Over at Reason’s blog, libertarian Shikha Dalmia writes on Alabama’s War on Immigrants. The essay is solid from beginning to end. I’d recommend readers to consider her full essay, but I’ll quote now from a few key passages.
Overview:
Conservatives are resorting to ever more draconian measures to take back the country from “illegal immigrants.” The latest state to declare an all-out jihad is Alabama. But as with slavery and segregation, they are using the government to commit sins that will eventually require even more government to undo.
Consequences of Alabama’s law:
But the provision that has struck terror in Alabama’s Hispanic community is that schools will now be required to collect information about the residency status of students and share it—albeit minus the names—with state authorities. Thousands of Hispanic kids have reportedly dropped out of school, fearing that this is a set up for future deportation.
The way these immigration restrictions are like segregation:
But there are parallels galore between the restrictionist and the segregationist crusades.
The most obvious is that they both invoke a grand American principle to justify a dubious cause.
Racists justified slavery and Jim Crow in the name of states’ rights then and restrictionists are justifying their attack on illegals in the name of the “rule of law” now. But rule of law in the service of bad laws is a form of tyranny….
But a bigger similarity between restrictionists and segregationists is their total blindness to what they are doing to a minority community. If restrictionists have their way, undocumented kids will have a hard time attending school, going to college, or ever gaining citizenship.
Emphasis in red my own.
The further consequence of these immoral restrictions:
Closing off economic opportunities and tearing apart families will ghettoize a subset of Hispanics just as segregation and Jim Crow ghettoized southern blacks. Right now, a country caught up in a restrictionist fury might not care.
But a civilized society doesn’t forever tolerate such blatant inhumanity. Ultimately, some triggering event forces it to confront its turpitudes.
The real question for the Right:
So the question is what do conservatives hate more: big government [to enforce a war on peaceful people] or undocumented workers? If it is the former, then they should stop drinking any more restrictionist poison. And if it is the latter, then they should stop pretending to be the party of limited government.
I’ve referred critically to similar policies before, either expressly or implicitly. See, Wisconsin Assembly Bill 173 and Eight Steps for Responding to Political Wrongs.
Politics is a matter of compromise, in almost all things. Yet you know, and I know, that there are legislators in Wisconsin — some so very close at hand — who support restrictions like those of Alabama.
Their support of these measures is beneath a normal American politics, and so there can be no compromise with them. If they were thoughtful they would renounce these views, and return to America’s principled, compassionate, beneficial support of free exchange in capital and labor.
If they were, they would; likely they are not, and so will not. Their embrace of these un-American proposals threatens to sew individual abuses and social discord across Wisconsin.
As with segregation, there can only be ceaseless, diligent, peaceful opposition to these restrictions. (Dr. King is an enduring example of principled American activism.) I wish it were otherwise, but one sometimes responds to conditions not of one’s choosing.
This is one of those times.