PRESS CALL: Unconstitutional and Costly: The High Price of Local Immigration Enforcement

Listen to today’s press call here. (mp3)

Washington, D.C. — As state and local governments consider harsh immigration enforcement measures, they must first study the high prices paid by taxpayers in cities that experimented with local laws and got burned. Two new reports by the Center for American Progress and the Southern Poverty Law Center document the financial, economic, and social costs of the local laws that the courts have deemed unconstitutional, and the buyers’ remorse in the towns that engaged nativist lawyer Kris Kobach.

To delve more deeply into the consequences facing jurisdictions that seek to ignore federal authority over immigration, the Center for American Progress will host a press call with a local leader with vast experience on immigration policy—Prince William County Supervisor Frank Principi—and the authors of the two studies on local immigration enforcement.

WHAT: A telephonic press conference call with a local government official involved in ongoing immigration debates and the release of a report by the Center for American Progress, “Unconstitutional and Costly: The High Price of Local Immigration Enforcement,” and a second study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “When Mr. Kobach Comes to Town: Nativist Laws and the Communities They Damage.”

WHO:

Supervisor Frank Principi, Prince William County, Virginia

Gebe Martinez, Senior Writer and Policy Analyst, Center for American Progress

Mark Potok, Director, Intelligence Project, Southern Poverty Law Center

Heidi Beirich, Director of Research, Southern Poverty Law Center

Moderator: Angela M. Kelley, Vice President of Immigration Policy and Advocacy, Center for American Progress

WHEN: Monday, January 24, 2011 at 11:00 a.m. EST

To RSVP to the call, please contact Raul Arce Contreras at rarcecontreras@americanprogress.org or at 202.478.5318.

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