This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 26, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Just because it's been found constitutional, that doesn't make it a good policy.

Portions of an Arizona immigration law patterned after federal law have been thrown out,

but the most controversial provision remains.

Ilia Shapiro, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute,

offers his thoughts.

The most controversial aspect of this SB 1070 was upheld, much of it was thrown out.

What did the majority say?

Yeah, there were a lot of ironies here.

I mean, first of all, you have to understand

that most of SB 1070 wasn't even taken up by the court. It's been in effect since July 2010 and it's

there. And now the most controversial one as you said, which is the provision that

when police stop somebody lawfully and then they have probable cause to suspect

that they're in the country illegally they're required to check their

verify their immigration status and the court threw out the government's

argument of effectively preemption by

executive whim that is just because of a resource allocation decision or or a

prosecutorial discretion type of decision. The federal government wanted to, the Obama administration

wanted to preempt the state law on that grounds. Of course, I'd no. This doesn't conflict with any

federal law. They're just cooperating as the law intended, and Arizona can direct its officers

to do this sort of thing.

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