The New York Times reports today that “the Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether Arizona may impose tough anti-immigration measures. Among them, in a law enacted last year, is a requirement that the police there question people they stop about their immigration status.”

ABC News reports ”the case will be argued sometime this spring,” adding that, “although deeply opposed to the law, the Obama administration had asked the Supreme Court to refrain from taking up the case at this juncture.”

Kris Kobach, current Kansas secretary of state and the coauthor of S.B. 1070 and other immigration enforcement-only efforts, wrote in May 2010: “[S.B. 1070] makes it a state crime for an alien to commit certain federal immigration violations while in Arizona.”

S.B. 1070 was passed by the Arizona Legislature in the first months of 2010, and was signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer in April; the measure was immediately challenged by the Obama administration.

The Times adds that the Obama administration “challenged four provisions” of S.B. 1070: “The most prominent was a requirement that state law enforcement officials determine the immigration status of anyone they stop or arrest if officials have reason to believe that the individual might be an illegal immigrant.”

According to ABC News, “similar legislation is pending in Utah, South Carolina, Indiana, Georgia and Alabama.”

The Supreme Court of the United States Blog writes today: “The Arizona measure, and one in Alabama that goes even further, were passed by state legislatures with the specific intent of making life so difficult for undocumented aliens that they would choose to leave the state. Other states are also passing similar measures.”

“Arizona’s infamous anti-immigrant law, SB 1070,” and other similar state laws, according to the Immigration Policy Center, ”impose unfunded mandates on the police, jails, and courts; drive away workers, taxpayers, and consumers upon whom the state economy depends; and invite costly lawsuits and tourist boycotts. These are economic consequences which few states can afford at a time of gaping budget deficits.”

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, “Republican Russell Pearce, lost by 53 percent to 45 percent with all precincts reported, according to the Maricopa County Elections office. Pearce, 64, was defeated by Jerry Lewis, a Republican school administrator who has said he opposes Pearce’s enforcement-only approach to immigration policy.”

Businessweek adds: “Pearce, the first state officeholder in Arizona to face a recall election, became prominent nationally after lawmakers passed an immigration law in 2010 that sparked national boycotts.”

Pearce was not alone in his defense and support of S.B. 1070. Kris Kobach, current Kansas secretary of state and the coauthor of S.B. 1070 and other immigration enforcement-only efforts wrote in May: “[S.B. 1070] makes it a state crime for an alien to commit certain federal immigration violations while in Arizona,” adding that, “far from inviting racial profiling, the Arizona law actually makes racial profiling less likely.”

The Federation for American Immigration Reform — known as FAIR, a stong supporter of S.B. 1070 — writes:

“Alabama is now the number one state for immigration enforcement,” stated Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Kobach, who is also of counsel to the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), helped draft Alabama’s new law along with the bill’s sponsors, State Sen. Scott Beason and State Rep. Mickey Hammon.

Alabama, Georgia and several other states have followed in Arizona’s steps, passing similar immigration enforcement laws.

The National Immigration Forum writes: ”Pearce was one of the most powerful politicians in Arizona. Citizens in the very conservative district elected him six straight times,” adding that, “the defeat of Russell Pearce sends a loud and clear message that American voters are tired of politicians exploiting the immigration issue for cheap political points instead of focusing on real solutions to our immigration system.”

Pearce writes:

I believe it is wrong to allow liberal special interest groups to overturn the voters’ will. I was elected less than one year ago as the State Senator representing District 18. Liberal special interest groups from outside of District 18 and with funding from undisclosed sources organized a recall petition drive to overturn the will of the voters. If my Republican opponents wanted to replace me, there is a method — run in the primary and general elections in less than a year.

Businessweek adds that another candidate,

Olivia Cortes, pulled out after her candidacy was challenged as a sham. A judge found in October that Pearce’s supporters helped get Cortes on the ballot to draw votes that might otherwise go to Lewis. While votes for Cortes didn’t count, ballots had already been printed with her name. She polled about 1 percent of the vote.

Gov. Robert Bentley (R), who signed the law and continues to support it, recently revealed that he has avoided making public statements about the law in part because he believes it has damaged Alabama’s reputation by strengthening stereotypes about the state’s residents “living in the ’50s and ’60s.”

“I don’t want to be perceived as the face of illegal immigration bills in the country, and I could be that,” Bentley told the Associated Press.

Bentley says he’s been turning down many national news interview requests because “I don’t want to add fuel to the fire across the country where people continue to look at Alabama in a negative light.”

He contrasts himself with Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R), who embraced the national spotlight when her state passed a similar immigration law last year.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked Section 28, a provision requiring K-12 public schools to check the immigration status of their students. Attention focused on the section after reports of Hispanic and immigrant families withdrawing their children from Alabama public schools. Such was the attention that provision received that one GOP state senator who voted for the law called what was happening in Alabama schools “heartbreaking.”

Yet much of the law is still in effect, including provisions requiring police to check the immigration status of anyone they stop, detain, or arrest, and a provision that makes any contract made with an unauthorized immigrant invalid.

But while most Republicans say they support state-level immigration laws, some are hesitant to publicly champion Alabama for implementing the most stringent enforcement law in modern history. Apart from the effects of the law itself, some of H.B. 56′s most prominent supporters have also been personally damaged by the heightened national media scrutiny of Alabama.

State Sen. Scott Beason (R-Gardendale), one of two named sponsors of H.B. 56, was recently publicly rebuked by a federal judge for having “racist” intentions when he cooperated with authorities in a high-profile corruption case, and was captured on a wiretap calling African-American constituents “aborigines.”

An outright accusation of racism from a federal judge towards a prominent Alabama Republican, in the context of a controversial push for immigration enforcement in as many fronts as the courts have allowed, could be one reason why Bentley isn’t as eager as Brewer was to become a national spokesperson for immigration laws.

Some restrictionist activists in Washington also aren’t that enthusiastic about the law in its entirety. Roy Beck, Executive Director of NumbersUSA, was recently asked by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes about Section 27 of HB 56, which bans “any contract between a party and an alien unlawfully present in the United States.”

Beck told Hayes: “My organization doesn’t take a position on those things. Again, I’m sorry you’re right, we don’t believe that for the most part the answers are in the states.”

Beck went on to argue that the priority should be on what former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) calls the “jobs magnet,” the idea that unauthorized immigrants come to the United States for jobs. He argued that nationwide mandatory E-Verify, which Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) has proposed in his Legal Workforce Act, would make state-level immigration policy obsolete.

“The more they focus on the fence, or frankly in-state tuition,” Beck told Hayes, “They’re off the main subject.”

Whether or not Beck is correct, it appears that many of the proponents of state-level enforcement don’t agree with his “jobs magnet” centric view on immigration enforcement.

Many states, including North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana, passed laws mandating workplace verification but without the more controversial sections of “papers, please” laws. But Arizona, which also passed a mandatory E-Verify law in 2007 that the Supreme Court ruled constitutional earlier this year, then went a step further in 2010 by passing S.B. 1070, which directly involved local police in immigration enforcement.

Georgia, Indiana, Utah, South Carolina and Alabama all followed suit, passing immigration laws that went further than mandatory E-Verify and cracking down on the so-called “jobs magnet”.

And dwelling on specific provisions of the law could be obscuring its broader intent, to create an atmosphere of zero tolerance towards unauthorized immigrants in the states that forces them to leave. U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) recently told Politico that regardless of the constitutional challenges to the law, its ongoing effects are not unintended: “with respect to illegal aliens who are now leaving jobs in Alabama, that’s exactly what we want.”

Kris Kobach, an attorney who in addition to being the Kansas Secretary of State wrote much of Alabama’s immigration law in his spare time, praised the exodus of immigrants from Alabama  as a sign the law was working. “You’re encouraging people to comply with the law on their own.  Nobody gets arrested.  Nobody spends time in detention. We don’t expend resources in removal hearings. People decide to comply with the law. I’d say that’s a good thing.”

The provision is contained in a single sentence: “It shall be unlawful for a person to harbor an alien unlawfully present in the United States by entering into a rental agreement … with an alien to provide accommodations, if the person knows or recklessly disregards the fact that the alien is unlawfully present in the United States.” To violate this provision is to commit a Class A misdemeanor, which in Alabama is punishable by up to a year in prison, with each additional undocumented tenant representing another violation by the landlord. Once ten or more violations have been committed, the crime is upgraded to a Class C felony.

Sam Brooke, an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center, says, “If you were a [landlord] found to have a number of properties and apartments with more than ten individuals, you could face up to 20 years. … [I]t’s incredible that they would have the audacity to do this.”

Critics point out that the law includes no information as to how a landlord might determine whether a tenant is undocumented.

Originally the bill did contain a section detailing a mechanism by which potential tenants would have to verify their legal status. Potential tenants had to obtain a license to occupy a residence from the government, for which they would have to demonstrate their citizenship or legal immigration status. The section largely mirrored the text of the Farmer’s Branch, Texas, municipal ordinance passed in 2006, which was challenged by civil rights groups in 2006 and struck down by a Texas federal district court last year because it preempted federal law.

Brooke argues that by leaving out the section detailing implementation and enforcement of the renting ban, legislators were trying to avoid the court challenges of the Alabama law’s municipal counterparts: “It’s a smart thing that they left a verification process out, because every time this has faced the courts it has been thrown out,” he said.

Without any such provision in place, Brooke says, “no one knows” how the law would work in practice, because only an immigration judge could say definitively what someone’s immigration status is. Although Alabama law enforcement does have access to the Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC), which can provide local authorities with a “snapshot” of what the situation of someone’s documentation is at any point in time, that has little relevance to whether that person can constitutionally be denied the same rights to enter into housing contracts that is afforded to any other resident of the United States.

Vic Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, which is suing the town of Hazleton, Pa., over an immigration ordinance similar to Farmer’s Branch, says that the housing provision would effectively deny the right to live in Alabama to any immigrant whose case for residence was still ongoing in the courts, “even though the U.S. government which makes those determinations says you are allowed to stay.”

Moreover, even if landlords were allowed to use the LESC, the time and resources necessary to train everyone who rents out housing to verify immigration status—much less respect their tenants’ civil rights by doing so—could be staggering, relative to the single sentence in the law that places that obligation upon them.

Zayne Smith, an immigration policy fellow at Alabama Appleseed, a legal advocacy organization, says landlords she has spoken to are concerned about the potential liability that the law exposes them to.

“They’re saying, ‘I have tenants who are Hispanic, who are immigrants, but I don’t know whether they’re undocumented — that’s none of my business,’” she says. But the law forces landlords into an extremely difficult situation no matter what they do, she adds. “If they accuse people of presenting false I.D. and they’re wrong, they could get sued,” says Smith.

Smith says that although the law received a great deal of public scrutiny when it was being crafted in each chamber of Alabama’s legislature, the bill’s final text was substantially changed during conference, going from 42 pages to 71 pages, after which it was quickly passed by both houses with little opportunity for further public hearings. While the bill was being debated, “many changes would come and go,” says Smith. Ultimately, that meant that few people in Alabama have a clear sense of what the law will mean for them.

Legislation that uses housing policy to regulate immigration has only been tried before at the municipal level, as in Farmer’s Branch or Hazleton, the latter of which was overturned by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals for imposing too much of a burden on businesses and for including no protection against discrimination for race or national origin. Although the U.S. Supreme Court recently asked the circuit court to reconsider its decision after ruling that another immigration-related law in Arizona was constitutional, litigators and advocates involved with the case against Hazleton don’t believe that the Arizona decision will have much relevance to the ban on renting, whether at the municipal level or, in Alabama’s case, at the state level. “People need to understand that the case wasn’t reversed, there was no similar housing provision in the Arizona case,” says Walczak.

Walczak also argues that given the bad economy and poor fiscal condition of so many states it’s strange that Alabama legislators are eager to craft new immigration laws that expose them to expensive court cases defending them. The ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center have already announced their intention of challenging the Alabama law in court. Farmer’s Branch alone has spent almost $4 million defending its ordinance since 2006.

Considerable frustration is also being expressed by opponents of the law, particularly with its most infamous co-author, the anti-immigration activist and Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, who contributed to the Farmer’s Branch ordinance as well as Arizona’s SB 1070.

“This guy’s just using these municipalities as his own personal laboratory,” says Walczak.

Kobach has expressed confidence that laws like Alabama’s and Arizona’s will continue to spread throughout the country, but the apparent invitation to legal challenges, epitomized by such provisions as the ban on renting, could make even the most conservative of cash-strapped governments more reluctant to follow Alabama’s lead.

Ultimately, says the SPLC attorney Brooke, the law’s worst consequence may simply be that it has brought Alabama back to the forefront of the nation’s debate over immigration in an unflattering fashion.

“It’s a shame that it’s happening here in Alabama,” says Brooke. “We have such a troubled history on civil rights.”

Kobach envisions bills similar to Alabama’s spreading across the country, and was profiled in a Politico article Monday saying as much: “It’s likely that Missouri will raise its standard up to the Arizona or Alabama level… and there’s a good shot that something might pass in Pennsylvania. It’s hard to predict too far out in the future, but those are probably the two best bets.”

The headline of the Politico article is “Swing states face immigration fight,” but the author, Reid J. Epstein, offers no corroboration for Kobach’s claims, instead merely quoting national-level opponents and proponents of the “attrition through enforcement” laws already in existence.

Carlos Gomez, president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City, told TAI that a Missouri version of the immigration law in next year’s legislative session is possible but, “it just depends on the community and how they’re going to react.” He points out that Kobach’s ideas met with strong opposition when they were proposed in Kansas and ultimately failed in this year’s legislative session.

Mike Hethmon, a colleague of Kobach’s at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, mentions Florida and Texas (only one of which is a swing state) as states where “you tend to see fairly high-profile… media efforts but [you] haven’t seen the appearance of a legislator who is both willing to focus on the technical issues and keep pushing the issue through multiple sessions.”

But it’s hard to see how Kobach’s claim that his laws will be spreading to swing states is any more substantial than the unfocused efforts of media-focused politicians that his colleague criticizes.

California is one of 10 states that allow undocumented students to receive in-state tuition as long as they meet other requirements. In California, that means attending high school in the state for at least three years. But an anti-illegal immigration group brought a suit against the state on behalf of 42 out-of-state students ineligible for in-state tuition, claiming the law violated a federal ban on educational benefits based on residency for illegal immigrants.

A legal challenge was led by Kris Kobach, secretary of state-elect for Kansas and an immigration hardliner who helped draft Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law. Kobach attempted a similar legal challenge against in-state tuition for undocumented students in Kansas, but that lawsuit failed in 2009.

This time, Kobach won the lawsuit in the first round, but the state Supreme Court now shut down his effort. In a ruling written by Justice Ming W. Chin, the Court found the law was constitutional because American citizens who attended at least three years of high school in the state are also eligible for in-state tuition.

“That section does not treat citizens worse than unlawful aliens,” Chin wrote. “It grants the same exemption to all who qualify, whether they are nonresident citizens or resident unlawful aliens.”

Non-citizens who attempt to vote can — and often do — face deportation, which opponents of the Arizona law argued is enough to deter fraud. “The penalties against non-citizens registering to vote are very serious and have served Arizonans — and all Americans — well for decades,” Linda Brown of the Arizona Advocacy Network, a plaintiff in the case, said in a press release. The court seemed to take this view by ruling the federal law does not allow states to require would-be voters to prove citizenship. But in other states, politicians are still proposing legislation that would crack down on voting by non-citizens.

Kris Kobach, who is running for Kansas secretary of state and helped draft Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law, has said he wants to require proof of citizenship at polling stations, claiming “the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive.” Kobach won support for this idea from likely governor Sam Brownback, who is currently serving as a Republican senator.

Colorado Republican state Rep. Ted Harvey told TWI he plans to introduce a bill requiring documentation for voter registration in the form of a birth certificate or passport.

In Arizona, challengers to the 2004 law said in a press release that the law had prevented citizens who did not have documentation of their citizenship from voting. “We are elated that the Ninth Circuit has properly applied federal election law and struck down the documentary proof of citizenship requirement,” said Jon Greenbaum of Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who argued the case for appellants. “This will enable the many poor people in Arizona who lack driver’s licenses and birth certificates to register to vote.”

It seems unlikely the bill will go anywhere, given that legal scholars say it blatantly violates the 14th Amendment. But Pearce, who has been discussing anti-birthright citizenship since June, has moved forward anyway and plans to introduce it in January during the next legislative session. Kobach shot down the Arizona Republic’s request for details on the bill: “We aren’t announcing anything yet, as the drafting is not complete,” he said in an email.

A move to end automatic citizenship may have some support on the national level, where numerous Republicans have come out against “birth tourism” and “anchor babies.” But a repeal of the 14th Amendment that grants native-born citizenship would need far more support to succeed: Constitutional amendments must be approved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and at least 38 states.

Pearce’s bill would instead remove citizenship at the state level, which legal experts say is directly in conflict with the Constitution. (Kobach, interestingly, is a constitutional law professor.) Last time Justice Department officials felt Arizona was preempting their authority on immigration matters, they sued the state to stop it. If the state were to pass Pearce and Kobach’s bill, it seems likely another lawsuit would result.

- More states and cities are considering their own immigration bills.

- No senators joined Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on his push to change the 14th Amendment to remove  automatic citizenship for babies born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants, but Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Jon Kyl, Tom Coburn and Chuck Grassley said they would support hearings to look into the issue of “birth tourism.” Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who chairs the subcommittee that would theoretically look into the issue, said he does not plan to hold hearings.

- Independent analysis released Monday shows the Department of Homeland Security deported a record number of criminal illegal immigrants this year. The DHS under Obama prioritizes immigration enforcement for people deemed dangerous criminals — and it appears to be working. “The stated immigration policy is actually being followed,” said David Burnham, co-director of Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which performed the study.

- Kris Kobach, a lawyer who helped draft Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law, defeated two candidates Tuesday to become the Republican nominee for Kansas secretary of state.

- The Department of Justice threatened to sue Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio for failing to hand over documents for a civil rights investigation, but a lawyer for Arpaio said Thursday that he plans to cooperate with parts of the probe.

- The Senate passed a $600 million emergency funding bill for border security Thursday, disappointing immigrants rights groups who hoped to see them focus on comprehensive immigration reform instead. Although Republicans have said they want to see measures to increase border security before they will support other immigration reform, experts on both sides of the debate said the bill won’t help the odds of a reform bill this year.

A key exchange came near the end, when Dave Johnson, an Alabama activist, asked what worried conservatives could do about the “invasive” questions in the decennial survey.

Video after the jump.

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