Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

You could see it coming. A federal judge has sustained legal arguments – for now – that apartment landlords in Farmers Branch don't belong on the front lines of immigration enforcement.

From the beginning, the suburb's City Council and voters appeared headed in the wrong direction in trying to force property owners to take on the job of verifying legal residency of would-be tenants. Private businesses should not be burdened with the job of sorting through legal documentation offered at lease-signing time. That's the job of federal immigration officers, and Farmers Branch officials should not have needed U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay's decision this week to affirm it.

That said, community frustration is palpable – and understandable – because of illegal immigration's social and financial costs, from hospital care to extra resources for education. State and local officials nationwide will cast about for ways to solve these problems until Congress finds the political courage to reform the deeply flawed immigration system.

Some cities have found better approaches than others. Irving, for instance, evolved a program to hand city jail inmates over to federal authorities if the lawbreakers turn out to be in the country illegally. The so-called Criminal Alien Program amounts to law enforcement officials working together on two levels, an arrangement that makes obvious sense.

The landlord-as-cop concept doesn't. Nor does another measure approved in Farmers Branch that would, if not struck down by Judge Lindsay, prohibit landlords from renting to people who did not obtain a $5 renter's license.

Requiring American-born or naturalized citizens to make a trip to City Hall to declare legal residency is beyond inconvenient; it's offensive.

Expensive legal skirmishes over immigration are far from over for Farmers Branch and many other cities and state legislatures. Oklahoma and five other states have passed employer-sanction laws. Arizona's cleared one federal court this year, and state lawmakers followed up with even tougher provisions.

Federal appeals courts need to provide badly needed guidance about the constitutionality of this patchwork of laws.

Texas lawmakers are going to wade into the legal thicket next year, and who can blame them? By some estimates, as many as 7 percent of all Texans are here illegally.

Capitol Hill has ample reason for embarrassment for its failure to enact comprehensive immigration reform. The clamor out of Farmers Branch attests to that failure.