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Written by Simon
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Sunday, 20 May 2007 |
“They are illegal.”
Of course they are “illegal,” there is a bad law involved. People who make this argument are on the wrong side of history. In the 1950’s segregation was accepted as a norm of American society. The Supreme Court had ruled that it was allowable. By 1964 it was under attack as a policy and by 1970 segregation and all of the laws that supported it were gone. Laws had to be broken to effect this change but they were bad laws. The phrase “illegal immigrant” will suffer the same fate. It cannot be right to make decisions about who can live where and who can have what job based on where people were born.
There are about 12 million people who are in this country “illegally” right now. They are here because we gave them a mixed signal. On the one hand we offered them better jobs and opportunities than they could get back home and on the other we told them they were “illegal.” If the speed limit is 65mph but the police don’t ticket people unless they drive 75mph pretty soon everybody is driving 75mph. It would be wrong for the police to change policy and suddenly start ticketing everyone who drove 75mph. And it would be wrong to try to deport law-abiding people who have followed our customs if not the letter of our bad law.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 29 August 2007 )
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