US Politics |OT|

[Shadow1980]

Since immigration was a major issue this year, I thought I'd cap out the year here on VGC with my own two cents on the subject.

I find it ironic that the most militantly anti-immigrant people in American are also the ones who like to talk about constitutional originalism. "What did the Founders mean when they wrote this?" Well, first off the Founders weren't a hive-mind and the Constitution was a product of political compromise, being essentially one of those proverbial "smoke-filled backroom deals." But even if they were a hive-mind, it's pretty clear that they did not intend on giving the federal government power over immigration. According to "originalist" conservatives, any power not explicitly granted by the Constitution to the federal government is a state power.

When it comes to regulating immigration, it's not even an implied power. There isn't some vague language regarding the subject that can be the subject of debate, like there is with a lot of things in the Constitution. Immigration is not mentioned or even hinted at once in the entire text of the Constitution. Whether the federal government should have the power to bar non-citizens from entering the country, or require them to fill out paperwork and deal with a bunch of red tape to live here, or expel them for any reason wasn't even a topic of discussion at the Constitutional Convention. Period. Therefore, by conservative's own standards regarding the Constitution, the power to regulate immigration is a state power. The Constitution does give the federal government power over naturalization, but that's merely the power to grant citizenship to a non-citizen. The Constitution is already clear on what defines a citizen, or at least it has been since the ratification of the 14th Amendment, so that doesn't even imply an ability of the federal government to arbitrarily decide who is and is not a citizen, only to be able to grant citizenship to those who are definitionally not citizens. But the Constitution never says that the federal government can prohibit non-citizens from entering the country, or even expel them.

The U.S. had no federal immigration laws as we understand them for a century after the Constitution was ratified. The Supreme Court basically decided in the 1880s, under spurious reasoning that had nothing to do with the Constitution, that the federal government did have power over immigration "because every other national government does so it must be a power inherent to a sovereign state," and ever since then it's simply been assumed to be a federal power, and the entire concept of "illegal immigration" in the United States was arbitrarily conjured into being. No amendments were ratified granting the federal government an explicit or even implicit power over immigration, yet we just decided that was how things are going to be done from now on, because a bunch of racists in the 1880s were fuming about how Chinese immigrants supposedly "terk er jerbs." Constitutional governance meant and continues to mean nothing in the face of xenophobia. Not that constitutional governance ever really meant much in the first place. The ink wasn't even dry on the parchment before there were constant arguments about what was or wasn't constitutional, and even when it is clear, constitutional provisions were always considered negotiable by certain people. Like any set of laws, it's only worth the paper it's written on, as we're seeing with the all-out assaults on the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments by the Trump administration.