By Daniel Payne
Friday, September 08, 2017
Yesterday former attorney general Eric Holder emerged
from whatever half-lit Sicilian restaurant in which he currently practices law
to lecture Americans about our immigration system.
“Our nation’s sense of morality—and of itself—is once
again being tested,” he wrote in the Washington
Post, accusing President Donald Trump of “turning away from the principles
that indeed made America great” by repealing President Obama’s executive order
allowing the children of illegal immigrants to stay in the United States. “If
we are to remain true to our heritage and who we claim to be,” Holder writes,
“we must stand with the dreamers.”
It is an irony for the ages: Eric Holder has no problem
shipping illegal firearms across the Mexican border, but he positively cannot
fathom doing the same thing to illegal immigrants.
Dreamers Are Not
Citizens, Or We Wouldn’t Be Talking
In truth, the question of what to do with the children of
illegal immigrants—the so-called “dreamers”—is a difficult one, insofar as
those children are illegal immigrants themselves through no fault of their own,
and we might consider whether it makes moral sense, at the very least, to ship
them back to countries which they may barely know. This is a question on which
Congress should spend considerable and careful time.
But Eric Holder nevertheless gets it wrong, as he is wont
to do. “I’m calling on all Americans to see and treat dreamers as our own,” he
writes, “because they are our own.” These individuals “should not be defined by
their immigration status,” he claims. He quotes President Obama, who says that
the dreamers are Americans “in their hearts, in their minds, in every single
way but one: on paper.”
Well, gee, thanks for pointing out the obvious,
professor.
Indeed, Obama gets it right: the dreamers are not
Americans “on paper,” and so in that one profoundly critical way they are not
Americans at all. That was the point of DACA in the first place: to offer
deferred deportation to non-Americans.
Natural-born and naturalized citizens of the United States were not the ones
who took advantage of Obama’s executive order: it was illegal immigrants,
non-citizens, that did so. It is not Trump who “defined them by their
immigration status.” It was Obama.
Citizenship
Matters, Whether We Like It Or Not
It is grating to have to point this out, though the
deficiencies of our immigration debate tend to make it necessary to do so. We
are, after all, a nation; as a nation we are composed primarily of a body
politic made up of citizens. There are a great many among us who desire, in
various incoherent ways, to do away with such distinctions—people who believe
that simply arriving here, through whatever means, should qualify one for
citizenship. Such a policy would essentially do away with the idea of
citizenship altogether, rendering our country’s immigration policy to be the
legislative equivalent of John Lennon’s turgid “Imagine.”
We are not, as a rule, obliged to seriously consider such
college-freshman proposals regarding serious and important domestic policy. But
the question of citizenship is nonetheless a profoundly vital one, and the way
we respond to the problem of the dreamers is of profound import.
There are good
reasons for providing them a path to citizenship. But, much as it might pain
Mark Zuckerberg to admit it, there are good reasons for deporting them, as
well—chief among them the question of whether or not, as a matter of national
policy, we want to incentivize and reward making immigrant children into
emotional and political hostages. The illegal immigrant children of illegal
immigrants are not, in the traditional moral sense, criminals, and should not
be morally seen as such—but they are, nevertheless, inhabiting the United
States actus reus, in the status of
criminals if not the intent.
The intent, of course, is a critical component of our
law—and in crafting a permanent solution to Barack Obama’s flimsy executive
order, our lawmakers should give careful consideration to the fact that the
dreamers did not intend to break the law when they came here with their
parents. Just the same, the idea that these young men and women “should not be
defined by their immigration status” is a fallacy, and a dangerous one at that.
We are all, in the eyes of the law,
“defined by our immigration status.” The dreamers are no different, nor should
they be.
No comments:
Post a Comment