There’s something about the ongoing immigration debate that I don’t understand. People don’t abide by the law. People get unhappy when they will be forced to face the consequences of not abiding by the law. What am I missing?
I Don’t Get It
2006-04-11 09:55
Change and uncertainty of the outcome are frightening. They’re not sure they’ll be allowed to stay if the law changes. Mario thinks if Democrats had written the bill, there wouldn’t be as much fuss.
Yes… but if you’re doing something illegal, you should be uncertain an frightened to begin with. Sure, this ups the ante a little… but what do you expect to happen if you don’t play by the rules?
Bad laws are bad laws.
What happens when you speed? 99% of the time, nothing. If that was any much smaller a percentage, we’d see the same protests.
Bad laws should be modified to be good laws, not to be worse laws.
It’s logistically impossible, and perhaps even morally questionable, to force 12 million people all at once to face the consequences (which are drastic, i.e. deportation) of not abiding by the law (which has been very loosely enforced for a generation).
JB: Yes, bad laws are bad. If I were someone trying to immigrate to this country and had been wading through the red tape required to do so legally for years and years and years, I’d be pretty pissed that others got to short-cut the process. If I get caught speeding, I don’t get mad at anyone but myself for getting caught disobeying the law.
Doug: I agree with the logistics part of that. As for the morally questionable part, I’m not sure that this debate triggers the ‘moral’ part of me, so it’s hard for me to think about this debate that way. To me, it’s about process, legality, and following the rules of society. Yes, the rules weren’t enforced, which is part of what makes the debate less clear cut for me. But they were enforced well enough that a large number of people chose to go the legal route.