I also notice that in the Constitution, congress is given exclusive power to make "...an uniform Rule of Naturalization".
Naturalization is theprocess by which one becomes a citizen. Okay. the congress makes the rules for becoming a citizen.
The problem is, I can't find the part that gives congress exclusive power to make rules regarding whom the States allow within their borders. The Constitution says: "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to the Privileges and Immunities of Citizens an the several States", so it is clear that Citizens may travel freely from one State to another, but illegal immigrants are not Citizens.
Does anyone know if there is a past SCOTUS decision which specifically placed the enactment of rules regarding immigration/entry under the same jurisdiction as the "Rule of Naturalizattion"?
No, but this is from the first legal treatise written after Ratification. [Before anyone tries to convince you it's 'just philosophy' and doesn't mean anything, this same paper was submitted to the Supreme Court and accepted as legal evidence in the RKBA District of Columbia v. Heller case.]
[Section 9 — Powers of Congress (cont.)]
The common law has affixed such distinct and appropriate ideas to the terms denization, and naturalization, that they can not be confounded together, or mistaken for each other in any legal transaction whatever. They are so absolutely distinct in their natures, that in England the rights they convey, can not both be given by the same power; the king can make denizens, by his grant, or letters patent, but nothing but an act of parliament can make a naturalized subject. This was the legal state of this subject in Virginia, when the federal constitution was adopted; it declares that congress shalt have power to establish an uniform rule of naturalization; throughout the United States; but it also further declares, that the powers not delegated by the constitution to the U. States, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people. The power of naturalization, and not that of denization, being delegated to congress, and the power of denization not being prohibited to the states by the constitution, that power ought not to be considered as given to congress, but, on the contrary, as being reserved to the states. And as the right of denization did not make a citizen of an alien, but only placed him in a middle state, between the two, giving him local privileges only, which he was so far from being entitled to carry with him into another state, that he lost them by removing from the state giving them, the inconveniencies which might result from the indirect communication of the rights of naturalized citizens, by different modes of naturalization prevailing in the several states, could not be apprehended.
George Tucker / Volume 1 — Appendix / Note D
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What we call illegals are what the Founders referred to as denizens, and unless they've petitioned to become citizens, they are solely under the jurisdiction of the State in which they reside.
This is yet ANOTHER example of how the federal government has abdicated it's duty as an administrative organ in order to subjugate the laws of the civil States and create a totally centralized entity.
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"When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."
Thomas Jefferson to Charles Hammond, 1821
"The constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests."
--Patrick Henry
I think that law enforcement is still the domain of the states.
-PJ