America’s Immigration Mess Shows It Failing as a Nation of Laws
Republicans are weaponizing a flawed legal system that Democrats are in turn undermining in word and deed. The consequences for justice are corrosive and far-reaching.
A bipartisan problem that both parties are making worse.
Photographer: Apu Gomes/AFP/via Getty Images
The government’s crackdown on illegal immigration, the resulting disorder in Los Angeles and other cities and the Democratic Party’s response to the riots testify to the country’s broken politics. But they also raise a deeper, less obvious, and more unsettling question. In what sense is the US, as it wants to believe, a nation of laws?
In a nation of laws, you might expect people to understand not just what the law says but also what it actually requires — an important distinction. In the US, as I’ve previously noted, the gap between the two is often very wide. Immigration law is an especially consequential case. Instead of clarifying its demands and aiming to have them enforced in a stable and predictable way, the country’s politicians manipulate the law’s gaps and ambiguities for partisan purposes. The result is injustice — together with enormous collateral damage.