Immigration is a good thing. We need workers and the infusion of ideas and customs from new cultures has made America stronger not weaker.
We also need respect for law and obedience to it in order for the Republic to function. If the immigration debate were only about helping nice Mexican and Central American families, then it would be far less worrisome.
Any sane American is in favor of legal immigration and sometimes this has been made too difficult. If immigration errors were not motivated by crass politics (more votes for us!), but by concerns about human welfare, then anger from citizens would not be so great. Even errors if well intentioned do not stir so much wrath as this bill has and should rouse.
The problem with the new immigration bill is not just in the details (there are devils enough there), but in the fundamental disrespect shown for the majesty of the law.
A republic always has a tendency to pander and fall into disorder. Plato predicted it in Republic and the Founders of our republic worried about it from the start.
It has been the remarkable experience of a very few places (Switzerland and the United States) to avoid this tendency. This has been the result of the respect for law found in both places. Americans didn’t like rules in the 1940’s and 1950’s (and there were fewer!), but obeyed them.
We still have a culture not centered on the bribe or the “underground.” Anyone who has visited many other nations know how rare this is! But Americans would be arrogant to assume we are somehow immune to this common disease of governments. Perhaps the real ethnocentrism in the immigration debate is to assume that we can set up an underground economy and allow increasing millions to flout the law with no ill effects, because we are “America.”
We do not need another way to disrespect the law in libertine America.
One of the founding ideas of America is that the law is King. The President is sworn in with an oath to defend the greatest source of our laws: the Constitution of 1789.
Illegal immigration is a law enforcement problem. Any solution to it must start with the basic flouting of law by businesses that hire illegals and by those who cross America’s borders without permission. Until this is stopped (or brought under control), the law is being mocked and republics cannot allow the law be mocked. We have no other political sovereign and a nation that allows its sovereign to fall into common disdain is ripe for political turmoil.
To simply make legal what was illegal, protecting scoff laws in business from their crimes, risks total break down in the need assumption that in America it is (generally) better to play by the rules than not. If that assumption vanishes or receives many more challenges, we may soon face a cultural “tipping point.” Of course, no single issue will get us to this bad place, and perhaps the law and respect for it, can take hundreds more blows, but why take this horrible chance?
What we must avoid is the horrible notion that the King (any government) is Law. A lack of stability in our laws, even if passed by Congress and signed by the President, undermines the ability to count on the rules and the profitability to play by them. It increases the dangerous appearance that some will be given a break and the rules will be changed in their favor (after breaking them) if they have the clout.
When law breaking is not controlled and law breakers can count on periodic amnesty, then why keep the laws? Why play be the rules? The government in power at the moment becomes King in such a whimsical system and raw power with the tyranny of a rapidly changing majority (giving their followers favors and forgiveness) the rule.
In such a way do republics, like the Roman Republic, die.
We need respect for the law in this age more than we need workers. We need secure borders more than cheaper products.
For humane and merciful reasons, once the law is no longer bleeding daily from multiple wounds on our border, forgiveness can be the order of the day. We can begin with common sense and mercy to deal with the humans (all created in God’s image) who are here illegally.