Immigration - Part 1 - Bad Law

Bad law makes bad citizens. Attempts to control immigration have produced some of our worst laws, with some of the most dire unintended consequences.

I read one reason the Japanese were willing to attack us at Pearl Harbor was they resented our discriminatory immigration laws which were aimed specifically at Japanese and Chinese in California. I don’t remember the source, and so don’t know what evidence, if any, supports that claim.

Certainly prohibition resulted, in part, from our desire to control our German- and Italian-speaking residents, especially during World War I. It was proposed in 1917, and ratified in 1919.

Despite its noble hopes to curb alcohol abuse, it fed, instead, a popular culture that glamorized cocktails, and spread drinking to the middle classes, including women. Since the new drinkers weren’t alcoholics, they didn’t believe their desires for chic social lives were corrupt. This lead to a willingness to circumvent the law, indeed, romanticized speakeasies and bootleggers by reinforcing youth’s natural desire to challenge restraints.

Selective obedience of the law was simultaneously occurring with the federal income tax and state attempts to control the newly available automobiles. Attitudes coalesced into a new view that our government was a system to be outsmarted.

Prohibition created a black market supplied, initially, by men who had previously controlled vice traffic in cities. They expanded into gangs, and then syndicates, and what we now refer to as the mafia.

As activities of rumrunners became more flagrant and led to gang wars, we responded with increased police power, and introduced what became the FBI. It, in turn, found it difficult to collect evidence of criminal behavior, and so found ways to twist the new income tax laws to find grounds to arrest criminals.

Prohibition was repealed in 1933, but too late to curb the lawlessness and the acceptance of lawlessness that it had engendered, especially lawlessness by the state. Those attitudes continue today when we jail users and escalate the force used against farmers, now to the point of dominating our policies towards some Latin American countries.

The consequences of criminalizing natural human behavior, especially when that involves the marketplace, comes to mind when politicians suggest ways to stop immigration should include turning undocumented immigrants into felons and prosecuting those who help them, wither it be with food, housing, or a job.

Attempts to slow immigration have already lead to a new class of criminals, the coyotes who charge to bring people into the country, then leave them to die in unventilated trucks or in the desert. A recent New York Times article described other exploiters, including unscrupulous lawyers.

The requirement that job applicants must show proof of citizenship already puts many in law enforcement positions for which they are not trained and makes all of us prove our legitimacy. I work for a contractor who leases his employees from a head shop that handles payroll and other legal requirements. I send copies of the documents applicants provide to the legal employer.

I have no idea how to tell if a driver’s license or social security card is counterfeit, and I doubt the employer can make any determination from the copies sent to it. I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to check anything, or am only a clerk. The worst of the proposed laws would prosecute me.

Some may respond to the threat of legal action by simply refusing to hire anyone who looks like he or she may be an immigrant, regardless of proof. That puts them in violation of civil rights laws against discrimination based on skin color, language or national origins.

Which law to break to run a business and hire people?

A government of laws depends on citizens accepting the laws it promulgates, and obeying them, regardless of cost or inconvenience. Selective obedience of the law has an honorable tradition going back to Thoreau, if not to earlier religious groups. However, our government has only tolerated it when the issues were ones of genuine conscience, like wartime conscientious objectors, or small religious groups like the Amish.

Every time I’m forced by economic necessity to do something that could be illegal, it makes me ruminate on the nature of the law and our government. The corruption of the body politic is no longer something happening to them, to politicians and lobbyists. When it touches a lowly clerk in a small business who dutifully votes in primaries, then it is forcing every single person not to consider the status of immigrants, but to reconsider their loyalty to their elected government.

It was hard to elevate drinking by our mothers and grandmothers to that level; it will be harder still to indict people trying to run legitimate businesses. The resulting, selective application of law enforcement will lead to a further degradation of our respect for laws and the individuals who uphold or enforce them. The contempt for law is far more corrosive for the American way of life, than the challenge of absorbing one more wave of immigrants.

Sources:
Gary Rivlin, "Dollars and Dreams: Immigrants as Prey," The New York Times, 11 June 2006.