The U.S. Declaration of Independence asserts that humans are endowed with “unalienable rights,” and that if a government deprives them of such rights, “it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” Henry David Thoreau cautioned against “undue respect for law” and urged his readers to rely instead on conscience. He decried the “thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them.” “When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize,” he declared in Civil Disobedience. (He was referring to the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846.)1
In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King too insisted that laws be judged from the standpoint of conscience and morality. “A law is unjust,” he wrote, “if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law.” He was talking, of course, about laws enforcing segregation made by southern legislatures for which blacks were denied the right to vote. He could just as well have been talking about laws that discriminate against immigrants, a minority in a country that denies them the right to vote.
(Some have even argued that all the world’s citizens should be allowed to vote in U.S. elections, given the degree of U.S. political, military, and economic power around the globe. “Every action of the US President affects my life deeply in political, economic, social and cultural terms,” wrote Indian journalist Satya Sagar in 2004, in an only partly facetious essay explaining why U.S. elections should be opened to all.)2
Much of the current anti-immigrant agitation stems from the idea of the sanctity of the law, and abhorrence of the crime that immigrants commit when they violate immigration law. This section will examine the arbitrary and discriminatory nature of immigration law and argue that the legal categories it creates have historically been informed by racism and politics, rather than humanitarianism, justice, or the idea that all men (or all people) are created equal.