The word "illegal" is out of control

Hi all --

On Facebook, the headlines meant to enrage me pour forth from my feed like water from a stone. And then there's one which is profoundly sad but also hopeful: Miss Rachel went to DC to talk to Congress. She told our representatives about the children she met whose parents have been torn from them. She spoke about those who are languishing in the jails and camps we have constructed for immigration detention. However, I don't get to read the article, because I make the mistake of looking at the comments. Thousands of adults, using their actual face, listing on their profile their job and what church they attend, believe it is fine to scream "ILLEGAL" at children and tell them they and their parents deserve whatever happens.

Facebook is trash with a culture of "cultivating" a certain kind of reaction. It is also a historical document of unabashedly ignorant rhetoric marked by bloodlust. Rhetoric, we note, which has become policy and destroyed thousands of lives. Screaming "illegal" at people as an excuse to do untold horrors to them is a way of voiding lawfulness itself. It's really a form of saying "I have a right to panic about anything and my panic should make the world revolve around me." It is a play for power. There's no serious discussion about migration and what citizenship means, just an endless supply of grisly, tabloid stories. Of course, the crime rate of immigrants is substantially lower than that of the native-born.

What floors me is that anyone would use the term "illegal" this way. It is immediate dehumanization, a way to win an argument by running over every reality. It yells "shut up" at anyone who brings up anything worth consideration: people on hunger strike, children contracting diseases in detention, a complete lack of due process. How did we get to "illegal" being an incantation, one giving racists and idiots all the power and shutting out anyone interested in actual governance? We can say it is a symptom of copaganda. The television shows you the police solving crime after crime and dealing with tough cases. No one talks about how 2% of all serious cases actually result in a conviction. We do our best to close our ears to abuses by police, jails, or prisons.

But I think it is more than copaganda selling us on the magic of the word "illegal." No one actually believes that because one thing here and there is "legal" that it is right. However, they do pretend that "illegal" means someone is worse than Hitler, especially if an imaginary line was crossed. We can add racism and sexism and homophobia and Islamophobia and other sentiments to the power "illegal" has. People use it as if there is an order to the universe in their heads and anyone not obeying that order will be dealt with. So at this point, I guess it is safe to say "illegal" gets its power from a combination of copaganda and bigotry.

Even that doesn't explain everything, though. Watch this short PBS report about a Montana town that fought to get one of their own back:

It would be easy for me to judge the residents of the town, but they fought for the man taken away by the feds. Still, you can see the power of the word "illegal" is tough to let go of, even as it is self-evident that the system is broken and the laws are used to persecute the innocent. At this point, we have to ask: given that this country started with a revolution against taxes, given that we all know slavery was legal, given that this country only became a full democracy (briefly) because of civil disobedience, what makes us attach ourselves to the word "illegal" so strongly?

One explanation is the immediate identification with one's way of life as "right," with anything unfamiliar being suspect. But even this hubris, however kindly it may appear, doesn't quite explain wanting to live in fear and believe every rotten thing said about people who are different. Plenty of people the world over are scared of the unfamiliar! They grow up and go places and learn that people can live a variety of ways. I think we have to try a deeper explanation. Something about the way we attach to our laws, our country, is incredibly flawed. Here's a few lines I personally like, ones which, correctly used, may renew our society. Enter Thomas Paine, from Common Sense:

...let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king.

"[I]n America the law is king." In theory, this should help all of us. Anyone who is vulnerable should be able to appeal to the law. The law should make us all equals. This is how we get liberty, equality, and a country which, once upon a time, beat Hitler.

What's happening now is complicated. Because of class and circumstance, there are communities which have to deal with the law every day and those who never have to. The equality "the law is king" depends on is broken; now things resemble Oscar Benevides' "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law." What the law actually means is radically different for different people. Even in an era defined by the world's first trillionaire, people have no idea that this is so.

Why? Because of copaganda, sure. Racism is certainly involved. And if you never get in trouble because you never experience the criminal justice system, yeah, you can believe you are the epitome of legality. However, I would urge us to think about how the way we understand constitutionalism brought us here. Many are obsessed with the idea that America is a mechanism which lets people do what they want. Through its laws and orders, all social problems are solvable by means of individual initiative. The law, as we conceive it, leaves us alone because we are good. It implicitly celebrates our citizenship. We are productive, we build this country, and we can identify our laws with our freedom. This isn't coming from sheer ignorance of the constitution, unfortunately. It comes from an understanding of constitutionalism as primarily protective of private property and individual rights. It is an interpretation of "the law is king," one which fits with an assumption of classical liberalism and Enlightenment thought. After all, not everyone has to know everything before they vote. They just need to react to what is hurting them immediately and the system will work. Legislators close to the people will react to their demands and fix what's wrong.

This sounds good until you ask this question: What if the law is completely, totally wrong? What if it is dehumanizing others routinely? What if it is encouraging people to spout bigotry publicly? And what's happening, over and over, is that we're leaning on the law as our property and not thinking once that others might desperately need change. Classical liberalism, which has helped many of us win rights, can be a major obstacle when it doesn't promote proper representation, allow vulnerable voices to be heard, or accept empirical data and argumentation. It would rather that we trust the procedures and ignore the very real needs of others, if not our own selves. The procedures primarily concern the rights of property owners and a market economy in which we can buy and sell our way to happiness. If you don't believe me, watch how our leaders are responding to crisis after crisis. It's like they don't hear anything from the rest of us.

If we're going to take "establish Justice" from the Preamble seriously, we need more positive liberties. Articulating and living them transforms classical liberalism itself into something else, something glimpsed by the Radical Republicans who banned slavery and gave us the 14th amendment. You can see it when educators stand up for the rights of children new to their classroom, or when artists bring those on stage who have been scared to speak their truth. This isn't a spirit that's a lovely outgrowth of our constitutional order. It is necessary so that we have the civic bonds which make society run and prosper. We have taken it for granted by letting any chud declare themselves lawful. What we need instead is a spirit which recognizes that extraordinary people do amazing things every day for their neighbors, and that this is welcome, celebrated, and the only lawfulness worth having. That it could never be equal to bashing your neighbors and demanding the deportation of their children.