550,000 last year. This is a promising development, but the task of securing America’s borders is far from complete.

Actually, migration experts attribute the slowing if illegal immigration to the United States not to new barriers and prosecutions but to the recession, which has slowed the demand for workers. Still, prosecutions for immigration violations have reached record levels in the past few years. Napolitano’s pledge to focus worksite enforcement on employers who knowingly hire illegal workers rather than on the workers themselves has, however, disappointed Sessions.

Unfortunately, on the crucial policy of worksite enforcement, the administration is moving in the opposite direction. They have effectively signaled to our law enforcement officers that they should turn a blind eye to clear violations of the law. The no-match rule—a commonsense policy that required employers to take action if notified that their employees did not have legal status—has been brushed aside in favor of much more lenient administrative audits. Perhaps most perplexing, worksite raids no longer result in deportation, meaning that even if discovered, illegal aliens are allowed to walk free and seek employment elsewhere. This lax approach is particularly troubling at a time when so many American citizens are struggling to find jobs.

It’s not at all clear that DHS has not been deporting illegal immigrants arrested in workplace raids. Although Napolitano did say she’d focus her efforts on employers, as did the Bush administration, workers are still arrested during “workplace enforcement actions,” as Immigration and Customs Enforcement likes to call them. Some of those workers may be allowed to remain in the United States temporarily to act as witnesses against the employer, however, if the government plans to prosecute. That happened in the case of workers at the Yamato Engine Specialists Ltd. plant in Bellingham, Wash., for example. They are now again facing deportation.

Regardless, Sessions made clear that the treatment of illegal immigrant workers in the United States is sure to be a point of contention at Wednesday’s Senate hearing.

Secretary Napolitano is America’s top immigration enforcement official, and I look forward to discussing with her these and other important immigration issues. Her recent comments that our progress on border security opens the door to consideration of new amnesty policies are disturbing. That faulty view will be a focus of the hearing.

That should make this morning’s hearing interesting. I’ll be following it and will report back.

Writing in today’s New York Times, Roger Mahony, the cardinal archbishop of Los Angeles, points out several other reasons why the Senate bill makes little sense as it pertains to illegal immigrants.

When undocumented immigrants are intentionally excluded from health care coverage, they are forced to go to the only place where they will be accepted for care: trauma centers and emergency rooms — the most expensive health care delivery systems in the country. What a foolish waste of money, particularly in a time of economic stress for everyone.

Using their own money, undocumented immigrants could receive basic health services through less expensive community clinics and doctors’ offices. Studies have shown that immigrants are generally younger and healthier than citizens, and use health care facilities and resources less frequently. Giving them access to less costly preventive care would help keep them that way. And by paying into the system, immigrants would make health care less pricey for all by spreading the risks and costs among a larger pool of participants.

Not that the Senate language is set in stone. Indeed, the House health care bill, while banning illegal immigrants from gaining subsidies on the exchange, has no such prohibition on their buying insurance at full cost with their own money.