is throw out the union goons and corporate rent-seekers currently in charge of the process, and a complete revamp of the same. Literally no one is being served by the current process but those who don’t want labor undercutting their union strength, and the various tech lobbies who like having malleable labor on a leash with nowhere to go (a factor in the low wages that they are paid). All of our immigrations bureaus need to be scrapped, and everyone currently working for them has to resubmit their applications to be re-hired.

Telling people to get in line, when the “line” in question is confusing and broken beyond repair, makes for a better slogan when we are paying attention to and addressing the issues with the line. Here’s a nice graphic illustrating but a few of the problems with the “line”.

In some cases, particularly on the tail end, malum prohibitum holds less true. You agree with me, you just don’t know that you do yet Here are a few examples where you and I probably agree:

Lech Walesa, the iconic founder of Solidarity in Poland, the non-Communist trade union, violated many laws against forming a non-Communist trade union, or otherwise competing against the one-party state. A follower of malum prohibitum would have said, post-Cold War, that Lech, regardless of how admirable and right the struggle under which he broke the law, should receive the punishment accorded to those crimes.

Our Founding Fathers were quite the roguish scoundrels, breaking English ordinances right and left. Many Tories argued that law and order had to be established in the colonies, regardless of cost, based on malum prohibitum argumentation. The Tories, despite having obeyed those statutes, were mostly worse off than the lawbreakers by the end of the Revolutionary War! Was that fair to those who followed the statutes, no matter how silly they were?

Anti-miscegenation laws enacted in several states held that blacks shouldn’t marry whites. After the law was repealed, would it have been fair to the blacks who followed those statutes to allow violators of the law to go off scot-free?

Ultimately, granting amnesty to those who broke the law is always going to be unfair to both those who were already punished for breaking the law, and to those who followed the law faithfully. There are some circumstances under which such unfairness is justified, and I hew broadly to these to three questions in ascertaining the justification for any sort of “amnesty”:

1) Does the group of lawbreakers in question have a venue for which to seek change? In the case of the Founders, blacks under anti-miscegenation laws, and our friend Lech, there was no such representation. In the case of illegals and immigrants in general, the same holds true: while Democrats like to pontificate on the plight of illegals from their fainting couches to get some applause and cheap votes from the multi-culti crowd, they are even more willing than Republicans to throw illegals and immigrants in general under the bus when trade and construction unions come calling.

2) Are the lawbreakers in question hurting anyone by virtue of their actions? In the case of Lech, the Founders, and blacks, it was quite the contrary: by breaking the law, they were making someone’s life better; the blacks getting married were making their spouses happy, the Founders and those who followed them, with their non-compliance with British mandate, were doing an unalloyed good for the population that was liberated from the onerous burdens placed on them by their masters across the sea, and Lech’s circumventing of the Soviet system did not hurt other workers in and of itself. Likewise, immigrants don’t hurt anyone by virtue of being illegal immigrants, and in fact are an unalloyed good in the industries where they work. Using illegal immigration as a proxy for crime, likewise, doesn’t work: most studies estimate the % of illegals who commit property crime to be around ten percent, which leaves ninety percent of illegals as law-abiding.

3) Is the law being followed a just one? Does it have malevolent intentions at its heart, or otherwise lead to overly malevolent outcomes? This one’s a tough one, as it mostly involves the motivations of lawmakers: a tricky proposition, to be sure. To do a quick end run and shorten a long post, Soviets bad, racists bad, British bad (but not to the extent of the other two). In my opinion, immigration law is a borderline case: since the 60s, it has been structured to serve various unions at the expense of the American people and prospective immigrants, has served to slam in the doors of a country that was and is, in many ways, defined as a beacon for the world’s downtrodden, and which continues to en-trammel those lucky few or skilled who get in. Such an attack on an aspect of our national character and valuing of unions’ fiduciary interests over the economy and mutual benefits provided by immigrants is, in my opinion, repellent, though one’s mileage may vary on this point.

Viewed holistically and pragmatically, I think that there’s a good case that this is one such tail-end case, though I’ll grant you that it’s not as bad as the aforementioned examples. The best thing we can do to rectify the unfortunate fairness deficit that would result is to simplify the rules for the immigrants waiting in line, not screwing the ones currently here while doing nothing for our hopelessly broken system.

I yield to malum prohibitum as a good rule besides those tail cases; recently in AZ, for example, we discontinued our lovely speed cameras program. The reason? Over 2/3rds of those cited as having committed an infraction didn’t pay the fine allotted. I disagreed with the speed cameras, but I do think that those individuals who haven’t paid should be made to do so, even if it’s expensive for the state. One can hardly set malum prohibitum as a rule for illegals while not making citizens follow this same maxim.