by JL Wall
Last week, a Northwestern University Police Department officer pulled over a man on suspicion of drunk driving; in the process of trying to identify him, it came out that he was in the United States illegally. So they turned him over to the proper federal authorities for a deportation hearing. This has become a minor deal here, what with letters-to-the-editor and a march planned for tomorrow. This, of course, to be expected; immigration policy is hardly something every agrees with. In fact, the Evanston City Council disagrees with it so much that they’ve directed the Evanston Police Department not to engage in or cooperate with investigations into immigrant-status.
This resolution, of course, has been brought up. But since the City Council’s authority does not cover NUPD (which, apparently, is a real police force more than a campus-wide security-guard staff), it has to be a more “spirit of the law” kind of argument. And NUPD violated this spirit by failing to act “on a humane and just basis” by reporting an immigration violation – the phrase has become both an argument and a refrain. It’s not entirely the fault of certain students that they’re using that phrasing; it’s from the title of the City Council resolution.
Nevertheless, because of it, the entire outcry has been based in large part on a conflation of justice claims with fairness claims. Though the means of enforcing an immigration policy could theoretically be unjust, the fact of its enforcement is not. (And in this case, the means of enforcement appear pretty clearly not to have been “unjust.”) So long as we are presuming that a nation has the right to an immigration policy – that is, to control its own borders – then it follows that it has a right to enforce that policy. Those now claiming that justice was violated are attributing it not to any quota system, or border policy, or mass rounding up of illegal immigrants (this is the isolated case of a man initially booked for drunk driving) but that the law calls for its own enforcement – that there be some punishment (deportation) for violating it.
This is not unjust. You can make a case that this is unfair: “He came here for a better life,” etc., and I’m not without sympathy for that line of thought; my grandfather’s first language was Yiddish, after all. So it’s unfair: “He came here for a better life,” and, “He wasn’t harming anyone by being here,” (we’re ignoring the DUI for the moment). The fact that he was in violation of the law by being in this country was not disputed: unless it has become a violation of justice to enforce a law that is not inherently unjust, this is a fairness claim. It’s not fair that immigration restrictions should make it so difficult to immigrate to America, it’s not fair that those who come in search of a better life should have to live in fear of deportation even if they are present in violation of the law: but so long as a government has the right to control its borders and the right to enforce its own policies, it is not “unjust” to deport someone present in violation of the law. One may enter a country illegally and attempt to live a life there, though if caught, one may not complain that being punished for it is inherently unjust – it’s part of the bargain, as with any refusal to obey a law with which you don’t agree.
So some people think justice should always be fair and what’s fair should always be just. Big deal. But conflating the two terms leads to a confusion of what we’re talking about, and a degredation of the debate. If that which is unfair is unjust, then anyone who disagrees with your fairness claim is actively promoting injustice. Which is why words like “bigot” and “racist” and “profiling” have been flung around on campus in the past week, and why the group organizing that march I mentioned a little while back has decided to advertise with a Youtube video that comes dangerously close to making the claim that enforcing an immigration policy quickly leads to mass murder and genocide.
Finally, I just want to say: shouldn’t calls for those charged with upholding the laws to pick and choose which laws they feel like enforcing make us all pause and think pretty hard at this point in our history?
(A closing note: yes, there are certainly situations in which upholding and enforcing a law is unjust. But immigration policy and, say, the Fugitive Slave Act are not the same thing: only one of them treated certain members of humanity as no more than chattel.)
Filed under: government/law, immigration, morality
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