Worse Than a Wall: Kris Kobach for Department of Homeland Security

In my course, Immigration, Employment, and Public Policy, the person with the most influence in the anti-immigration movement since 2000 is Kris Kobach.

Name a city or state that wants to get rid of illegal immigrants, and Kobach has drafted laws for them.

Hazelton, Pennsylvania was a white working class town with many Italian immigrants until Hispanics moved in in large numbers. The whites in power passed laws to criminalize the hiring of these immigrants, and renting apartments to them. If you hire—or rent— you face criminal fines and jail.

After very lengthy litigation, these laws were thrown out by the Supreme Court. 

Mission accomplished, anyway, for Kobach: Many Hispanics left town.

The city remains depressed.

He’s a perfect fit politically for the Trump administration. As Chair of the Kansas Republican Party, he instituted a “loyalty test” that punished anyone for cooperating with a Democrat. The Federal Elections Commission audit found that when Kobach was the chairman, the state party failed to pay state and federal taxes— and it accepted illegal contributions.

An email in 2007 boasted: “The Kansas GOP has identified and caged more voters in the last 11 months than the previous two years.” 

Caged a voter? Scary stuff.

If any lawyer is capable of drafting a plan to round up Muslims or Mexicans (or both), and put them in camps on American soil, it is Yale-educated, Eagle Scout Kris Kobach. It is hard to understand where he learned to be so intolerant.