Practical thoughts on immigration

 

In this article, Heather Mac Donald gives a clear account of the dangers the U.S. faces from prolonged lax enforcement of the immigration laws, and she condemns the amnesty policies of President Obama.  Ms. Mac Donald has followed and written about immigration issues for several years; her article here underscores the urgency of restoring the rule of law in immigration matters.

 

Practical Thoughts on Immigration

by Heather Mac Donald, Manhattan Institute

In Imprinis, monthly speech digest of Hillsdale College, February 2015 | Volume 44, Number 2

http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/

 

The lesson from the last 20 years of immigration policy is that lawlessness breeds more lawlessness. Once a people or a government decides to normalize one form of lawbreaking, other forms of lawlessness will follow until finally the rule of law itself is in profound jeopardy. Today, we have a constitutional crisis on our hands. President Obama has decided that because Congress has not granted amnesty to millions of illegal aliens living in the U.S., he will do so himself. Let us ponder for a moment just how shameless this assertion of power is.

 

Article 2, Section 3, of the Constitution mandates that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This provision assumes that there is a law for the president to execute. But in this case, the “problem” that Obama is purporting to fix is the absence of a law granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. Rather than executing a law, Obama is making one up—arrogating to himself a function that the Constitution explicitly allocates to Congress. Should this unconstitutional power grab stand, we will have moved very far in the direction of rule by dictator. Pace Obama, the absence of a congressional law granting amnesty is not evidence of political failure that must somehow be corrected by unilateral executive action; it is evidence of the lack of popular consensus regarding amnesty. There has been no amnesty statute to date because the political will for such an amnesty is lacking.

 

To read the rest of the article, click here:  http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/

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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She received her B.A. from Yale University, and earned an M.A. in English from Cambridge University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She writes for several newspapers and journals, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Criterion, and Public Interest, and is the author of three books, including—with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga—The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today’s.

 

Her article, Practical Thoughts on Immigration, was adapted from a speech she delivered on February 18, 2015, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Naples, Florida.