Many adults in the United States want the government to implement tougher immigration controls, according to a poll by TNS released by ABC News and the Washington Post. 76 per cent of respondents believe the U.S. is not doing enough to keep illegal immigrants out.
Even now, my mother-in-law, who has a job, a husband, and an apartment in Russia, couldn't get a visa in order to attend her only daughter's wedding. Our immigration restrictions are already insanely tight, and are damaging our economy and our image in the world, and yet most people want to make the problem worse. It's important to remember that our democracy has never been absolute. The power of the people has always been constrained by the common-law tradition represented by the courts, as well as by civil disobedience on the part of conscientious individuals.
Like segregation in the past, immigration today is the issue on which the will of the people must be defied. I salute George W. Bush and the 7 million illegal immigrants on our soil for doing so.
The will of the people must be defied? Is that really what you want to say?
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, did you read the recent article in the Independent Review on cultural protectionism?
I didn't mean to imply that I thought your statement wrong; I merely wanted to be sure it wasn't an intentional bit of rhetorical overreach. Also, I wanted to make sure it was via appeal to (true) morality rather than something else.
ReplyDeleteYou and I agree on the existence of an independent, objectively-true moral system (I avoid using the word "code" as it encourages pernicious oversimplification) and that said system is ideally the source and justification of laws. Any law that contravenes morality must (normatively speaking) be changed and even contravened, assuming the evil of contravention qua contravention* is less than the evil of obedience to immorality.
That said, I love the Bill of Rights and subsequent (as well as previous) prohibitions of the domain in which laws can be made because it's a excellent admission of and method of mitigating the fact that our moral judgement is imperfect.
So I think we're fundamentally on the same page here. Of course, our moral and epistemic appraisals are different enough that the rest of the pages look pretty different.
*Here I'm referring the steady erosion of rule of law caused by repeated and widespread disobedience thereof. Elision of unjust laws from our daily lives creates a spillover effect that can reduce regard for just laws and ablate their effectiveness. Of course if someone's response to an evil contains more evil of its own, that's wrong too, but in a more obvious way.