Musings on Immigration

A detailed review of HB 87, the purported " Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act of 2011" reveals that this bill does not reform illegal immigration nor does it enforce laws related to illegal immigration. What it does do is increase taxes on every citizen of Georgia by increasing government regulation, creates unfunded mandates for every county, city, town, and village in Georgia, and creates new private rights of action against every Georgia polity that will absolutely result in hundreds of lawsuits that will drain taxpayer coffers and result in little, if any real change on illegal immigration. The Faulty Premise of HB 87 W ithout belaboring the point, this type of legislation is popular because it gives the perception that the state is doing something, which the federal government is purportedly not doing—enforcing federal laws on illegal immigration. The problem with this notion is two-fold. First, the federal government is doing mor...

Some will find no sympathy for this Border Patrol Agent . They will say, HEY, he chose to be a Border Patrol Agent, and he chose to let his twice deported father live in his house. And, he knew that it was against the law to lie to federal investigators. But, when you realize it was his DAD, don't you think, "darn, our system is broken?" In a way, I feel sorry for this young agent. His law enforcement career is over. He may serve time in a federal prison. All because he was protecting his dad. Frankly, I don't know how many of us wouldn't do the same thing. Who would rat their father out, when he personally experiences everyday the tragedy of our broken immigration system? Our immigration laws just continue to cause human tragedies every day. How sad.

We constantly hear that undocumented immigrants are not obeying the "rule of law" or that because we are "country of laws" undocumented immigrants need to be arrested and deported regardless of their situation and the consequences to either them or the U.S. These phrases are thrown about randomly because they surely sound good. Who does not want to live in a "country of laws" where we are governed by the "rule of law?" But an understanding of the concept of the "rule of law" in the context of the U.S. immigration system might better serve our national debate on immigration and bring us closer to resolving a problem that is not intractable. Deserved respect is paid to the Constitution as a basis for all of our laws. As such, we should acknowledge that the framers of the U.S. Constitution believed that an unjust law was not really a law at all. And, as noted in Wikipedia : James Wilson said during the Philadelphia Convention in 17...