The recent demonstrations over illegal immigration remind one of the comment attributed to a politician during the French Revolution: “The mob is in the streets. I must find out where they are going, for I am their leader.”
These demonstrations, impressive in numbers though they are, not only lack a leader, they appear to lack any announced and coherent purpose.
In fact, an Aurora Central High School student put it about as well as anyone when he told The Post this week that “A lot of people were walking out but they didn’t know why.”
Their confusion is not unique. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who spoke to the crowd in Washington on Monday, has characterized the immigration protests as a new “civil rights cause.”
It is no such thing unless the traditional meaning of civil rights is junked completely.
Civil rights or civil liberties, as most civics students should know, are those guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. There can be no plausible claim that illegal immigrants in this country have been the victim of a campaign to deny them the rights provided in the U.S. Constitution. Far from it. Numerous court decisions have actually gone far beyond the text and original intent of the Constitution and provided illegal immigrants a right to emergency health care and other medical services, a right to a publicly funded education and a bevy of legal protections in employment, housing and the like.
The U.S. Constitution enumerates rights enjoyed both by U.S. citizens and by “persons.” The guarantees of “due process” and “equal protection” found in the 14th Amendment have been applied to all persons. Thus, illegal immigrants today enjoy many of the same legal safeguards as citizens.
These public protests are therefore not intended to right some past wrong, but rather to lessen, if not completely obliterate, the remaining differences that separate the citizen and the non-citizen.
Media accounts of the most recent demonstrations claimed the protesters particularly don’t like the provisions in the bill passed last year by the House making it a felony to enter the U.S illegally. Maybe so, but the crowds are quite uninformed as to the source of this provision or its future prospects. Blame has been widely directed at the Republican Party majority, but the facts are quite otherwise.
Here is what Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., had to say on the subject during an Internet appearance sponsored by The Washington Post in late March:
“The truth is Democrats voted for the felony provision, and a majority of Republicans (including me) voted against it. … Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., wrote an amendment to his own bill asking that the penalty be reduced from a felony (in the committee version) to a misdemeanor: 191 Democrats and a few Republicans voted to keep the felony penalty in the hope that it would be a poison pill to defeat the measure. After his amendment lost, Sensenbrenner promised, ‘When this bill gets to a conference, those penalties will be made workable. You can count on that.”‘
It is a safe bet that not one in 100 of the marchers is familiar with this set of facts.
The demonstrators may be confused about what they want, but some key organizations supporting their rights have let the cat out of the bag.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which has been in the forefront of the past legal battles, readily admits that “the Constitution does not give foreigners the right to enter the U.S.” but it goes on to say that “laws that punish them (once they are here) violate their fundamental right to fair and equal treatment.”
This is both madness and an invitation to abject surrender.
Congress has the power to determine who is and who is not a citizen, and it matters which is which.
No rational immigration reform is possible if Congress were to accept the ACLU notion, echoed in a number of recent demonstrations, that the fundamental rights of immigrants acts as a bar to the punishment of those who enter the country illegally.
Al Knight of Fairplay (alknight@mindspring.com) is a former member of The Post’s editorial-page staff. His column appears on Wednesdays.
