Want to challenge Trump on immigration? Try a strategy from the antebellum South By Anna O. Law

between the national government, state and local governments.

The 10th Amendment of the Constitution is the source of the states’ powers. It states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Traditionally, this division has meant that states control policies under its “police powers,” which include health, safety and morals. Examples include regulating gambling, liquor, prostitution, and cigarettes. In turn, the federal government confined itself to what James Madison described in Federalist Papers Number 45 as “principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce.”

In the antebellum period, slave states used the autonomy allowed by the federal system to preserve slavery by arguing it was part of “states’ rights.” Later, during the civil rights era, southern states relied on the same arguments to justify racial segregation as part of the “southern way of life,” even though that belief contradicted federal law. Of the federal system, political scientist William Riker once noted, “Here it seems that federalism may have more to do with destroying freedom than with encouraging it.” Given its ignoble legacy on racial equality, the federal system earned a bad rap with those for racial equality.

However, the federal system can also produce liberal results because of the flexibility it permits across the 50 states. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1932: “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

That belief has led to progressive policies. In the Progressive Era, 1890 to 1920, it was the states that first passed laws to protect their workers’ well-being, including child labor laws. By 1919 every state had a law banning children under 14 from working, even as a similar federal law was struck down by the Supreme Court.

More recently, many states have legalized the use of medical marijuana. By contrast, the federal government continues to criminalized all uses of the drug, resulting in tough federal convictions.

Sometimes, states can succeed where the federal government cannot. Protecting immigrants may be the next example.

Anna O. Law is Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights, City University of New York. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution / No derivative).