Many of you probably remember the debate concerning S.B. 81 last year. The bill was signed into law and provided sweeping change in regards to the enforcement of our immigration laws. Some of the lowlights included: Making the Attorney General contact the Department of Homeland Security to basically deputize police officers into immigration officers (an amazing slap in the face of federalism)but not providing funding to train said officers, punishing employers, not for breaking the law by employing an Illegal Alien, but rather for firing a citizen when an Illegal Alien is in the same position (disregarding any Protestant ideal of being rewarded for hard work), and put down an underfunded mandate for every state agency to go back through their records and verify that every single person on the roll is a legal citizen.
This brings us to S.B. 113 as proposed by Senator Pat Jones (D – Holladay, District 4). Her bill makes one simply change by pushing back the effective date for the bill to July 1st 2010.
Make no mistake, I do not like S.B. 81, but this simple fact of the matter is it is law and it must be obeyed (I trust the democratic process will take place to overturn this law – but I can’t bank on that anytime soon). In the mean time we may as well actually make sure we have the systems in place to enforce the law, something that was simply not possible due to the lack of funding when the bill was written.
I do not envy Senator Jones, she voted against S.B. 81 when it was first introduced. But she sees the writing on the wall and is at least trying to make this bad law work.
