The issue of illegal immigration has been a hot topic in The Diamondback this past week. While the focus has been on the status of an illegal immigrant student, “Jacqueline,” I would like to turn the discussion onto the more general topic of immigration.
There are a lot of arguments put forth against illegal immigration, some of which are reasonable and cogent, but one in particular – the “illegal means illegal” argument – is so wrong it only serves to distract any real debate. I want to kill it once and for all.
It’s such a deceptively simple argument: “Immigrants are welcomed in the U.S. as long as they are here legally. All ‘illegals’ should be deported.” Unfortunately, like all things in life, it’s never that simple.
Immigration laws aren’t like most criminal laws. According to John Judis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, laws governing sex, drugs and alcohol are similar to immigration law because they “reflect majority opinion about what is good for a society, but are defied by large groups [of people].”
These laws are different from other regulations based on commonly held moral views about the protection of life and property because the validity of these laws lacks a moral consensus. Remember last year’s immigrants’ rights protests?
While Prohibition was meant to create a sober and orderly society, it backfired, causing the rise of organized crime and the illicit market, fueled by the resistance of a large portion of Americans. It ignored the root causes of society’s problems and attempted to establish an artificial standard of American life. Analogously, our current immigration laws are rejected by a large group of Americans who don’t concede that the immigrants who break these rarely enforced laws are criminals who should be deported.
The anti-“illegal”-immigrationists argue that America needs to reassert its sovereignty by expelling “illegal” immigrants, buildingDadisman 2/11/07 to build (for parallel) a wall to prevent further “illegal” immigration and enforcing these laws, maintaining the “social fabric of American society.”
But let’s analyze the basis of the “illegal is illegal” argument. Many assert violating the law makes one a criminal and should, in turn, result in just punishment (in this case, deportation). That seems fair, right? But, if you follow this line of reasoning, more than 80 percent of the students at this university should turn themselves in for violating one (or many) of Maryland’s sodomy laws. Under House Bill 11, section 554, oral sex is an “unnatural” and “perverted sexual practice” punishable by a fine of $1,000 or up to 10 years in jail. I hope those willing to live and die by this argument are ready to cough $1,000 or spend up to 10 years in the Big House.
On top of the absurdity of this argument, there are horribly impractical consequences: jailing and deporting 12 million people. This act would, at the very least, be extremely costly and ineffective.
And consider the legal repercussions for implementing such a regulation, which would have to be expensively defended in court. Lawsuits would challenge the ability of the government to deport U.S. residents without hearings or other due process of laws based on the violation of the Fourteenth Amendment – as happened in California in 1982 when the state passed Proposition 187.
To truly address the causes of immigration we need radical reformation of both our discourse and the governing laws. We must understand immigration is caused by fundamental flaws in our trade relations with developing countries and the pitiful economic prospects of these countries. We need to promote more comprehensive development strategies that address the underlying causes of poverty. Only when we address these issues will we ever see a decrease in illegal immigration.
Alan Wright is a senior economics and government and politics major. He can be reached at amwright2@gmail.com.
