“Immigration Rights”–What Are They?
2nd September 2014
Read it.
What are those “immigration rights”? Legally, of course, no one has a right to violate our immigration laws, whether the Obama administration enforces them or not. So what does the president have in mind here? It seems clear that Obama isn’t suggesting that immigrants are somehow being denied their actual rights under American law. Certainly he made no such explicit claim. Rather, his point appears to be that some people–not everyone in the world presumably, but some unspecified group of people–have a “right” to enter the United States, or stay here, even though it is illegal to do so under U.S. law, as long as Barack Obama opposes the law in question.
No coherent theory of law or justice supports such a proposition, but when has that ever stopped Barack Obama? “Immigration rights,” implying the right to violate others’ actual, legal rights, has now become liberal dogma. Who in the Democratic Party news media will point out the absurdity of the president’s position? No one, I suspect.