As an immigrant child, who didn't much want to come to the "land of wild Indians" in the first place but was brought by a mother, who couldn't settle in any one place for any length of time, and then decided the U.S. was definitely preferable to Chile, where she took us next, in 1954 (I turned 13 as we crossed the equator), I don't even know where to start, when the topic of immigration comes up.
That's not because, since all my papers burnt up with the house in 1974, when I went to get copies from the immigration service in 1989, the agency couldn't find them and I had to be re-sworn by a chain-smoking bureaucrat in a closet-sized office with my husband attesting we'd been married since 1964. That's all it took -- one oath and an affirmation to replace records the feds couldn't find.
So, when I read about identification being required for people to carry out their civic duties and vote, I'm almost speechless. After all, that attesting spouse, who, for all he knows, was born in the state of Lousiana to a family that immigrated before the Revolutionary War, has no certificate to attest to his birth and never did. Since he wasn't expected to live, nobody bothered to issue one.
I, on the other hand, have mine. Germans are good at keeping records. Indeed, they even sent my mother a small pension after she'd been gone from the country for thirty years and taken out citizenship papers somewhere else. Paying her to stay gone was undoubtedly cheaper than having her return.
Yesterday, I got a message from Senator Leahy of Vermont wanting to know my thoughts on immigration in 250 words or less. I wrote back that I thought anyone should be able to come and stay as long as they injure no-one, including themselves. And, if they do, they need to be restrained and/or sent back where they came from, if the country will have them.
It's struck me as strange for some time that it takes foreigners like Hamdan and Boumediene to help define the extent to which the U.S. Constitution respects human rights, even as the Congress routinely passes laws to violate them (DADT, DOMA, the Military Commissions Act). Indeed, from where I sit, the only reason our current immigration laws are still on the books to be amended is because the Constitutionality of the U.S. making laws that apply to people, who reside in other countries (political jurisdictions) and might want to come here without enough money to splurge on fancy hotels, hasn't been challenged yet.
What makes migrants and immigrants and short-term residents different from the other natural persons the Constitution is designed to serve? Nothing, I would argue, but the desire of some people to come up with some category of people whom it is constitutionally admissable to separate and segregate on the very thin thread that the Constitution distinguishes between foreign born and native when individuals are selected for the Presidency. On that one example now hangs the future of legal (legislated) segregation and "protecting" the whole nation is its justification.
The groupists among us just can't stand the idea that everybody needs to be treated the same. Might as well expect them to identify and cherish every plant that shows up in the yard, instead of killing everything that doesn't look like grass. You see, it's a perception problem. Individualism is all fine and good, in theory. It's when persons are to be seen as individuals that the optically challenged have a problem. If they can't tell the difference between a rose and a pansy, how can they deal with people, each of whom is unique?
Finally, there's the problem that equality is not the unmitigated boon one might expect. The last forty years have clearly demonstrated that equality does not equal high quality--that it is possible to treat everybody (or almost everybody eventually) equally shoddily. People can be herded like cattle and those wearing the hats can be easily changed. Because, after all, the Constitution has no enforcement powers. It's up to "we the people" to respect human rights. And, since we haven't even ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, that's still only an aspiration, towards which the arc of justice supposedly bends.
Exception, on the other hand, is enshrined in the Constitution. Some civil and property rights are to be respected, EXCEPT when it is reasonable not to. The presumption of reason is perhaps more problematic than the presumption of innocence, because the impulse-driven among us do not reason. And the presumption of probityseems to have been obliterated entirely by their insecurity.