Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Jonathan Blitzer has this profile of Kris Kobach in the New Yorker. One particularly disconcerting passage:

"Kobach’s long game may have had less to do with creating legal precedent than it did with sowing social discord. According to the Migration Policy Institute, between July, 2006, and July, 2007, a hundred and eighteen proposals similar to Hazleton’s came up for consideration in towns across the country. This was how self-deportation was supposed to become a reality—if you put immigrants in the center of a raging populist debate at every level of state and local government, life got ugly for them. [An ACLU attorney] told me that the policy fight in Hazleton prompted a number of violent incidents, including threats made against the town’s immigrant community. “It was all about scapegoating,” he told me. “Rocks were thrown through the windows of stores owned by immigrants. Eventually, the Justice Department had to get involved.”

KJ

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2016/11/trumps-ideas-man-for-hard-line-immigration-policy.html