U.S. District Judge Neil Wake has refused to delay implementation of Arizona’s employer sanctions law while the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals considers whether to overturn the law.
Wake based his ruling on the belief that the host of business groups challenging the law will be unable to prove the legislation infringes upon federal jurisdiction. Other arguments presented in the plaintiffs’ challenge, including “conflict pre-emption, due process and the dormant Commerce Clause are even weaker,” Wake wrote in the court order released Feb. 19.
Wake also shot down arguments that employers would face a hardship implementing the federal E-Verify program to check prospective workers’ legal status, while ruling an injunction would surrender the deterrence of hiring illegal workers that the law has already achieved.
Earlier this month, Wake also ruled against a collection of business- and Hispanic-advocacy groups that claimed the law was unconstitutional. 
Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas announced that he was pleased with the decision, which allows county attorneys across the state to start enforcing the law.
“Our office stands ready not only to enforce this much-needed law, but to defend it in court as opponents seek new ways to challenge it,” he said in a press release.
But Farrell Quinlan, a spokesman for Arizona Employers for Immigration Reform, a coalition of business owners challenging the law, said Wake’s decision not to halt the implementation of employer sanctions is not a victory for the law’s supporters.
The judge has already upheld employer sanctions, so his rejection of the request to stop its implementation certainly came as no surprise, Quinlan said. Also, opponents of the sanctions law had to file on the district level in order to for the 9th Circuit to address the same issue — whether the law should be halted while its merits are considered.
“It’s like throwing pitch two, three and four in an intentional walk,” said Quinlan, using a baseball analogy. “Everybody knows the runner is going to first base.”
The state’s 15 counties pledged to the judge in January that they would not prosecute businesses for violating the law until March 1, to allow the district court, and possibly the appeals court, to consider the matter.
Quinlan said opponents of the employer sanctions law are hoping the appeals court will rule whether the law should be suspended before March to “avoid any confusion.”
Mesa Republican Russell Pearce, the law’s author, said Wake’s order was not surprising given the judge’s statements in hearings that illegal immigration depresses the wages of legal low-income earners.
“You knew it was coming because he said every other time that delaying (the law) hurts the most vulnerable among us,” he said.
Pearce said he was also glad Wake relied on the study Thomas paid for and submitted that showed illegal immigrants cost legal workers $1.4 billion in lost wages. That study was completed by George Borjas, a Harvard economics professor.
A competing study offered by Judith Gans, a immigration policy manager of the University of Arizona’s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, was rejected by Wake. The UofA study found that benefits provided by illegal immigration outweigh its costs.