Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Immigration is About Nation's Rule of Law
As a 15-year-plus credentialed correspondent in the U.S. Capitol covering immigration and higher education, and the author of two books and a primer on how our immigration laws and policies have evolved throughout U.S. history, I have to report that I am thrilled that at last the main stream media journalists now have to cover all aspects of immigration that got Donald J Trump elected the 47th President of the United States. They now must face their past eight years of either ignoring immigration issues altogether or deeming them far right wing extremism using over-the top hyperbole, misinformation and leftwing bias.
Understanding and covering immigration issues fairly without bias starts with the basics – that I have made available in a 68-page primer now on Amazon "The 5 Basics Everyone Should Know About Immigration: Confronting Confusion". The bottom line – and what makes immigration different from migration – is that immigration is about the sovereign nation state and national rule of law.
Most liberals and journalists seem to have missed the fact that there are NO universal human or civil rights to immigration – that is, the intention of foreign nationals moving from their nation of birth to another usually wealthier country like the United States, to stay long term, even permanently (unlike migrants and birds and beasts who migrate temporarily and keep moving from one place to another).
The United Nations Charter on Human Rights Article 13 states that "Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." But no one has the right to just enter and stay long term and demand the rights of citizenship in any sovereign nation state with defined borders and the rule of law. Immigration regulations and laws managing immigrants are solely the duty of each nation state (even in the European Union each member country has their own individual laws of how to become a permanent resident and a citizen. Every EU passport indicates the nation to which the EU member is a citizen). Every country gets to state their own immigration goals and policies through immigration laws, made by their national legislatures.
Immigration laws can and do change over time – like admission policies to our great universities. But it's the institution that changes them, not the student nor the migrant. Anyone can apply for admission -- in the case of the U.S. immigration, for the "green card" -- Permanent Legal Residency. But like many of our best universities, applications from highly qualified applicants far outnumber the places available – the number of PLR permits available now numbering about one million new permits a year. The nation gets to choose who gets them via immigration laws.
That leads us to the other bottom line about immigration laws. By definition laws state what is lawful about a certain issue and what is unlawful (or legal and illegal). AND every law contains guidelines for punishing unlawful behavior – the enforcement measure to be used to uphold the law. Laws are meaningless without enfoircement (a bit of history: we did not as a nation have immigration laws until the 1880s and no immigration enforcement agency per se; we have only had two comprehensive immigration laws since: one in 1923 – the national quota act, and the present one of 1965 that was driven by civil rights and gave anyone from any nation or background the right to APPLY for permanent residency with the restriction that no country can receive more than 7 percent of all permits given out in one year. Enforcement agencies increased.
The enforcement of immigration laws – indeed even the designation of a person living and working in the country illegally as an "illegal immigrant"– has been met over the past eight years with increasingly incomprehensible resistance from liberals. They loudly demand things like "no deportations ever" and "there is no such thing as an illegal person". This rejection of immigration law as a law that must be enforced, is largely why Democrats lost the 2024 election. It is why everyone must become fluent in the basic history of our immigration laws and enforcement policies from the past, in order to understand and improve them.
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