Bloomberg Businessweek - June 16, 2014, by Josh Eidelson - While Congress drags its feet on immigration reform, New York State lawmakers are mulling an immigration bill of their own: It would grant state citizenship to some noncitizen immigrants, including undocumented residents, allowing them to vote and run for office. Under the New York Is Home Act, noncitizen residents who have proof of identity and have lived and paid taxes in the state for three years could apply for legal status that would let some qualify for Medicaid coverage, professional licensing, tuition assistance, and driver’s licenses, as well as state and local—but not federal—voting rights. The responsibilities of citizenship would also apply, including jury duty.

“It’s mind-boggling,” says Michael Olivas, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center who specializes in immigration law. “I don’t believe there’s ever been a serious attempt to codify so many benefits and opportunities.”

Democratic State Senator Gustavo Rivera, who’s sponsoring the legislation, sees it as a precedent. “We have a bill here that could be a model of what we need to do across the country,” he says. Rivera acknowledges the bill “certainly will not pass this session,” comparing it to same-sex marriage, a cause which took years to travel from fringe to mainstream. But he expressed hope that the primary defeat of Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, widely construed as a final nail in the coffin of near-term federal immigration reform, would create interest in state-level reforms like his. Democratic Assemblyman Karim Camara is introducing the same bill on the other side of the Capitol. Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If it did pass and Cuomo signed it—again, not at all likely—the new law would certainly be challenged in court. Olivas says some aspects of the bill are on safe ground (in-state tuition for undocumented students has become widespread), while others involve “unsettled or untested” areas of the law. Olivas says that by “appropriating the term ‘citizen,’” a word he says “is really truly a federal term,” the bill’s authors have made it more vulnerable to legal challenge.

The state law wouldn’t trump federal immigration statutes, so undocumented workers in New York would still be denied some important benefits of citizenship. One big example: They’d be subject to federal laws barring them from legally working in the U.S.

Supporters insist the bill, unlike Arizona’s largely overturned SB 1070, is well within the law. “The problem with the Arizona law and the copycat laws around the country is that they were intruding upon the unique province of the federal government to determine who gets to enter the United States and who gets deported,” says Peter Markowitz, a professor at New York’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He says the bill, which he helped draft, is instead “exercising a firmly established, constitutionally enshrined authority of the state to determine the boundaries of its own political community” and is consistent with Supreme Court precedents that recognize “state citizenship” as well as “federal citizenship.”

 “The very nature of our dual-sovereign federal structure,” says Markowitz, “means that New York gets to decide who are New Yorkers.”

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