Authorities won't enforce immigration laws

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Col., is calling for a White House probe into high-ranking federal Homeland Security authorities in Texas who publicly reassured illegal aliens and their backers they have no plans to enforce federal immigration laws anytime soon.

Tancredo, head of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, responded to statements by Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent in Charge Joseph Webber, and Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas, who called a special meeting, attended by about 400 people.

At the meeting, they announced they had no plans to arrest, deport, or hassle the scores of aliens illegally living and working in the Houston area, according to the Houston Chronicle.

As a Libertarian, I'm not all that fond of immigration laws. That is, I think we have the right to choose who comes into the country and who doesn't, but in general I favor a fairly open border policy. That is complicated by the existance of a present welfare state and the current war on terror; in times of war no nation is obligated to maintain an open border regardless of peacetime principles.

And yet the current government is completely blind to this. That's not my only beef here, though. Why is the government openly stating that it will not enforce immigration laws?

Well, duh. Politics. Bush wants the votes of those in the country legally but who come from a culture with a large number of illegal immigrants. Immigration policy is one of the few levers into that voting population . Unfortunately, refusing to enforce the law is a very poor choice of lever.

We have so many laws these days that we can pick and choose among those to enforce. Indeed, we have to pick and choose. We don't have enough police or enough prosecutors to do anything else. Perversely, that lack of resources leads to even more power in the hands of the government; since the government cannot control an innocent man, where there are not enough criminals to satisfy the lust for power, government will act to make more criminals. And with an abundance of rarely-enforced laws to choose from, governments are free to select cases not by the severity of the crime but by the opportunity to set an example.

Or, in other words, the squeaky wheel gets locked up. All the other wheels stop squeaking when that happens, because they are all breaking some of the laws, somehow, and avoiding the attention of the State is suddenly a necessity of survival -- and survival easily outweighs principle in the minds of most squeaky wheels... and even squeaky men. The power to prosecute one man in 10 who breaks a law is the power to threaten all 10 with being chosen.

Right now, regardless of what our government has to say about enforcement, there are millions of illegal immigrants -- honest and hard-working, for low wages, and without the protections of America's labor laws -- who live in fear of being deported... because whereever they came from is worse. These are the victims of our immigration policies. They are victims because they are neither accepted nor rejected.

If we are to welcome to our shores the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free"

For years, the first thing new immigrants saw of our country was a great statue, with this inscription:

... Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the goden door!

If we are to live up to that charge, then we must welcome these new citizens into our land with open arms, offering them all the rights, responsibilities, and privileges of citizenship. If we cannot do that, and instead pass laws to turn them away, then we must enforce those laws. Otherwise we are no better than slavemasters, threatening with the whip of the INS and tantalize with the bribe of a scanty meal to a starving man.