Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.
—Julius Caesar II.i.18-19

I’ve been reading extensively about laws and legality on Facebook lately. Most of what I’ve read would be funny but the people who write these things take themselves so seriously. Their insistence on obedience to the law, at the expense of compassion and logic, isn’t funny. It’s heartless. And it’s terrifying.

So for all of you legal eagles out there, especially those who specialize in illegal immigration, here are things in the past that have been scrupulously legal:

–The Sanhedrin turning Christ over to the Romans for crucifixion. But Christ had committed sedition, once with such delicacy, by saying “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” not a comment on obeying civil law, but a subtle and very sharp dig at the illegitimacy of Roman coinage, frequently debased, and so at Roman authority.

–The Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, required European Jews to wear badges—Stars of David, a precursor to the laws of Nazi-occupied Europe. You can still see bolts of cloth with Stars of David ready for the cutting in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam.

–A series of laws enacted by the Scottish Parliament in the 1500s and early 1600s that mandated the death sentence for convicted witches. Witchcraft convictions, in duly-constituted civil courts, were particularly common in Scotland and Reformation Germany, where the overwhelming majority of victims were women, immediately suspect in a time of great social and political change.

–The Indian Removal Act of 1830, when gold was found on Cherokee land, was perfectly legal. Until John Marshall’s Supreme Court struck it down. The removal was nonetheless enforced by Andrew Jackson, the present president’s hero, who reportedly said: “Marshall has made his decision. Now let him try to enforce it.”

–Slave codes forbade the legal recognition of slave marriages, making it convenient for slaveholders in the Upper South to break up families for sale to the harsh conditions of places like Louisiana or the Mississippi Delta. One Virginia mother, to be sold South away from her children, defied the law by chopping off her foot with a hatchet to queer the deal.

–The legal justification for the Mexican War was that American soldiers had been killed on American soil. One young Congressman who disputed this was savaged for his lack of patriotism when he urged a series of resolutions, the “Spot Resolutions,” which demanded the government reveal the exact spot—more than likely on disputed territory along the Nueces River—where, more than likely, the war that gave us one-third of Mexico had begun illegally.

The Congressman was Abraham Lincoln.

–The Fugitive Slave Act, part of the Compromise of 1850, required northerners to return runaways to their masters. Thousands of white people flagrantly and shamelessly broke this law.

–In 1872, sixteen women were arrested for breaking the law. They attempted to vote.

–In the South before the civil rights movement, it was illegal for a black driver to pass a white driver on the road. No matter who arrived at an intersection first, the black driver had to yield the right of way to the white driver.

–In 1930-32, the Hoover Administration and local law enforcement officers, including the LAPD, “repatriated” 1.6 million Mexicans rounded up in raids throughout the Southwest. 60% of them were U.S. citizens. Four years later, the LAPD also appeared at the Arizona border to turn away more U.S. citizens, refugees from the Dust Bowl.

–Executive Order 9066, which led to the imprisonment of West Coast Japanese-Americans, was, according to Franklin Roosevelt, completely lawful, despite the objections of two powerful Americans: FDR’s attorney general, Francis Biddle, and the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. By the way, it had been long illegal for Issei, first-generation Japanese immigrants, to become citizens because they were not white people. This was based on law, on the Naturalization Act of 1790.

 

My ancestors came here legally.

That’s because there was no way for them to come here otherwise. They weren’t Chinese, they weren’t Filipinas, they weren’t Guatemalans.

They were from England, Ireland and Germany, so they broke no laws, most importantly the Naturalization Act of 1790. By happy accident, they were white people. That gave them substantial claim to legality and far more comfortable train seats.

Would I come here legally if I lived in a place like Guatemala, where my kids’ lives were threatened by street gangs or by government-sponsored death squads? The latter, by the way, have been a longtime South of the Border custom born, bred, trained and armed by the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia.

You bet I would. And that’s what thousands of “illegals” have tried to do: To present themselves, under international refugee law–laws drafted in the wake of the ill-fated ship St. Louis and the logical outcome of that debacle, lives swept up in chimneys in places like Auschwitz–at American ports of entry. Most of them, ultimately, would have been denied entry by immigration courts. That doesn’t matter. They’ve been turned away from the immigration courts and they’re sweltering in Mexico today. Those are the lucky ones. The others are in Immigration and Naturalization lockup.

Would I come here illegally if I lived in a place like Guatemala, where my kids’ lives were threatened by street gangs or government-sponsored death squads?

You bet I would.

Would I come here to work illegally slaughtering chickens in the fetid Mississippi heat if it meant my kids had a chance at a college education? Or at surviving to adulthood? Would I be willing to work and live here if it meant paying American taxes and obeying every American law,  except for the one that forbids me from being a better father? Would I try to be someone as devoted to his children as that slave mother had been to hers?

You bet I would.

Whose job am I taking?  There are now too many jobs and not enough white Americans to fill them. I’ll take one of those. As an immigrant, who am I hurting?

No one.

Who am I helping?

This one. Her father loves her more than life itself. She knows that. She feels, at this moment of missing him, a fear so powerful that we can only pray that we will never feel anything like it.

 

None of this matters, the legal eagles cackle—the law being such a splendid shield to conceal moral cowardice.

The law has been used so skillfully to that end from characters as disparate as Henry VIII, who used the headsman to rid himself of embarrassments like Thomas More, and Henry Clay Frick, who used instant deputies, Pinkertons, to shoot down the steel strikers at Homestead.

What if it’s the law—and those who insist on its application, their power disjoined from remorse—who are evil?

So what would you do in the chicken-slaughterer’s place, a man who, more than likely, did come here legally but who’s overstayed his visa?

That reminds me. My car payment is overdue.