White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Spot the Illegals — a Chilling, Sad Neighborhood Game

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Here is a disturbing game: Try to spot the illegal immigrant.

Is it the waitress, the winning one from Bulgaria, or is it the charming emergency room doctor from Pakistan, or is it one of the Mexican men working on the housing site at the corner? Maybe it is the Haitian caregiver in your home, whom you adore and are afraid to ask if employing her will compromise you.

You look hard at them because if they are illegal, or also referred to as undocumented immigrants, ICE could pounce.

They are a shadow underclass, productive members of society, and they are part of our national fabric.

Many of us are silent conspirators when it comes to these immigrants. We know and don’t tell. We don’t reach for the phone, and if they are arrested, we feel it personally.

Some would want you to believe that a majority of these people are rapists, murderers, thieves or drug dealers. If they are, they should be arrested, tried and imprisoned. That is what the police and the FBI should be doing, not the extracurricular, often barbarous ICE.

The trouble starts with the word “illegal,” which conjures visions of an evil underworld. Undocumented workers are indeed living in an underworld, doing essential jobs that others won’t. That labor force is part of the grease that keeps America’s wheel turning.

Whether cleaning houses, minding elderly parents or children, building houses, repairing roads or plucking chickens, immigrants, legal and illegal, are an essential part of the functioning of our society. Failure over decades to enact sensible immigration laws has left us persecuting those we depend on for so much.

The paperless came here chasing a dream that was also the legendary American Dream: a better life in a fairer, happier, safer place, where you can trade a day of work for a day of pay, even if the work was rejected by the rest of society.

Behind all crimes is motive. The motive of the person who walked across the southern border or overstayed a tourist visa is the same: a better life, a life worth living. It is the same motivation that has always brought the needy to these shores, whether it was for religious freedom in the 1600s, the Irish famine in the 19th century or escaping Hitler.

The true asylum seekers came to avoid death, an unquestionable motive.

My plea is for those who are here and have established lives of merit, not for open borders. Migration is a global challenge exacerbated by war, climate change, religious persecution and political oppression. It causes fear that an existing culture will be overwhelmed, as when migrants bring in a different language or a disruptive religion.

These are real concerns, but they should be less so in the United States than in Europe or Australia. This nation is so large, and has benefitted so hugely from immigration, that it should tailor its policies to local reality, not global fear.

The politics of immigration are murky. Democratic and Republican administrations have had vigorous deportation regimes — but the statistics are skewed for President Biden and President Trump’s first administration because of the COVID crisis.

Under the administrations of President Obama and Biden, enforcement was active but less conspicuous, while the southern border remained porous. Under Obama, deportations reached their zenith with 400,000 expulsion orders. In the second Trump administration, deportations will probably exceed the Obama removals’ total.

Among immigrants, there is confusion about their status. There are those from 13 countries who had special protected status, which included allies from the Afghanistan war, Haitians and Venezuelans, who wonder why they have lost it.

Then there are those who wrongly believe their Social Security numbers will protect them; and those who have work permits but don’t have the right to abide by a bizarre legal contradiction.

ICE agents with their thuggish demeanor appear to relish arrests and deportations. We are told ICE has numeric targets for arrests. Whenever its agents appear, they strike fear into the hearts of otherwise innocent people who wanted to share a dream.

None of us choose where to be born. Those born in awful circumstances and who come here without permission are guilty of breaking the law even while signing on to the American dream.

Now that the borders are essentially sealed, how about some American forgiveness?

The Rule of Law Is the Foundation of Civilization

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The men you see in masks on your television savagely arresting people may not seem like your affair. But they are your affair and mine, and that of every other American.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates outside of the law. It doesn’t disclose charges, and no one arrested sees a court of law.

ICE agents are also the affair of the whole world, for while they are symbols of local terror, they are also symbols of America’s withdrawal from the one critical underpinning of civilization: the rule of law.

Without it, society isn’t much. No one is secure, even those in charge.

At another time, the victim may be the oppressor. When there is no law, there is only fear. One day, the persecutor behind the mask may find himself persecuted by another man behind another mask.

Once power is wielded indiscriminately, it is free to serve many masters.

During the government of Argentina’s campaign to suppress left-wing political opponents, known as the Dirty War, from 1976 to 1983, a new way of settling personal disputes emerged.

The police arrested so many and killed them secretly — between 10,000 and 30,000, and the victims became known as the “disappeared” —  that soon murder became easier. If you didn’t like a rival or even a family member, you “disappeared” them — and that was that. No one would report such disappearances to the police for fear that it was the work of the police.

When I was in Argentina after the Dirty War, I was told about a man who didn’t like his mother-in-law and disappeared her. Lawlessness breeds lawlessness.

Currently, in areas of America where ICE is present, there is a common assumption that if someone suddenly goes missing, it means ICE has detained them, and they are likely being sent to a detention center for deportation.

Mickey Spillane, the American crime writer, once said the only difference between the police and the criminals was that the police were employed by the government. We see that with ICE.

In 1215, at Runnymede, the nobles of England told King John to cut it out. They demanded an end to the arbitrary confiscation of property and his majesty’s habit of handing out sentences without trial.

Habeas corpus (“that you have the body”) dates in English law to before the Magna Carta, but it was codified there. The Napoleonic Code embraces many of the same elements as the Magna Carta, although Napoleon eschewed English common law when he revised French law into the code in 1804.

Now, about half of the world’s legal systems are based on the French code, and half, including 49 U.S. states, are based on English common law. Louisiana has a hybrid of the two.

Nonetheless, it is a tenet of both systems that the individual will face trial and know his or her accusers, that the accused could be tried by his or her peers, and that the accused has rights.

Historically, the British relied heavily on the rule of law. In fact, law and its application became a mainstay of maintaining order in Britain and in the Empire. It was part of the concept of British exceptionalism.

The dignity and openness of trials were an important part of the colonial ethos. In Southern Rhodesia, before the country suffered a civil war and became Zimbabwe, I was a defendant in a minor dispute with a hotel over a bill. Even though I had settled the bill, I was ordered to appear before the native commissioner’s court in the remote area of the country where the hotel was located.

The court was a room with a single table and chair. Everyone else sat on the floor. It was crowded with justice-seekers and defendants, all of them black.

Only the commissioner and I were colonials. I thought the process would be nothing more than a courtesy call, a wink and blink.

Finally, the great man with bushy, unkempt, white hair and a mustache called me to the table. He read the now-moot complaint and dressed me down in terms I have never been dressed down, even by irate readers.

He said I was a disgrace to Britain, to my ancestry, to my family, and to my school. But, he said, I had especially let down the Empire. I was warned that if I ever faced him again for any reason, no matter how minor, I would get strict punishment.

It was really a rough way to treat a teenager, but it was part of the justice of the day that had to be seen as even-handed and blind.

In “Oliver Twist,” Charles Dickens wrote that “the law is an ass.” I think it is a beautiful beast, despite running afoul of it in colonial Africa. We need it back in the U.S. stable.