Continuing my thought re: immigration: In my opinion, we have laws for a reason, and we should make use of them and enforce them. We should not overlook people breaking immigration laws because they’re in a bad spot or because they do jobs we don’t want to do; and we should not have lax gun laws because “criminals don’t obey them anyway.”
We have what I’d call a “nod-and-wink” economy regarding undocumented workers, basically meaning we have two labor markets. We have one above-board market where workers have protections, safety regulations, legal recourse, and so on. And we have another market where workers have none of those things.
Well, we’re certainly not going to establish laws that overtly create second-class citizens (or second-class because-they’re-not-citizens). Just to begin with, the Declaration of Independence itself says “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
Words written without any irony whatsoever by a slaveholder.
So… we just throw them out then?
I’m saying some people today also see no problem between “all men are created equal” and the overt creation of an underclass, so the conflict does not necessarily indicate any sort of political infeasibility. Yeah, we had slavery before, and we don’t now, but I don’t believe the arc of the moral universe bends toward anything in particular unless we keep pushing it there ourselves.
I don’t like the attitude some on the left have toward the founding documents. I don’t like the way the right fetishizes them, but it’s completely sane and rational to accept and live by the great words of some of the Founding Fathers without ignoring the problematic aspects of their history.
It wasn’t about the words themselves, but how the words were being presented in a “this could never happen in America” defense. Frankly, I had a few things I was pretty sure could never have happened in America not so long ago, and the list is a lot emptier than it used to be.