Laws and Justice

This is the first part in a series to explain why I compare the US "mass deportations" of undocumented immigrants to the Nazis rounding up Jews in the run-up to World War II. One of the arguments in favor of this sort of action is that the immigrants have broken the law by being in the US without proper documentation, therefore the actions against them are needed to meet the needs of the law and justice. But how can you meet the needs of justice when the laws being applied are unjust and applied unjustly?

The law is never perfect, and it is not always just. US history is rife with examples. Slavery was codified by the the Constitution as legal. Slaves did not have the same protections as white people, and time and again, laws reinforced the rights of the South to not only own slaves and try to recapture escaped slaves, but to have the federal government assist in the return of escaped slaves. As noted in this Wikipedia summary, not everybody agreed with or supported these laws. Sadly, it's 2025, so I can't say "Of course we all know slavery was bad and that it was the morally right thing for those who resisted these laws to do as they did," since as just one example, Florida is now teaching students that "some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught useful skills." [source] But I hope that the majority of Americans agree that it was wrong to keep people in slavery, and that it was right to help them escape.

US law is also not equally applied, often along racial and ethnic lines. Anti-drug laws are just one place we see that. "Two out of five blacks sent to prison are convicted of drug offenses, compared to one in four whites." [source] Here in Massachusetts, Hispanic people make up only 12% of the state's population, but 25% of the prison population and 29% of the jail population. [source] I could go on for days about this topic, but I just wanted to make a couple of notes here to say that, even if a law is just (and I don't think most of our drug laws actually are), they are applied unevenly. Matt Gaetz is still walking around a free man despite credible evidence of illegal drug use. (There are economic inequalities in the application of the law, as well, but the main purpose of this discussion is around race and ethnicity.)

US immigration laws and policies are not just. These laws have been a tool of white supremacy from the beginning, when only white people were considered citizens. That changed eventually, but immigration law has typically been made and changed to limit or prevent immigration of non-white people. Even when the laws were meant to loosen restrictions, the actual implementation leaves the majority of the world unable to enter the US legally.

US immigration is a lengthy and expensive process. For someone in the US, the list of documentation needed for an immigration visa may seem reasonable. Yet the civil structures we have in the US are not universal, especially for the marginalized people in other nations who are considering leaving their nation. El Salvador, one of the sources of people seeking refuge in the US, has plenty of children who never get a birth certificate. Someone working to help those in poverty access education has had to help young people get the proper documentation in order to be able to attend school, often at later ages. The registration of the birth of children is actually data UNICEF tracks because "Birth registration is a first step towards safeguarding individual rights and providing every person with access to justice and social services." Just getting to a US Embassy for a visa interview could be a dangerous endeavor in a country rife with gang violence. Even if someone can get all the documentation together, make it to the embassy, and pay the costs for visas, they are not guaranteed acceptance if they don't fit a limited category, such as already having family in the US or having a set of job skills designated as desirable. And because these lists of jobs are written largely by white people, they don't include "low skill jobs" like picking fruit and vegetables, janitorial work, tending children, landscaping, food-packing, etc.

Those desperate enough to leave their homes for the promise of a better life in the US end up using human smugglers, known colloquially as coyotes. For ever-increasing fees, they agree to smuggle people across the border. But it's not a guarantee for the potential immigrant, and the risks aren't just getting caught, but extortion, physical and sexual violence, and even death. This article from 2018 details the process, though it doesn't go into as many of the risks, slanting more towards the coyotes' self-reporting of their processes

I do not think any of this is just. I do not think coming to the US seeking a better life should be a crime. My ancestors came to the US without any particular documentation. As commentary from the Brookings Institute points out, "Examining immigration policy through a systemic racism lens reveals that today’s largely Latino undocumented immigrants face far harsher consequences than white Europeans of years past for the same exact offense of unauthorized entry. A system that treats immigrants differently solely to their race is essentially the textbook definition of structural racism." [source] And my ancestors who came here were part of that weird religion that practiced polygamy, but nobody has ever told me to go back to where I came from. But someone whose ancestors have lived in this hemisphere for thousands of years can be told that because they happen to have brown skin. That is not justice.

It's even more unjust, because many of the problems these folks are fleeing are caused by the US. We've meddled in Central and South American countries, supporting coups, installing dictators, treating their economies as colonies to the US. We've also really messed things up with both our insatiable need for drugs and our "War on Drugs." For example, "homicide rates rose rapidly in the 2000s as the region became the primary transit corridor for South American narcotics bound for the United States." [source] And the guns at some of the homicides in Mexico's militarization of the war on drugs have come from the US, not just via smugglers, but by things like the ATF's Project Gunrunner, which ended up with the guns not leading to the arrest of cartel leaders, but instead being used in crimes in both the US and Mexico. [source]

Justice as I see it would not only involve taking care of those displaced by the violence we have caused, but ideally make things better. Though given the track record of the US government's interventions abroad, I'll settle for us committing to not making things worse.