With all the fuss over the question of whether Arizona is permitted, or preempted from, helping the federal government enforce its own immigration laws, an interesting proposal has escaped notice. The Sutherland Institute, the Utah free-market think tank, has announced it will push for that state’s legislature to pass a state-specific amnesty for illegal aliens. (H/t Ron Mortensen.) This would involved issuing a “working privilege card” to illegal aliens, modeled on Utah’s illegal-alien driver’s license, called a “driving privilege card.” Here’s how institute president Paul Mero described the idea:

Mero adds that the “Legislature isn’t in the mood to do nothing” about illegal immigration. “It’s either going to be the Arizona way, or something different,” he said. So the Sutherland Institute is offering what it feels is a practical and compassionate alternative.

He said working privilege cards would be issued by a state agency, such as work force services. The approval process would require applicants to show they have lived in Utah for several years without violating other laws. Mero said it would likely include an application fee, which would be seen as a sort of fine for being in Utah illegally.

Two thoughts. First, the illegality of such a measure is unambiguous. No state can legalize illegal aliens, any more than it can admit immigrants from abroad or sign treaties or wage war or issue currency. The folks at Sutherland aren’t stupid, so they know this, but are presumably just trying to promote their vision of open borders more generally. As Mero wrote last year, “authentic conservatives are clearly pointed in the direction of conserving the principle of open immigration.” (I hope you’re feeling as “inauthentic” as I am.)

But my second thought is a bigger question: Why are the state think tanks generally so bad on immigration, when they address it at all? This is a generalization, of course, but my experience has been that the state think tanks lean heavily, if not all quite so flamboyantly, in the same anti-enforcement, pro-amnesty, open-borders direction as Sutherland, even as they’re seen as “conservative.” I suspect this is because the issues that originally animated most of the groups belonging to the State Policy Network, the clearinghouse for the nation’s state-based free market think tanks, are ones where libertarians and conservatives agree: education, taxes, government spending, regulation, etc. Furthermore, because of the narrow focus on economic issues, the funding and boards are likely dominated by businesses in their respective states that either don’t care about uniquely conservative issues like life or national sovereignty, or simply disagree with conservatives on those points because they really are libertarians. Either way, an important area of state legislation remains generally without conservative policy ideas.