Neighborhood Covenants

 The covenants of the Old Mill™ addition clearly state that thou mayest not sell thy house to an Italian. Neither a moor, not a mongoloid of any type. It is all right out. So say the covenants.

Of course, these bylaws have not been enforced, nor has anyone attempted to enforce them in a great long count of years, though perhaps that is only because no obvious Italians have proven so bold as to move onto the street. Got some Mexicans, though, and I'm sure the rule would have included them if the writers had the foresight.

What is the force of a law that is not upheld? 

When the ark is returned to Israel from the Philistines they are dumb enough to open it, because they are unsure whether God in Heaven is still insisting upon His sovereignty. And so they died.

Stare decisis. The binding precedent. And the law that ceases to be enforced ceases to be binding.

And so, my sympathy is actually with illegal immigrants who have made their abode lawfully and peacefully after the first offense of coming to the country uninvited.

Because we may not have invited them, but we absolutely left the door open and turned our backs. The signal was clear, and it was sent by the legitimate political authorities of the country. We've not been serious about border enforcement or deportation for decades. We might be more serious about it now, and the number of people coming has dropped precipitously. I would posit that is not because we suddenly have iron control of the border, but also because of the signals we are sending. We shut the door, and now the people who are coming in know they are breaking in.

So what do you do with all the people that came in during the era when the door was wide open? Well this is where I think we get to be a little arbitrary. I am not team "send them all back." If you have more or less knowingly let someone squat in your house for two decades you don't really get to throw them out if they have been doing the dishes and helping with the care and maintenance.

If they have lived peaceable and quiet lives they should stay. They should not get to skip the line to citizenship, and probably they are going to have a bill for back taxes, but it is as much our fault that it has taken us so long to put our house in order. People act according to the incentives, and we left all the incentives on the side of coming here illegally. We enforced the law lacksidaisically.

Do you expect a speeding ticket in the mail for every time you went 8 over to arrive in your mailbox tomorrow? No, because we all tacitly understand that those laws are there as a curb against recklessness.

Now I think one can argue that residency controls rise well above the level of speed limits--obviously so. That has not stopped us from enforcing them like speed limits. And so people increasingly treated them like speed limits.

What is done is done? Let the broken result stand.

If you came here illegally and thereafter lived a life of hard work and virtue, welcome to America. Enjoy your stay, pay your taxes.

If you came and lived a life of vice or crime, then into the outer darkness with you, or as they call it in the mother tongue, Canada. Where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Can you imagine living most of your adult life in a place, where the authority looked the other way while you arrived, where you had kids, made a community, and were home, and then decades later someone comes and tells you that it is time to go.

That may technically be the law, but it is not justice.

I am for the serious enforcement of the border. I am for the deportation of anyone who has not lived blamelessly. I am for measures that will effect assimilation of those who have come here, legally or not.

But we need to own that we effectively let all these people in, and for the people who have been here for ages, they are effectively our countrymen now. They have lived, worked, and--in blue cities--voted right alongside the dead.

We can look back and shake our head and ask how the heck we let all this happen, but there are a lot of these people who this is home for now. 

The St. Patrick's parish that I used to walk through to work is significantly less sketchy than it was, and the miracle that made it happen was that a bunch of Mexicans moved in and fixed it up. The did not eradicate all the sketch, but we are past the era of a shooting on Masterson every summer. I would bet 1/3 in that neighborhood are illegal immigrants, and only that few because their kids make up another 1/3 and birthright citizenship is still a thing.

That neighborhood no longer lights up the same way on the crime map that it once did.

And I understand that there have been plenty of sketchy people that came as well. Send them away! If they have dealt in drugs, robbery, or murder, then away to the gallows. Public executions are good for the civic spirit. But actually, if you look at arrest statistics, Latinos actually commit offenses at lower rates than their representative population across most categories of crime. I mean, there are obviously outliers--they make up over 80% of immigration prosecutions, for instance.

Turns out when you are keeping your head down you tend not to shoplift as aggressively as people who will get community service rather than a deportation order.

We have done poorly in not enforcing our borders. Not enforcing our borders has been destabilizing, in that it has led to the uncontrolled accumulation of poor folk who need support in high concentrations in particular areas. It has allowed some very bad people in, and had given the cartels in Mexico easy access to an affluent American market.

You can shut all of that down. You can mandate English across government administered programs: drivers licenses, schools, and make them a condition for continued residency. You can make assimilation the wise choice.

But am I in favor of sending a 50 year old with no criminal record, a steady job, and a family back to the old country because they snuck in 30 years ago? Don't be ridiculous. This shit should have a statute of limitations.

Lock. Down. That. Border.

But also recognize that we left it open a long time, that the people who have been here for decades are your neighbor now, and that you do owe them something more than the people who don't live here. We don't have to like it, but it does not make it less true.

Sometimes, we need to accept that we let all the Italians move in, and figure out how to live with the good ones, and still find a way to chuck out the ones we don't like.