A Nation Of Laws

Fire of Liberty

As members of the Senate celebrate the most recent passage of the "comprehensive immigration reform" bill, there's a lot of folks in the country scratching their heads wondering what in the heck are these folks doing with regards to our borders.(My two Senators (Chambliss and Isakson) voted no with 34 others) With the passage of this bill, the Senate has signaled that they could care less about the 12 million who broke the law but are making it possible for more uneducated illegals to come in here while making it harder for the more productive and highly educated individuals from entering this nation. So it seems that the individuals within this august body seem to forget that we live in a nation that is ruled by laws and has a people that expect individuals to abide by them. Well, George Will has a wonderful column in the Washington Post that shows how the folks in D.C. are failing to enforce laws that are already on the books with regards to immigration by pushing through outlandish things like the publication of bilingual ballots(The same thing goes for bilingual education). Here's a look at what Will had to say:

To understand why millions of conservatives do not trust Washington to think clearly or act reasonably about immigration, consider bilingual ballots. These conservatives, already worried that both the rule of law and national identity are becoming attenuated because of illegal immigration, now have another worry: The federal government's chief law enforcement official might need a refresher course on federal law pertaining to legal immigrants.

In 1906, the year before a rabbi in a Passover sermon coined the phrase "melting pot'' during torrential immigration from eastern and southern Europe, Congress passed and President Theodore Roosevelt signed legislation requiring people seeking to become naturalized citizens to demonstrate oral English literacy. In 1950, the requirement was strengthened to require people to "demonstrate an understanding of the English language, including an ability to read, write and speak words in ordinary usage in the English language.''

Hence, if someone needs a ballot written in a language other than English, that need proves the person obtained citizenship only because the law was not enforced when he or she sought citizenship. So one reason for ending ballots in languages other than English is that continuing them makes a mockery of the rule of law, including even the prospective McCain-Kennedy law that pro-immigration groups favor.

So once again we have a bunch of law makers who created a new set of laws while ignoring the ones that we have on the books. One can only imagine what shape this nation would be like if our society as a whole just decided to up and ignore all the laws of this nation because they just want to. My advice is to work with what you've got rather than waste our time pushing ineffective laws.