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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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I guess my question here is, if congress passed a law saying that, "The United States shall have open borders. The free entry of persons into the United States shall be presumed to be lawful unless proven otherwise," would that law be unconstitutional under Article 4 section 4? It would be a bit strange for the federal government to not have that power at all, but that would mean that the free movement of large numbers of people across the border isn't inherently an invasion.

I don't know if the best argument for that would be that it violates A4S4. Perhaps better would be to ask which provision of the Constitution authorizes them to pass such a law. A1S8 authorizes them "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization", so they could presumably, with the aid of any one state, declare that literally every person on the planet is naturalized, making it illegal for a state gov't to turn them away. Best as I can tell, any direct control over border interactions is much more subtly read in, with the type of reading depending a bit on the theory.

E.g., one might say that the ability to exclude people from entering your territory is inherent in sovereignty. That's a completely plausible way to get to the federal government's ability to enact laws restricting immigration, but in the US, states are also separate sovereigns, so they would presumably also have such rights. In this case, the feds wouldn't have all that much ability to tell the states that they have to have fewer restrictions.

Alternatively, one might frame it as the ability to exclude or to welcome in people being inherent in sovereignty. As such, it would set up a massive clash of the Supremacy Clause with the doctrine of equal sovereignty. Those types of cases tend to turn on the opinions of a small number of Justices feeling out how they read the "structure" of the Constitution, which is always a murky endeavor.

It probably would be fine, but under Article 1-10 that would not be enforceable against any state utilizing its police powers. The framework, I think, intentionally leaves this power to both sovereigns as the founders presumed each would be corrupt, corruptible, and/or incompetent at any time, and thus they would work to check each other, as appears to be happening with Texas' actions. I think there are indications in the drafting discussions, federalist papers, etc that this is a non-justiciable question.