Arizona's vicious SB 1070 became a national controversy two years ago, when Jan Brewer claimed her state's illegal immigration crisis was draining law enforcement resources, public funds and citizens' patience. A crisis so severe, Brewer argued, required a severe response, and since the federal government refused to enforce border policy, Arizona was justified in taking matters into its own hands.

This argument was repeated during last week's Supreme Court hearings over SB 1070, both by Arizona's counsel Paul Clement, and as part of the selective circus that is Justice Anthony Kennedy's relation to reality. At the end of the day, both men said, Arizona has such a serious illegal immigration problem that its response may trace the limits of constitutionality.

But what if illegal immigration isn't as bad a problem as everybody keeps suggesting? In fact, what if it isn't a problem at all?

Such a question was posed twice by PoliticOlogy, once when Pew Hispanic released its comprehensive report showing a reversal in migration trends between America and Mexico, and again after the SCOTUS hearings. According to Pew, immigration from Mexico has not only declined over the past decade but made a full 180, with more people migrating from the States to Mexico. This reversal seems to dissolve the crisis on which SB 1070 and its copycat laws are based.

This morning, Timothy Noah at the New Republic gave a more full-throated voicing to this argument: 

I hate to interrupt a good brawl. But, while politicians and Supreme Court justices debate how, and at what level of government, to halt the national crisis of illegal immigration, it might be worth considering whether the crisis has, um, passed...After more than doubling between 1991 and 2000—when it peaked at 770,000—annual immigration from Mexico fell thereafter (except for a brief spike in 2003–2004). Annual immigration from Mexico now stands at about 140,000—less than one-fifth its level at the twentieth century’s end. "No one wants to hear it," the Princeton sociologist Doug Massey told The New York Times almost one year ago, "but the flow [of undocumented immigrants] has already stopped."

Noah points to numerous factors for the decline, including the Mexican economy's post-NAFTA expansion, Mexico's declining birth and rising literacy rates, stepped-up U.S. border enforcement and increased deportations. When both Mexico and America had stagnant economies, a Mexican worker was comparatively no better off on either side of the border; then Mexico's economy improved more quickly than America's, drawing workers south.

In short, a combination of economic and cultural factors and narrow, targeted enforcement took a problem and solved it, in what seems to be a fine example of successful, multifaceted social policy (with some luck thrown in). What's more, the trend doesn't appear likely to change. Noah writes:

An obvious question to ask is whether net immigration flow from Mexico to the United States will rise again once the U.S. economy more fully recovers. If it does, then perhaps the crisis (if it is a crisis) won’t have passed. But it’s hard to imagine a sustained increase over the long term. After all, the decline in immigration began a decade ago, and the U.S. construction boom that prevailed during the first half of that decade did strikingly little to reverse it.

But this problem is wrapping itself up with a neat little bow just as reaction to its supposed existence reaches vitriolic levels. "The bill I’m about to sign into law," Brewer said upon signing SB 1070, "represents another tool for our state to use as we work to solve a crisis we did not create and the federal government has refused to fix the crisis caused by illegal immigration and Arizona’s porous border." What happens to that logic when the actual crisis part of it is removed? Further, what happens to that statement when the declining immigration rate is in fact partially due to federal response of border enforcement and deportations?

Brewer's response to declining immigration rates has been to emphasize the supposed problem of border violence, a specter she's had great trouble proving exists in any widespread form, especially after her tale about beheaded bodies found in the desert proved to be a fiction. "I was, of course, trying to make the larger point about the uncontrolled, drug-fueled violence on the border region," Brewer wrote in her book. "We didn’t want that sort of depraved violence to spill over into our towns and cities." True, we don't, and it largely is not.

Brewer's shifting villains and shaky logic suggests that immigration is not her concern at all. Before SB 1070, Brewer, who was appointed after Janet Napolitano joined the Obama administration, was trailing in the polls. What's more, Arizona's economy was and remains in the toilet, with its lowest point coming just before the SB 1070 fracas started. Immigrants are classic scapegoats for economic woes, and the amount of ink and ire spent over this law as opposed to Arizona's economic policies show how successfully Brewer exploited this fake crisis to keep herself in office and attention off her state's true troubles.

SB 1070, as you well know, doesn't just usurp federal authority, but in doing so allows for the institutionalization of ethnic profiling, which threatens to pre-criminalize the state's large Hispanic population, legal or not. Such a move is only justifiable under the most drastic of circumstances. Now that we know that Arizona is under no such compulsion, but rather cravenly exploiting a fictional crisis to distract from their economic woes, what argument do they have for criminalizing the ethnicity of an entire segment of their population?

Noah points out that Pew's report didn't get much play in the press. This is too bad, as a wider audience for the story would mean that it might eventually reach both Arizona voters and Justice Kennedy. Whether Kennedy's solipsism can be penetrated is anybody's guess, but Arizona could still step back from its conservative brink. If it doesn't, and continues to chase the phantom of illegal immigration, Arizona will be left complaining about immigrants to those very immigrants' backs.

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Related: SCOTUS Hearts Arizona's Immigration Bill

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