Royal Decree

Why Obama’s Granting Amnesty Is the Worst Move for Freedom

By: Andrew Deaton

Last month, President Obama announced a limited amnesty for illegal immigrants who were brought to this country at a young age without their own consent. The ostensible goal: to allow those young immigrants, particularly Latinos, the time necessary to obtain citizenship in this country where they have grown up and established roots. “We are a better nation than one that expels young kids,” he explained. Many illegal immigrants and their supporters were overjoyed at the news, hailing it as progress for freedom.

The hidden truth: nothing could be more of a step back for freedom than Obama’s decree. As Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said in his opinion following the court’s ruling in Arizona v. United States, “To say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing immigration law that the president declines to enforce boggles the mind.” The key issue here is deceptive; it is not about immigration, but about the rule of law versus the rule of a single individual’s arbitrary opinion. It is not in the purview of President Obama’s executive branch to decide which laws to enforce or not. Those illegal immigrants remain illegal, but the Administration has decided to wash its hands of the matter by opting-out of enforcing a policy passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States – the President’s peers in the scheme of checks and balances. That is precisely the behavior of the demagogic tyrant which the Framer’s wished to prevent at all costs.

Historically, our nation’s form of government is itself unprecedented while simultaneously becoming the precedent in some way or another for every free or semi-free nation on earth. The Framers of the Constitution were treading uncharted ground in establishing the tripartite system of checks and balances. The British Empire from whom they were seceding had one single source of power: the Crown, the holder of such power being the monarch. There was no constitution, no checks and balances, no binding elections in the Empire. There was Parliament, but it was an organ which was by no means equal to the monarch – it governed the Empire for the monarch, to be overridden and dismissed by royal prerogative at the monarch’s leisure. The three branches were established by the Framers of the United States Constitution to remove the threat that any individual or group of individuals (even if they formed a majority) might frustrate the rights of any other individuals, with the impartial Constitution replacing the arbitrary Crown as the centerpiece of the great experiment.

When the President of the United States refuses to uphold a law, he is refusing to abide by the Constitution, the source of his legitimacy. His is the office expressly tasked with protecting, preserving, and upholding the Constitution of the United States. What the issue boils down to is the fact that President Obama is not only shirking the fundamental responsibility of his job description, but he is by the same motion violating that very document which defines which powers he has – and which ones he does not have.

If President Obama is allowed to get away with deciding not to enforce a law on 800,000 or so illegal immigrants, what grounds could he possibly have for enforcing analogous laws on those who are here legally, let alone actual citizens? If the Constitution is no longer his point of reference, what other than his own unaccountable whim will be his touchstone for deciding how, when, and on whom to mete out the execution of the law? Remember that the internment of persons of Japanese – and, to a lesser extent, German and Italian – descent during World War II was the result of F.D.R.’s Executive Order 9066. If President Obama is allowed to arbitrarily decide to grant grace for the sake of a few votes in the upcoming election, how could anyone invoke the Constitution in protest when the next President decides to pander to nativists' fears by rescinding naturalized citizens’ hard-earned status and then deporting them back to the countries from which they originally sought refuge?

There is no moral justification for barring peaceable, productive, patriotic immigrants from this nation any more than a man should starve himself rather than eating when hungry. Both morally and practically, the only long-term solution is to open our borders to any and all individuals who wish to enter this country with peaceful designs. In the meantime, though, the law says otherwise. We are a constitutional republic where law reigns supreme. No matter how expedient it may seem, President Obama’s unilateral nullification of Congressional law and ignoring the Supreme Court’s upholding of that law does only long-term damage that will get worse in exchange for a mere handful of years of seeming “freedom” for immigrants. Ultimately, this is yet another move toward tyranny, toward establishing the same sort of nation from which those very immigrants wish to flee. The ultimate issue is one of mutually exclusive values: a short–term, superficial, pseudo-“fix” that results in permanent damage to the Constitution; or upholding the rule of law for the sake of freedom on principle.