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What was illegitimate about the Fugitive Slave Act other than the flagrant and duplicitous disregard for the law by free states?
It was morally abhorrent to enslave people and to return them into slavery. Legitimacy does not consist in "whatever the state says is legitimate."
Iis morally abhorrent to cross border without permission and to overstay a visa. To impose yourself in a place you don't belong and doesn't want you.
If we are talking about well-behaved gainfully-employed illegals in blue cities like Chicago (which is where the ICE raids causing the fuss are focused), then nobody is imposing. The illegals are in a place where their landlords, bosses, butchers, bakers etc. as well as a super-majority of the community are perfectly comfortable to have them there. The people who don't want them are the people (almost entirely from outside said blue cities) who voted for Trump.
Now as a matter of positive law, this particular group of intermeddling non-Chicagoans and the federal government they elected do in fact have the legal right to send goons into Chicago to round up and remove the illegals. But that only affects the morality of the immigrants' behaviour if you think there is a moral obligation to obey permissibly-dumb-but-not-evil laws in a democracy. I do, but my impression is that most Motteposters subscribe to the libertarian view that there there is no such obligation. Even if breaking laws is immoral, peacefully breaking immigration laws is immoral on the level of filesharing or handling salmon suspiciously*, not on the level of victimful crimes like burglary, so "abhorrent" seems excessive.
* "Handling a salmon in suspicious circumstances" is, somewhat notoriously, a crime in the UK. The purpose of the law is to make it easier to prosecute blatantly guilty poachers like this guy without needing to litigate the provenance of a specific salmon.
I am a white American. My neighbors here in Japan like me well enough. I perform community service and pay taxes. I have children here and am well-integrated into the community. If I had come here on a tourist visa 5 years ago and the Japanese immigration services finally caught up to me and deported me, would you find that outrageous and unjust? For consistency's sake, you may respond to me in this thread saying that you would. But if your eyes passed over a headline reading "American man deported from Tokyo over illegal visa violations" would you immediately be shocked and upset by this? Or would it pass beneath your notice as a mundance "dog bites man" story? The outrage over punishing immigration crime really seems like an isolated demand. It's only bad when America does it, for some reason.
Arbitrary and capricious enforcement of paperwork offenses (and illegal immigration is a paperwork offence) is an injustice, though a minor one in the grand scheme of things and I certainly wouldn't call it an outrage. I think tolerating well-behaved illegal immigrants for decades and then rounding them up for deportation counts as arbitrary and capricious enforcement, although I understand why the people voting for right-populist parties don't*. It definitely isn't shocking given that almost every 1st-world government - especially the ones that don't actually believe in immigration enforcement - now engages in occasional bouts of arbitrary and capricious immigration enforcement as a form of reality-TV prolefeed.
As a separate issue, I think deporting well-behaved established members of communities harms those communities. If your neighbours like you, then the Tokyo government is hurting them by deporting you, and they are entitled to treat a government that does so as hostile, just as Chicago is treating ICE as hostile.
The median voter seems remarkably sane about immigration - people want system of managed legal immigration operated in the national interest, with criminals, scroungers, and radical Islamists deported asap and well-behaved productive immigrants on a 5-10 year path to citizenship. The "Why can't we have an Australian/Canadian points system?" discourse. There are multiple reasons why this does not happen in the UK or US, and the most annoying one is that the whole debate is poisoned by the completely broken humanitarian immigration system. It doesn't help that two-party systems in the social media age shut out the median voter, such that the public debate is between leftists who favour de facto open borders through a trivially abusable humanitarian system and rightists who want a near-zero immigration system that would have deported Elon Musk and Jensen Huang's parents.
* If you think that the 30 years of broadly-tolerated illegal working was a conspiracy by the Dems, the GOPe, and their corporate supporters against the American people, then the American people (and the Trump administration as their agent) aren't acting arbitrarily and capriciously - they are doing what they always wanted to do and always said they were going to do at the first reasonable opportunity. The comparable argument in the UK is similar but more complex because most of the low-skilled working immigrants in the UK entered using (possibly deliberately) easily-abusable legal routes, not illegally.
I think that if my neighbors had learned I had broken the law, they would like me less and would (rightly) regard me as a criminal. Japanese take the law very seriously, they don't have any of the American-style anti-authoritarian animus. And although I'm loathe to admit it, I'm also not sure how me getting deported would harm them. This house would probably be vacant for a few months before another polite and quiet middle class family moved in with whom they would get along just fine. And they'd probably be relieved to no longer be living next to a lawbreaker. My friends here would be sad, but they'd probably think I made some pretty stupid choices and got what I deserved.
I'm tired of hearing about Elon Musk and Jensen Huang. America went to the moon and back before we opened the immigration floodgates, we can clearly do just fine without mass third world immigration. The idea that America "needs" a bunch of immigrants to stay competitive is IMO a revisionist historical narrative promoted by those same recent immigrants. I don't even really blame them for pushing the narrative; doing so helps them fill a psychological need to write themselves into the American story. The Ellis island generation did the same thing ("America is a nation of immigrants!"). But it's also fair play for heritage Americans to call it what it is, revisionist propaganda.
And I'm learning Chinese, says Wernher von Braun.
As well as the Project Paperclip scientists, George Mueller grew up in a German-speaking household so he wasn't exactly a "heritage American". The ancestors of Aldrin (grandson of Swedish immigrants) and Collins (long-established Irish-American family) wouldn't have been let in if the nativists of their day had won their political battles.
"Collins" is an Irish name that fought in the Revolutionary War.
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