Essay

From Plyler to Arizona: Have the Courts Forgotten about Corfield v Coryell?

John C. Eastman

Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service, and former Dean, Chapman University School of Law

Dr. Eastman is also the founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm on whose behalf he has participated as amicus curiae in several Supreme Court cases related to the topic of the Symposium at which this Article was presented, including Hamdi v Rumsfeld, 542 US 507 (2004), and Arizona v United States, 132 S Ct 2492 (2012). He has testified before Congress (Oversight Hearing on Dual Citizenship, Birthright Citizenship, and the Meaning of Sovereignty before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims of the House Committee on the Judiciary, 109th Cong, 1st Sess 57 (2005)), the Arizona Legislature (both the Judiciary and Appropriations Committees on the Birthright Citizenship State Compact bill, Feb 7 and 22, 2011, respectively), and the California Legislature (Assembly Republican Task Force on Illegal Immigration, Oct 11, 2006), on matters related to the subject of this Symposium. The congressional testimony was subsequently published in the Texas Review of Law & Politics and the University of Richmond Law Review. John C. Eastman, Born in the U.S.A.? Rethinking Birthright Citizenship in the Wake of 9/11, 12 Tex Rev L & Polit 167 (2007); John C. Eastman, Born in the U.S.A.? Rethinking Birthright Citizenship in the Wake of 9/11, 42 U Richmond L Rev 955 (2008). Other related publications include: John C. Eastman, The States Enter the Illegal Immigration Fray, in Carissa Hessick and Jack Chin, eds, Illegals in the Backyard: State and Local Regulation of Immigration Policy (NYU forthcoming 2013); John C. Eastman, Papers, Please: Does the Constitution Permit the States a Role in Immigration Enforcement?, 35 Harv J L & Pub Pol 1 (2012); John Eastman and Ediberto Román, Debate on Birthright Citizenship, 6 FIU L Rev 293 (2011); John C. Eastman and Karen J. Lugo, Arizona’s Immigration Storm, 12 Engage 68 (June 2011). Portions of this Article have been drawn from some of those prior publications.

The theme of the Symposium at which this Article was presented was Immigration Law and Institutional Design. Our mission, as Symposium participants, was to assess the efficacy of the institutions that adopt and enforce our immigration laws. But before we can possibly make an efficacy assessment, we must address a normative question, namely, just what is it that our immigration laws seek to accomplish? It seems to me that there are three mutually exclusive alternatives or, perhaps more accurately, three principal points on a continuum of policy alternatives: (1) open borders, with unconstrained immigration and naturalization; (2) closed borders, with no permanent immigration and naturalization, only temporary visas for students, tourists, and so forth; and (3) controlled borders, with limited immigration and naturalization according to some established standard.

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