Commentary
Our country is engrossed in a pressing question. Is there an emergency at the border involving what President Donald Trump
calls “a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul”?
“Crisis” comes from
a Greek word connoting a “decisive point in the progress of a disease” or a “point at which change must come.”
There is indeed such a crisis and contagion involving the border, but it isn’t on the Mexican side. Rather, the crisis involves literally untold millions of citizens from other countries who have settled in the United States illegally, as well as our lethargic response to it.
Whether we view this fact as an emergency depends upon how conditioned we have become to accepting decades of an epidemic of illegal immigration. The crisis is twofold.
The first part of this crisis is the fact that we have simultaneously refused to enforce our immigration laws effectively, and refused to disincentivize future law-breaking resolutely. The result of this mixture is a molotov cocktail of injustice.
Our refusal to enforce the law in proportion to the problem and to disincentivize continued flouting of our laws—extended over decades—undeniably makes us complicit in this injustice. If we think that the perpetual fate of millions of men, women, and children whose official status in this country is “undecided” doesn’t constitute a crisis, then we have become habituated to moral blindness. If justice delayed is justice denied, then our decisively facing this crisis is long overdue.
The second part of this crisis is an insidious belief about America that saps our moral confidence to enforce our laws. Many people believe, for a variety of reasons, that U.S. citizens aren’t morally worthy of claiming ownership of this nation.
All these beliefs are in service to a new form of Marxism, founded on faith in the paradigm that all people are divided into two groups: historical oppressors and historically oppressed. These are the new bourgeoisie and proletariat.
The new understanding of “the revolution” is that all places of privilege properly belong to the oppressed people of the world, regardless of national borders. Tacit acceptance of this belief has led to a lack of confidence about the moral rightness of enforcing immigration laws that presuppose U.S. sovereignty over its borders. This lack of moral confidence has led to decades of weak immigration policies that are a grave injustice to U.S. citizens and legal immigrants alike.
I have already written about the justice of the first part of this crisis, the fact that we owe it
to ourselves, as well as
to the population of legal and illegal aliens living in our midst to resolve the ambiguity of the latter’s resident status in some equitable and expeditious manner.
Let us now face the question of this second part squarely: Do the citizens of this country actually have a right of ownership of the United States? If so, then they have a moral right to defend their borders not only from drug-traffickers and rapists, but also law-abiding immigrant farmers and families if they so wish. If not, then why maintain the semblance of law as though we do? Laws should either be enforced or changed; when we simply disregard them, we invite disdain.
The fact is, the moral logic of the Left leads incontrovertibly to
open borders. Most Democrat leaders
say they oppose open borders, and yet how many of them accept the basic moral argument that it’s based upon?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
claims to support border security, but she calls a border wall “
an immorality.” Her moral blithering is a result of her moral dithering. Evidence that she has drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid is seen in her
commitment “to work every day to ensure the American Dream remains in reach for everyone,” by which all in polite society are meant to know she refers to American citizens and not alike.
When Democrat leaders talk about supporting “border security,” they mean they want to make it
safer for immigrants to come in legally or illegally or to remain in easily after overstaying their legal visa.
The Obama administration liberally employed “
prosecutorial discretion,” by which law-enforcement agents were instructed to prioritize the most dangerous cases and actually help fund and advise lower-priority illegal aliens effectively to acquire pardons.
Prosecutorial discretion is based on the assumption that there’s a “
limited availability of resources” for enforcing the law. Of course this is true, but there is strong evidence that the Obama administration’s recourse to prosecutorial discretion was done for political—not practical—concerns.
According to
Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics, after the Trump administration canceled the Obama priority directives in 2017, ICE arrests rose by 42 percent over a given period, compared to that same period in 2016. Clearly, there wasn’t too great an insufficiency of resources in 2016. Rather, there was too little will to use them to enforce the law. In truth, most of the Left believe that non-violent, illegal immigrants actually haven’t broken any law at all.
Make no mistake, this oppressor-oppressed, neo-Marxist ideology is absolutely dominant among the Left and society elites. They consider the idea of the bordered nation-state to be
outdated. It’s evident in their
caring more about the sovereign borders of habitats of certain animal species than about preserving the sovereign borders of our nation.
This neo-Marxist dogma is in explicit contradiction to the fundamental American belief that all people are created equal, with regard to their natural rights—regardless of privilege or the perception thereof. In fact, our Constitution has denied recognition of
titled claims to privilege since 1789. Do we still hold this fundamental belief?
We are indeed facing an emergency because of a crisis, but it’s a crisis of faith. Wall or no wall, one thing that must be built up to fix our immigration policy is our firmness in the right to our moral claim to be sovereign over our own country.
Clifford Humphrey is originally from Warm Springs, Georgia. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate in politics at Hillsdale College in Michigan. Follow him on Twitter @cphumphrey
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Friends Read Free