gracchusdixit

In deciding to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a.k.a. DACA, a policy introduced by President Barack Obama to protect the innocent children of illegal immigrants from deportation, Donald Trump had neither the courage nor the courtesy to announce the decision himself.  Instead, he handed this disreputable task to his all too eager Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.

Speaking from a podium where he declined to take questions from the press, Sessions all but quivered with spiteful glee.  It was shockingly obvious that this decision was the fulfillment of his deepest heart’s desire.  In a syrupy southern drawl, he oozed self-satisfied moral outrage, justifying the decision with four specious claims:

(1) That DACA was an “unconstitutional exercise of authority by the Executive Branch”.

(2) That it “contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences”.

(3)  That it has “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those jobs to go to illegal aliens”.

(4) That it “puts our nation at risk of crime, violence, and even terrorism”.

The first of these claims is, to say the very least, questionable.  More than 100 legal experts have publicly stated their judgement that it was well within Barack Obama’s constitutional powers to decide how immigration laws should be enforced.  In any event, it is up to the courts, not Jeff Sessions, to decide whether presidential actions are constitutional.

His other claims aren’t in the least questionable—they are utter rubbish.

The “surge” of unaccompanied minors he cited was caused, not by DACA, but by a wave of civil unrest and criminal violence in Central America. There is not a jot of evidence that DACA recipients have “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans,” or any Americans, for that matter.  And the insinuation that DACA recipients, or immigrants in general, “put our nation at risk” is absurd on its face.  No one can get DACA protection without passing criminal background checks, and immigrants in general are far less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.  For Jeff Sessions to pretend otherwise is duplicitous and deeply troubling, coming as it does from the chief law enforcement officer in the land.

Sessions would also like us to believe that, in rescinding DACA, he and Donald Trump are merely upholding the law:

To have a lawful system of immigration that serves the national interest, we cannot admit everyone who would like to come here. That is an open border policy and the American people have rightly rejected it.

Therefore, the nation must set and enforce a limit on how many immigrants we admit each year and that means all cannot be accepted. 

This does not mean they are bad people or that our nation disrespects or demeans them in any way. It means we are properly enforcing our laws as Congress has passed them.

What Sessions does not say is that our immigration laws have always been, and still are, instruments of racist exclusion, coercion, and control.

Until 1882, the United States of America did, in fact, “admit everyone”.  Indeed, there were no national immigration laws, let alone passports or visas.  Immigrants merely showed up on the docks of New York or New Orleans, Philadelphia or San Francisco, and if they weren’t afflicted with a communicable disease, were rubber-stamped and sent on their way, left to fend for themselves.

That is how millions of German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Scandinavian, Chinese and Japanese immigrants came to these shores. They went to work on the railroads, in the mines and the fields, in the factories and the slaughterhouses.  Their toil and sweat built this country, and in the process, the lucky ones were able to build new lives for themselves and their families.  If our current immigration laws had been in place back then, those millions would have been rebuffed, and their descendants, myself among them, would never have had the chance to become Americans in the first place.

Our first national immigration law was passed in 1882, after a couple of decades in which thousands of cheap Chinese laborers had poured into the country to build the Union Pacific railroad.  The white Americans who got here earlier were bombarded by the popular press and complicit political demagogues with threats of a “Yellow Peril”.  The legislation that resulted from this racist fear-mongering was called—without an iota of politically correct irony or shame—the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The next wave of immigration laws came on the eve of the First World War, and for similar reasons.  The excuse was that the nation needed to be protected from “foreign influence” in a time of crisis.  The real reason, however, was that 15 million immigrants had poured in during the preceding 15 years.  Many of these were Catholics, whose swelling numbers threatened the privileges, prerogatives, and power of the Anglo-Saxon Protestants who then ran the country.  Like Jeff Sessions today, the proponents of these draconian immigration laws invoked the risk of “crime and violence” to bolster their case.  The Germans, they claimed, were violent, beer-besotted drunkards.  The Irish were not only drunkards, but Papists and terrorists.  The Italians were not only drunkards and Papists, but disease-carrying, swarthy criminals.   To stem this corrosive tide, to save the nation, to preserve its culture and traditions, the anti-immigration voices demanded that it was time to clamp down.

Immigration laws have never been the only instruments of racial and ethnic suppression in our history—eugenics, sterilization, even the 18th Amendment’s prohibition of alcohol all served the same purpose—but immigration laws have been the most enduring.  They endure to this day.

Jeff Sessions would like us to forget this racist history, because he is a racist himself, a man who would like nothing better than to purge the country of those he deems to be ethnically undesirable.  Bigots like Sessions always invoke the “rule of law,” as if that were somehow sacrosanct.  It is not.  The law is a set of the rules by which we agree to conduct our public and private affairs, and we may agree that living by such a set of rules is better than living by no rules at all.  However, the validity of any particular law, its claim on our obedience, and its authority to compel or punish our actions depend entirely upon its moral content.

It was Saint Augustine, perhaps the greatest of the Early Fathers of the Catholic Church, who said:  Lex iniusta non est lex…“An unjust law is no law at all.”  There is nothing just, and nothing even remotely lawful, in the racist prejudices of men like Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump.