Texas Barred From Detaining Border-Crossers
Plus: Cuba's collapse, D.C.'s crime rate, Austin's housing market, and more...
Blocked: Last year, Texas Senate Bill (S.B.) 4—which would've allowed Texas police to arrest those who illegally cross the southern border—passed. Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order that blocks the enforcement of the law "until justices decide whether Texas should be allowed to enforce it before federal court challenges are resolved," reports The Texas Tribune. "Justice Samuel Alito did not put a deadline on the temporary order blocking the law and did not indicate when the high court would decide whether to keep the law from being enforced during ongoing litigation."
S.B. 4 "allows police to question and arrest anyone they believe entered Texas through Mexico illegally and is currently without legal immigration status," per the Tribune. It was not intended to be a means by which law enforcement can go after longtime residents of the U.S. who once crossed illegally (and statutes of limitations further protect such people), but rather a means of detaining recent border-crossers.
The bill says "any migrant seen by the police wading across the Rio Grande could be arrested and charged in state court with a misdemeanor on the first offense," per The New York Times. "A second offense would be a felony. After being arrested, migrants could be ordered during the court process to return to Mexico or face prosecution if they did not agree to go."
No path forward: Since the federal government has immigration-enforcement authority, there is plenty of reason to believe the Texas law will ultimately get struck down. The state, meanwhile, says the law has a necessary deterrent effect.
"No matter how emphatic Texas' criticism of the federal government's handling of immigration on the border may be to some," wrote U.S. District Judge David A. Ezra when ruling on the case last month, "disagreement with the federal government's immigration policy does not justify a violation of the [U.S. Constitution's] Supremacy Clause."
But the Supreme Court intervening, and possibly striking down S.B. 4 altogether, doesn't mean tensions will be cooled—quite the opposite.
"There is either a red wave this November or America is doomed," wrote Elon Musk on X this past weekend, in response to a video about New York City's migrant crisis. "Imagine four more years of this getting worse," he added, ominously. But one thing that will surely get worse, regardless of who gets elected in November, is the degree of polarization driving Americans further away from each other on this issue in particular. There are wonky questions worth sussing out—How many low-skilled job-seekers can our labor market bear? Are there certain low-cost-of-living areas of the country that can better accommodate migrants? How quickly should work authorization be processed?—but both political parties have chosen to sidestep these questions in favor of political posturing that does very little to serve the border-crossers in question.
Scenes from New York: You've heard of carjacking, but what about trainjacking? Inside the strange breed of New York criminal that attempts to…break into subway cars and drive them.
QUICK HITS
- Is Cuba about to collapse?
- "For committee behind TikTok bill, influence may be short-lived," reports Politico. "Disagreements over the future of the committee underscore Congress' deep divides over how aggressive to be in handling threats from China—and who should take the lead in addressing them."
- "Has intergenerational progress stalled?" asks a new research paper by Kevin Corinth and Jeff Larrimore. Not really: "We find that each of the past four generations of Americans was better off than the previous one, using a post-tax, post-transfer income measure constructed annually from 1963-2022 based on the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement. At age 36–40, Millennials had a real median household income that was 18 percent higher than that of the previous generation at the same age. This rate of intergenerational progress was slower than that experienced by the Silent Generation (34 percent) and Baby Boomers (27 percent), but similar to that experienced by Generation X (16 percent). Slower progress for Generation X and Millennials is due to their stalled growth in work hours—holding work hours constant, they experienced a greater intergenerational increase in real market income than Baby Boomers."
- "Once America's hottest housing market, Austin is running in reverse," reads a Wall Street Journal headline of a long feature that seems to be…lamenting the fact that property values have come down due to the city actually approving the building of more housing (so, exactly what YIMBYs wanted, and exactly what needed to happen).
- "Don't be so down on D.C.," Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser told Axios at an event yesterday, in response to questions about the city's crime problem. Last year, "homicides jumped 36% and carjackings nearly doubled," per Axios.
- SCOTUS watch:
KBJ doubles down: "My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways."
That is, quite literally, the entire point of the First Amendment—of the entire Bill of Rights. pic.twitter.com/gWMCaHDG1W
— System Update (@SystemUpdate_) March 18, 2024
