What is the purpose of laws if they are willfully ignored? Where do you draw the line? If the police don't care about someone's immigration status, why should they care about who broke into your car?
The Federal Government is responsible for immigration. It's their job to set policies and adjudicate immigration issues.
Local and State Law Enforcement are not responsible for -- and indeed it is outside of their powers to enforce immigration laws.
Supreme Court precedent is that states cannot be compelled by Congress to enforce Immigration law (see: Printz v. United States).
So, what you have in this situation are the fact that States and the Federal Government have opposing interests: The States need to be able to enforce their laws without their people feeling like they can't tell the police when there's a crime, and the current federal policy is to deport all undocumented immigrants, no matter why they're here or whether they are allowed to be here while their status is adjudicated.
So the supreme court struck a reasonable compromise between federal and state interests. I am not a lawyer, but I am certain that this precedent does not give states the right to actively obstruct federal agents from doing their job, that is, to enforce federal immigration law.
Who said they had that right and when did this happen?
had they realized they were likely to walk into the middle of procedings, the first stop should have been authorization to intercede.
Controlling the border from foreign enemies is a far cry from the Federal government asserting the right to determine who gets to simply live and work within the states.
The Supreme Court makes a mockery of 10th amendment on so many issues, whether it's drugs, healthcare, immigration, gun control...
Not just immigration law but federal law generally. It's funny that this never reached the point of beign a decision rule in a case and thus binding precedent until the 1990s, as you see it in dicta in Supreme Court cases decided on other bases back to shortly before the Civil War (specifically, in cases around the Fugitive Slave Laws.)
Yeah, it is absolutely because the federal government was simply not trying to commandeer state authorities to enforce federal law; the interesting part (to me) is that the courts were anticipating the problem well before it materialized.
Nearly every liberty we take for granted was at one point against the law or gained through willful lawbreaking. A healthy society should be tolerant of some bending of the rules.
People who have productively worked in the country and either paid taxes or contribute to the economy for some years should be offered pathways to naturalization or at least work visas and real legal protection.
- America is a land of opportunities. It is BY FAR the country with the largest number of legal immigrants[0]. There are ~51M in the US and the second is Germany with ~16M. I think it makes sense that given the extremely high demand to come to the US, it is unsurprising that many do so illegally. Especially when the costs of staying in your own country are so high.
- How would you even go about documenting them, determining status, and then following due process[1]. Tricky situation. It's does not only create a dystopian authoritarian hellscape to constantly check everyone's status, but it is also really expensive to do so! Random stops interfere with average citizens and violates our constitutional rights. Rights created explicitly because the people founding this country were experienced with such situations...
I mean I also agree with your point that they are being exploited and that there's been this silent quid pro quo (even if one party is getting the shit end of the deal). But also I think people really need to consider what it actually takes to get the things they want. Certainly we can do better and certainly we shouldn't exploit them. But importantly, which is more important: the rights of a citizen or punishing illegal immigrants? There has to be a balance because these are coupled. For one, I'm with Jefferson, I'd rather a hundred guilty men go free than a single innocent be stripped of their freedom. You can't pick and choose. The rules have to apply to everyone or they apply to no one. There are always costs, and the most deadly costs are those that are hard to see.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigrati...
[1] I cannot stress enough how critical due process is. If we aren't going to have due process, then we don't have any laws. Full stop. If we don't have due process, then the only law is your second amendment right, and that's not what anyone wants.
> A healthy society should be tolerant of some bending of the rules.
So even without a direct expansion of rights and the natural progression of societies to change over time, we have to at minimum recognize that there is a distinction between "what the rule says" and "what the intended rule is". This is like alignment 101.
Laws are are already routinely being ignored. There's a massive amount of discretionary choice space for law enforcement and prosecution. It's not as black-and-white as you're making it sound.
Arguably South Korea has better democracy, because Yoon Suk Yeol is probably going to prison for insurrection.