"Illegals Out Themselves"

From the Wall Street Journal:
John-Clark Levin: Young Illegals Out Themselves, Daring To Be Deported
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703578104575397180097418638.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t

I've discussed this issue before, and this is more of the same. Even though we know that illegals have nothing to fear from government nowadays, it still surprises me just how open they are about it.

Here is an interesting quote from the article:
"Take no action, and ICE would undermine the law. But come down hard by deporting the students, many of them still teenagers, and it would risk drawing overwhelming public outcry. ... Yet ICE has stated that it has no intention of initiating deportation proceedings against the students arrested in the Washington protests."

We have laws on the books that we do not enforce. When we do enforce the laws, there is often public outcry against them, indicating that there is not a firm moral basis for these laws.

This is analogous to the abortion debate, by the way. (Didn't see that coming, did you?) People say they support "choice." But show them a picture and they recoil in horror--even though that "fetus" is not human in their opinion; it has lower status than a dog. Kill your own baby, that's okay. But if a pregnant woman is killed, the murderer is often charged with two counts of murder. And people talk about the baby as if it's a member of the family long before it is born--even if it's not human YET if you believe the "pro-choice" side. Deep in their hearts, people instinctively know what a fetus is, and that killing it is wrong--as demonstrated over and over again by our natural reactions to the situations I mentioned. (For a better justification of being "pro-choice" please read Murray Rothbard's views on the subject.)

Similarly, our gut reaction is to not enforce immigrations laws. People instinctively realize that laws that throw hard-working people, people trying to better themselves, out of the country are wrong.

Still, the laws are on the books. One more quote from the article:
"Yet this strikes many on Capitol Hill as an inexcusable failure to enforce the law. 'It's outrageous,' California Rep. Gary Miller told the Orange County Register. 'How can you have a protest right in a U.S. senator's office, admit you are here illegally in violation of the law, and we pat you on the back and do nothing?'"

There is a conflict here. I believe it is because our laws are wrong. The laws are not in accordance with our morals, at least the morals that we profess to have. We should not be deporting good, hard-working people. However, we should also not be rewarding people who come here for the wrong reasons. The immigration issue is really a question of incentives, which is why it's really a welfare and social benefits issue. We want to reward people for doing the right thing and punish them, or at least not incentivize them, for doing the wrong thing.

The people screaming to "build a wall" or "throw them out" are, in my opinion, pushing band-aids. They're not even close to addressing the core issue. Stories like this continue to demonstrate this to me.


This story is nothing new, of course. Here is a similar past post of mine this subject, about a young woman in the Atlanta area who openly defies the INS:
Immigration: "Messed-up system" - May 27, 2010
http://tblooming.blogspot.com/2010/05/immigration-messed-up-system.html

And my thoughts on immigration in general, in case you were wondering where I'm coming from:
Address the root cause of illegal immigration - June 14, 2010
http://tblooming.blogspot.com/2010/06/address-root-cause-of-illegal.html