|
Page 1 2 3 4 5
La Guerra Contra El Terrorismo
American for Immigration Reform
by Jason Roth
Preservation of the rule of law
When all else fails, the next excuse I hear from the conservative types is that anyone who's shown enough guts and perseverance to get into this country is a criminal, end of story. We must fight to preserve "the rule of law", and extricate these wildmen from our borders before they start using our heads as piñatas and everybody's kids start crying for their bottles in Spanish. If there's one thing that differentiates a Republican from an Objectivist, it's the Republican's dogmatic defense of law with blatant disregard for context. I.e., are we talking about a good law or a bad law? More fundamentally, why do we have the law in the first place? Is it only there for us to obey it?
A rational approach is not to accept some dictator's commands (say, ten of them), obey without understanding their purpose, and declare any act of transgression a step toward anarchy. Sitting on a bus when you're not allowed to is not necessarily a step toward anarchy, nor is giving the finger to bureaucratic assholes who make it impossible for you to escape from your life of poverty and misery, simply because your birthplace was latitudinally-challenged and your parents picked peyote instead of Pabst Blue Ribbon as their aphrodisiac of choice. When the law infringes upon, rather than protects, individual rights, the law is immoral and ought to be broken (in the short term) and then changed (as fast as goddamn possible). Rights apply to individual human beings, not to those born of a certain status or geography.
Hence, the justification for the rights of the original Americans, even before they were Americans:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
It just so happens that one of the things the Founding Fathers were so pissed off about was King George III's actions towards potential immigrants:
"He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands."
If contemporary Americans, the descendents of immigrants or immigrants themselves, really held respect for American law, they would respect it for its power to protect individuals, not its power to rule over them. They would choose to differentiate between those who are threats and those who are innocent.
Many of us have seen the practical consequences of "the rule of law". The "rule of law" everyone's so proudly anal about is the law that hinders honest, hardworking people from getting into this country. I've seen multiple examples of this firsthand, from Jamaicans to Germans. We're not talking about a few annoying hours at the DMV. We're talking about death and disease, and a government that rams its proverbial burrito (and/or jerk pork) up your loco ass 24 hours a day. When someone gets in the back of a truck with two-dozen other sweaty assholes with dreams of being unloaded into the promised land of a filthy kitchen in the back of some redneck barbecue joint, you know she's taking her pregnancy seriously. Give her a break. She's not al Qaeda.
|
