Tim Lee makes a great point about selective moralizing about violations of immigration law:
The same point applies to immigration law. Obviously, we ought to enact sane immigration laws that make it easy for people like Jose Vargas to get a green card. But given that we haven’t done that, it’s a good thing—both for him and for the rest of us—that our enforcement system wasn’t effective enough to prevent him from taking a job here.
Again, there's a huge double standard here. We American citizens take a strictly moralistic tone toward laws that we don't personally have to follow. But “the rule of law” goes out the window when it comes to that pot you smoked in college, or the use taxes you haven't paid on your Amazon purchases, or those pirated MP3s on your hard drive. When we're talking about laws that actually affect us, we're glad there's some breathing room between the law on the books and what people actually get punished for.
We should display the same kind of magnanimity toward people who have to deal with our immigration system, which is much, much more screwed up than our copyright and traffic laws. Jose Vargas didn't hurt anyone when he illegally entered the country as a teenager, just as Barack Obama didn’t hurt anyone when he illegally smoked pot in college. Law enforcement has, correctly, turned a blind eye to Obama’s youthful lawbreaking. It should do the same for Vargas and thousands of others like him.
This is another one of the reasons I think that the issue of illegal immigration is a bit like the Drug War. Americans have spent an incredible amount of resources on enforcement of immigration laws, not recognizing that you can't simply destroy a market by making it more illegal. We know, because we've tried.
The other thing this brings to mind is Matt Welch's argument that most of us are, essentially unprosecuted felons. Just to flesh out Lee's point a little bit more, not pirating MP3s and not running red lights--even not smoking marijuana--are laws that most reasonable people could obey that they don't because of temptation and self-interest (those smoking marijuana for medical reasons excepted). But demanding Vargas or other undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children turn themselves in so they can be shoved out of the only home they've ever known sets a standard most reasonable people would be unwilling to meet. And when you have laws that reasonable people would be practically incapable of following, you incentivize lawbreaking. That's a symptom of a deeply broken system that needs to change.
