Republican'ts have made an art of proposing to solve insoluble problems, to do the impossible. Then, when they fail, they can't be blamed.
The so-called "illegal immigrant problem" seems to be another of that ilk.
If the words coming out of the mouths of Republican'ts dispatched to the national TV audience are to be believed, then there are a couple of facets to this particular "problem" that seem worth discussing.
First there's the assertion that the undocumented workers have "broken the law" and have to be punished before the "problem" can be addressed. Aside from being a really peculiar argument to come out of the mouths of Republican'ts who've spent the last five years breaking the law, it needs to be pointed out because it shows that some people obviously don't recognize law breaking in themselves. (I'm ruling out gross hypocrisy)
But, beyond being peculiar, this position regarding law breaking seems to directly contradict another developing position--that if a rule or law isn't enforced, it doesn't really exist. That, after all, seems to be the rationale behind the Bush/Cheney failure to carry out the laws Congress has passed-- the predicate of the signing statements which simply create a paper record of the determination that non-enforcement is equivalent to, if not more efficacious than a veto.
I have to admit that this is the first time I have ever run across this line of reasoning. I credit it only because it makes sense of the practice of negating legislation by ignoring it. But, what it does in the instance of undocumented immigrants is it leads to the conclusion that because there was no effort to enforce registration and documentation requirements, those rules were, in fact, inoperative. So, there was no law to be broken and the people who got here while law enforcement was held in abeyance can't be charged with BREAKING the law.
In other words, if rules and regulations are only in effect when they are enforced (failure to enforce negates the law), as the President seems to argue with his signing statements, then, whether or not immigrant workers have the right documents, nothing can be done after the fact.
While this interpretation of the operation of the law is totally illogical and inconsistent with our system of government, it not only vitiates the "solution" of the "immigrant problem," but it also explains the underlying thought process by which the Republican'ts have been directed. They seem to have bought into the assumption that "if we (government) don't prevent you from doing something wrong, then the law which prohibits that action is effectively invalid." Or, to put it another way, "if I don't stop your bad behavior, then whatever you do is my fault."
While at first blush this line of thinking seems to assign all responsibility to the law enforcement agent, the impossibility of actually carrying out the intent (preventing all bad acts before they happen) has the effect of errasing responsibility entirely. If I'm responsible for stopping you, then you're obviously not responsible for your actions. But, since it's impossible for me to stop you, I can't be responsible either.
That strikes me as a truly novel way for humans to escape responsibility.
That it's not rational because the premise is false is obvious, but it doesn't seem to matter. And that may be because of a rather more pervasive inability to see the proper relationship between agent and act and the proper sequence of events than we might expect.
Indeed, those of us who do perceive these relationships, on which our system of government is clearly based--including the recognition that the liberty of all implies the ability of some people to commit bad acts and to be punished for those actions AFTER the fact--assume that this perception is universal. In other words, we assume that the natural order is first the crime and then the punishment, but the doctrine of pre-emption recently articulated by the Republican'ts strongly suggests that this assumption is false. That is, the assumption that bad acts can be prevented with prior action--i.e. punishment, isn't just attractive but sincerely subscribed to by lots of people whose perception of cause and effect is skewed.
If so, then they are probably also incapable of recognizing that since bad behavior can't be identified before it happens, efforts to prevent it are doomed to fail. Nor that, if bad behavior doesn't occur, that reality is entirely co-incidental.
The central failure here seems to be an inability to recognize the proper sequence of events. I used to think this was a rare condition. But, increasingly, it appears to be rather wide-spread. We even see it a lot in the papers where effects are routinely ascribed to improper causes.
We assume that everyone has a sense of time and of one thing following another but that's not necessarily so. That tribe in the Amazon that doesn't count and doesn't recognize distinct things or quantities has no sense of history, probably for that reason. They just don't perceive the sequential relationship of things.
Anyway, whatever the logical basis, the "immigrant problem" is another one of those that Republican'ts have brought forward because it can't be solved, at least not if we want to maintain our current system of social organization. We can't discriminate against people who may or may not have the documents we want because it's impossible to tell who might rightly be discriminated against without asking and the asking, based on a profile that may or may not be relevant, is itself discriminatory.
Besides, what makes discrimination so pernicious is that in ruling some people out and some people in, EVERYBODY has to be subject to a level of scrutiny from which a free people should be protected.
It may be true that the wages of all working people are being depressed by some employers getting away with paying some recent immigrants less. But, if that's the case, then the solution is to audit the corporate books and make sure that the proper wages are being paid to everyone, regardless of country of origin. The Constitution applies to all "persons" and not just citizens and, by extension, the laws that are consistent with that Constitution apply to all persons, whether or not they are enforced.
The notion that the law is defined by its enforcement is really pernicious and need to be strongly refuted.
Posted by Hannah at May 17, 2006 06:39 AM