On the 17th of August, 1929 in Thousand Oaks, California, the Bank of America sold to Henrietta Atherton a piece of real property. The deed, which is only two pages long, contains the following restriction:

Today the very thought of such a restriction turns our stomach. And yet until 1948 when the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley V. Kraemer it was legally acceptable for courts to enforce race-based covenants. Sixty years ago it was possible to tell someone where they could or could not live based on his or her race. At that time it was so accepted that people and companies like Ms. Atherton and Bank of America would willingly sign documents that were by today’s standards racist. Race and color are attributes that individuals do not control and therefore judging people based on them is unacceptable in America. Thurgood Marshall said in his argument in Shelley “Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society.”

Today the immigration laws of the United States are written to judge people based on where they were born. Place of birth, like race, is an attribute individuals do not control and therefore as Thurgood Marshall argued about race “have no moral or legal validity in our society.” Sixty years from now our descendents will see that it was wrong that we, in 2008, had laws that classified people based on where they were born. They will be embarrassed just as we were when we read the restricted deed in the example above. Responsible people should have the right to live wherever they choose in the world. The sooner we recognize this right and start to move our immigration policy in that direction the better off our country and the world will be both morally and economically.

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