If you have listened to any liberal discussing immigration enforcement over the past half-century, you have internalized two overarching concepts that should supersede all duly enacted legislation on the subject. First, amnesty should be granted to illegal aliens because it would be impossible to deport all of them. Second, families with honor students should never be deported.
By the logic of the first concept’s false choice of all or nothing, the IRS, for example, should not prosecute anyone who underpays his taxes, because we cannot hope to prosecute everyone who does so. The IRS, of course, does not seek to prosecute all offenders. Instead, it has a system of audits that serve as a deterrent.
Why not apply the method behind IRS audits — selective enforcement — to deter illegal immigration the same way? If 20 known families of illegal aliens live on a block, what will be the reaction if one or two are selected, prosecuted, and deported? I’d venture that it would be similar to your reaction if you had underpaid your taxes and found out that your neighbor down the street was to be “deported” to the clink for doing the same.
Thus, all of the inevitable caterwauling notwithstanding, at least some of the other illegals on the block would self-deport, and their cousins back home would not try entering the country to begin with. Illegal aliens have proven their expertise on the state of immigration law and its enforcement from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Of course, with the first deportation of a non-criminal family comes the shrill, hysterical, totally predictable cry of “HONOR STUDENT!”
A word search reveals that the term “honor student” does not appear in the federal statutory scheme governing immigration. In fact, it does not appear anywhere in the entire U.S. Code. A review of federal case law reveals no instances where spawning or otherwise harboring an honor student was successfully used as a defense or mitigating factor in a tax deficiency case, and it is not clear why immigration matters should be at all different.
Given the left’s frequent invocation of ersatz honor student defenses, we should at least settle to whom the term applies. Here, the ultimate cultural arbiter, Tom Wolfe, provided useful instruction. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, a tabloid journalist, looking to garner sympathy for a poor boy from the Bronx struck by a wealthy white motorist, asks one of his teachers if the boy might be considered an “honor student.” The teacher responds, “At Colonel Jacob Ruppert High School, an honor student is somebody who attends class, isn’t disruptive, tries to learn, and does all right at reading and arithmetic.” Hence, Tom Wolfe established more of a functional modern definition of the term “honor student” than does the U.S. Code.
Hundreds of millions of American kids, including honor students, live with the consequences of bad decisions made by their parents in innumerable contexts. Parents who commit crimes would never go to prison otherwise. Nonetheless, immigration rights advocates claim an honor student exception to both statutory law and the natural law of consequences. However, I cannot find a biblical prohibition on visiting the sins of the father upon the honor student.
In sum, neither the “can’t prosecute them all” or “honor student” trope remotely applies in the context of tax collection enforcement, which actually bears direct parallels to immigration enforcement. Politicians opposed to open borders should start to use the IRS parallel as a talking point and refutation of their opponents’ hoary arguments. For good measure, they should start offering to take a ten-to-one pledge — that is, to hire ten border control agents for every one IRS agent that might be added during their term in office.
We should lose a few IRS agents. Given their likely resistance to learning to code, a repurposing as friendly and competent ICE agents might represent treatment for the seemingly unrelated problems of over-taxation and under–immigration enforcement.
