Immigration Laws: Legal is not always Moral

We are a nation of law.  Our leaders do not rule by personal fiat.  We have no king, conqueror, or self-imposed dictator giving order by means of arbitrary commands based on personal whims and fancies.  In our land the rule of law reigns.

But not all laws are created equal.  There are good laws and there are bad laws.  Like the will of a King, laws can be fair and equitable or they can be unjust and oppressive.  Thus, just because one obeys the letter of the law, one is not necessarily being moral and just or even good for so doing.

Remember how Mark Twain’s fictional character, young Huckleberry Finn, struggled with a guilt ridden conscience for helping out Jim, Miss Watson’s runaway slave?  He was breaking the law.  He knew it.  And he didn’t feel right about it, at first.  But as we see it now, the law of slavery that once reigned in the South was a bad, cruel, unjust, and inhumane law to begin with—including supportive laws, such as those requiring everyone to notify authorities when a runaway was spotted, so as to have the slave recaptured and brought back to the rightful owner.  Thus, from our vantage point, it was right that young Huck Finn should disobey the law of his day and help Jim out.  It was an inhumane law to begin with.

Sometimes it takes a while for us to realize that a law is bad, but hopefully when we do, we make it right.

Thus, when we are faced with what appears to be a legal, ethical dilemma, it is not enough to simply ask ourselves: “Is it lawful?”  We must also ask: “Is this right, moral, just, or humanely fitting?”  Pressing it further, we should ask, “Is this right in the eyes of a good, holy, compassionate, loving and redemptive God.”

For example, I remember being very disappointed by the way our previous president, George W. Bush, approached the question of whether or not waterboarding should be used for interrogating captured enemy combatants.  He seemed to only focus on the question of its legality.  Was it within legal bounds to allow it?  Really!  To decide that an action is allowable because it is within legal bounds is a terrible way to decide the ethics of an action.  The real question was whether or not the interrogating method was immoral and inhumane, because it is actual torture, not whether it was simply within legal bounds.

So for example, in today’s hotly debated topic about the status of our present undocumented immigrants, there is much talk about their “illegal” status and their “law-breaking” methods of having arrived here.  We criminalize them.  This makes it easier for us to also trash them.  That is, to speak bad about them, to put them down, to treat them as undeserving and unworthy of our compassion and care, believing that we need not concern ourselves for the wellbeing of criminals.  That’s our excuse to be harsh with them and to treat them with little respect.  Arizona’s severe immigration-law is a case in point.

Obviously there is no easy solution, no easy economic, social, or political answer to the challenge of this nation’s capacity to continue to absorb an unlimited number of ongoing undocumented and underground immigrants into our land—even if it IS a direct consequence of our own badly shaped social and economic policies with Central and Latin American countries during the 20th century.

Nevertheless, our attitude and our depiction of these undocumented immigrants make a whole lot of difference.  Those who banter about the terms “Illegal” and “unlawful” or “criminal” when speaking of these immigrants are blindly refusing to look at the bigger picture and failing to consider the deeper humane questions: what is moral, good, right, merciful, and just?  Especially considering what has driven many of these immigrants to commit a desperate act in crossing our borders to enter this nation in the first place, given that they are received by an uninviting and unwelcoming people who resent their very presence.  There is much, much more to their story than meets the naked eye of the average American citizen on the street.