Border Justice

I attended one event during the week of activities at ASU West's Migrants Justice and the Border forum. I attended the mock supreme court trial about the "Protect Arizona Now" ballot initiative.  The  event I attended was the mock Supreme Court trial conducted by a political science class. The trial was based around the premise the "Protect Arizona Now" bill would pass and would be challenged for constitutionality at the Supreme Court level.  The Bill consist of two parts the first part being that only American citizens will be allowed to vote and in order to do so they will have to show proof of American citizenship in the form of a birth certificate. The second portion of this bill would deny state services to illegal immigrants. This bill is known as being "severable" this means that one sections of the bill could be found unconstitutional and the other part of the bill would still stand, so if the bill passes and heads to the Supreme Court, they would have to decide that both parts are unconstitutional  in order for the entire bill to be stricken. The students brought up some interesting questions such as, "is voting an inalienable right?" voting is denied to prisoners and is already denied to non US citizens. I think that the problem that the fist par to this bill is that it is connected the issue of illegal immigration. Every state is given specific powers under the constitution and if the people of a state decide to vote and require proof of citizenship in order to so it is clearly constitutional, the problem lies in the fact that in order to receive votes the bill taps into a large anti immigrant attitudes and thus has the appearance of trying to deny one segment of society of the ability to vote.