All eyes on Arizona, but not 'sanctuary cities'

[Jeanfromfillmore]

All eyes on Arizona, but not 'sanctuary cities'
Our country is experiencing a serious outbreak of lawlessness, but it is not in Arizona state government, and it is a major contributor to the flood of illegal immigration, largely from Mexico, in the last quarter century. It is the growing number of so-called “sanctuary cities,” which have provided safe havens for those illegals.
Theft of valuable items is a major problem largely because the thieves have a market for their stolen goods. These “fences” are poised to pay a price attractive enough to make the crime worth the risk of arrest. Similarly, the knowledge that approximately 150 cities in 29 states and the District of Columbia, including all of Maine and Oregon (http://www.ojjpac.org/sanctuary.asp), gives “coyotes” at America’s southwestern border ample incentive to smuggle in illegals and transport them to a compliant destination.
The name “sanctuary cities” is clearly a ploy to compare their harboring of illegal aliens to free state residents protecting runaway slaves before the Civil War. That was illegal, of course, as the Constitution guaranteed that “persons held to service or labor” would be returned to their masters. But it has hardly ignoble, for as Frederick Douglass (himself a runaway slave) put it, slavery was 100 times worse than what American colonists “rose up to oppose.”
Mexico is an oligarchy which is striving simultaneously to become more democratic and suppress drug lords. The escape valve which misguided American cities are offering to millions of poor people gives no incentive to the Mexican government to deal with rigid social inequalities.
Moreover, harboring illegal aliens leaves them at the mercy not only of the criminals that smuggle them across the border but of activists and career politicians who use them as cannon fodder for their ambitions and employers who exploit them at the expense of American workers.
The federal government’s indulgence of sanctuary cities — and the major media’s silence on the full extent of it — might cause many who consider themselves progressive to overlook or even applaud this lawlessness. But lawlessness is what it is, however sugar coated, ignored or concealed it may be.
Ominously, massive illegal immigration is dividing our citizens in ways that parallel “legal” slavery’s effect. Abraham Lincoln warned in 1838 about a spirit of lawlessness, both citizen action and government inaction. For example, abolitionist printers were terrorized and murdered, and both white and black citizens accused or suspected of crimes were burned or lynched, while state and local governments looked the other way.
Lincoln argued that slavery had the power to incite citizens on both sides of the question to law breaking as it massively contradicted our nation’s founding principles. Illegal immigration, too, has incited law breaking, primarily by those who favor it.
The 1960s saw an epidemic of law breaking that was rationalized by the doctrine of “civil disobedience,” which holds that if a person’s conscience tells him that a law is unjust he has the right to break it. Obviously, there can be no such right if the rule of law means anything, but persons who embraced law breaking believed that they were answerable to a “higher law,” typically nothing more than personal angst.
Those law breakers have grown up or are emulated, and many of them govern in cities and states across America. Hence, there are 30 “sanctuary” municipalities in California, including most of its largest cities. There are 13 in Texas, 11 in New York, 10 in New Jersey, nine in Colorado and eight in North Carolina. There are even four in Arizona. Mayors, council members and some county supervisors are complicit.
For those who wonder why the Obama administration is more concerned about Arizona trying to control the borders than 150 governmental entities that are defying federal law, the explanation is not difficult. Ever since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Law that encouraged immigration from countries outside of Europe, Democrats have sought the immigrants’ votes.
Whether or not the federal lawsuit against Arizona is successful, Obama is pandering to those who ignore the distinction between legal and illegal immigration or who benefit directly or indirectly from the practice. He and his party are in desperate political trouble and are hoping that a huge Hispanic vote will overcome the electoral deficit that has developed among most American citizens.
Lawlessness by private citizens is bad enough, but its indulgence and even practice by public officials is worse. Neither enforcement nor reform of immigration law is possible without a commitment to the rule of law.

ABOUT THE WRITER
Richard Reeb taught political science, philosophy and journalism at Barstow College from 1970 to 2003. He is the author of “ Taking Journalism Seriously: ‘Objectivity’ as a Partisan Cause” (University Press of America, 1999). He can be contacted at rhreeb@verizon.net.
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