The uneven application of due process threatens the Trump administration’s illegal immigration deportation efforts. Ensuring that due process – or the rule of law – applies to everyone helps make government serve the people. Thus, any undermining of the rule of law should concern us all. So it is with current immigration deportation efforts. But insisting on due process after ignoring the law only further diminishes Americans’ respect for the law.
U.S. immigration policy involves limited legal immigration and extensive illegal but tolerated immigration. This can be contrasted with two alternatives: limited and strictly enforced legal immigration and mass, legal immigration, perhaps even open borders.
Our immigration system diminishes respect for the law. Many government officials must ignore their duties – such as cracking down on businesses employing undocumented workers to sanctuary cities – to accommodate large numbers of law breakers.
The disadvantages of current immigration policy include an inability to target highly skilled workers and the abandonment of criminal background checks. This pushes Americans trying to run businesses into law breaking, for a business can profit by employing illegal workers. With strictly enforced limited legal immigration, few businesses will be employing illegals, so an owner only needs to resist temptation. Currently, however, many American businesses must break the law to compete against rivals employing illegals.
I am an economist, not a lawyer, and will not discuss what due process currently applies to legal and illegal immigrants. I instead consider rights and justice generally.
Citizens use constitutions to ensure that the government serves them, thus constitutional rights must ultimately be for citizens, not immigrants. Our Bill of Rights prohibits deprivation of life, liberty or property without due process. But because deportation is not truly a punishment, it seems the due process of a murder case need not apply to the immigration issue.
Deportation resembles trespassing. Property owners should be able to quickly make someone on their property without permission leave. Criminal trespass penalties might require legal proceedings, but trespassers should be expelled quickly.
Yes, some due process is necessary in deportation proceedings to prevent the deportation of a citizen. But due process has already been applied when the government executes a lawful deportation order.
We can often infer intent from what an action accomplishes. A week-long proceeding for each illegal immigrant will prevent mass deportations, and bending or stretching the law to invent these due process restrictions on deportation further undermines the rule of law.
Today’s governments pass laws, but in the English Common Law tradition, law was prior to government. Economist Friedrich Hayek referred to judges and legislatures discovering laws. Free people are the source of the laws they agree to follow.
Americans should care about and respect the law, for it orders the affairs of people seeking to peacefully and prosperously coexist with each other. The law should also protect peaceful citizens. Today, however, the law resembles a weapon wielded against the law abiding.
Consider, for example, the Americans working in jobs with high proportions of illegal immigrants. These Americans face competition and downward pressure on their wages. They would benefit from illegal immigration enforcement, yet employers can hire illegals with impunity because current law benefits them, giving them ways in which they can evade immigration hiring laws.
Immigration built the U.S., but that was when we were the land of freedom and opportunity. Immigrants back then came decades before the welfare state. As such, they came to work, not live off taxpayers.
A rational, legal system of immigration could benefit America. The progressive left, however, wants to use immigration to destroy America. As Jonathan Turley explained in a recent article, it’s this same progressive left who wants to see “the overthrow of the country by ‘people who came from nations who are under occupation by the United States government.’”
The law orders our affairs for peaceful cooperation. Respect for the law is sustained by following the law, not evading it to achieve a goal unattainable through the political process. Just as property rights disappear if trespassers and squatters cannot be removed, a nation dissolves if citizens cannot control its borders.
Daniel Sutter is the Charles G. Koch Professor of Economics with the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University. The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of Troy University.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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