THE BORDER REPORT

The Supreme Court backed away from the sticky issue of illegal immigration today, putting the country right back in the comfortable Limbo of cheap, unacknowledged and exploitative labor, just the way we like it.

The Court ruled that illegal migrants using other people's identities can't be charged with a felony unless they knew the documents belonged to someone else. It was one of the most important cases concerning illegal immigration in months; today's Supreme Court's unanimous decision gets us absolutely nowhere in addressing the situation.

I've been watching the case for some time and I was hoping the Court would rule otherwise. Not because I'm interested in flooding the prisons with migrants but because all the pieces were in place to send the entire illegal labor system into a tailspin. If illegal migrants could face felony sentences for having fake Social Security numbers it would mean the employers who facilitate the fake IDs would also be held criminally liable. A crude solution but an effective one. At the very least, we would have had to acknowledge what we've allowed to fester for so long.

But it's a moot point now.

The case, Flores-Figueroa vs. United States, started three years ago when Ignacio Flores used another person's Social Security and resident alien cards at a steel mill job in Illinois. What saved him today is that in 2000 he had brought in falsified cards to the same employers. Because the original pair of documents didn't belong to anybody, his lawyers were able to successfully argue in the Supreme Court that he had assumed the second set of cards were also fake.

The aggravated identity theft charge was used last year by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the case of 400 illegal migrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested in Postville, Iowa. Most of those defendants took six month plea deals and were then deported.

To be fair, the Court wasn't ruling on the broader issues of illegal immigration or even identity theft.

What they had to work with was the United States' argument which reads like something scrawled onto a last minute stickie note.

The Feds tried to argue that the word "knowingly" in the law applied only to the verbs in the law: " ... knowingly transfers, possesses or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person."

Judge Stephen Breyer rejected that argument, saying "knowingly" also applies to the end of the sentence: "of another person."

What this all means of course is that, once again, we are right back where we started.