The Morality and Pragmatism of Immigration Laws
The mass overrunning of our borders warrants a Watergate-style investigation. Meanwhile, the Left’s performative indignition can be countered by both moral principle and by pragmatic reason.
Larry Gordon | February 12, 2026 www.americanthinker.com
It is undeniable that millions of individuals entered the United States between 2021 and 2025 without following U.S. laws on how to do so. This was not only allowed by the previous administration, it actively facilitated the influx with intricate planning and funding and with no democratic consensus.
Polls show most Americans strongly agree that our immigration laws are good and should be enforced. And yet when they are, it evokes ritualistic indignation all the way up to big city mayors, governors, and U.S. senators, all of the same political party that created this mess.
The Pavlovian Left has predictably responded as riotous street mobs that actively interfere with law enforcement. Their focus is upon ICE agents doing the heavy lifting of deportation, while the legacy media stokes their anger.
There is no prologue here, no acknowledgement, much less debate, about what led up to this. And still no official explanation from that same party as to why this influx was orchestrated.
You might think there would be indignation that airplanes were clandestinely flown in in the middle of the night to pick up persons to enter the U.S. illegally, who were then given free housing all on the taxpayer’s dime.
And where is the indignation that hostile countries emptied their prisons and mental institutions into the U.S.? Who could possibly think that would be benign?
The mass overrunning of our borders warrants a Watergate-style investigation. Meanwhile, the Left’s performative indignition can be countered by both moral principle and by pragmatic reason.
Put simply, if someone sneaks into a ballgame, theme park, or concert and gets caught, he gets put out. There is no “Due Process,” and the “sneaker” does not expect any. He expects to get shown out.
Likewise, U.S. immigration law enforcement does not result in imprisonment but rather deportation. That simply means getting sent back preferably to the country from which they came and where they can apply for citizenship per the proper procedure.
Deportation is tough on all involved and can get rough physically (thus optically) when resisted, but it is not cruel or unusual. All countries do this; previous Democrat administrations have routinely done this, and they did not need to hide behind the apologetic spin “we’re only focusing on child rapists and terrorists.”
Clinton and Obama deported millions by enforcing the law and its simple principle, “You sneak in, you get caught, you get put out.” No one prattled about “neighbors being kidnapped ,” and ICE agents did not feel the need to be masked.
Deportation isn’t cruel and unusual and it’s not even “punishment” per se. It is not intended as such, it is following the law. Isn’t "The Law" the central element of Justice?
In fact, we might label ICE’s task “Restorative Justice” as it seeks to cure a malady deliberately brought upon us. Justice typically results in law, but when law does not (and cannot) cover everything, then we must sense there is unfairness, something unjust afoot that should be rectified in our pursuit of justice.
So, it is undeniable that waves of folks sneaking across our borders is not fair to those who have already gone through the procedures properly, nor is it fair to those waiting to be naturalized by the book.
And most importantly, it is not fair to our own citizenry, who must bear the consequences of overrun borders. Think costs and crime and competition and culture. Each one of those things is immensely important in its own right, but all this has been blissfully ignored by a myopic mainstream media.
ICE’s Restorative Justice can rightly pound both the law and the facts while their critics can only pound their chests and still not win the moral side of the argument.
The pragmatism of immigration law is just as clear. We all understand that there are persons who sincerely want to be U.S. citizens and who could be good citizens, but we cannot take all who wish to come.
This is not complicated: For every one American citizen, there are also twenty-four other human beings on the planet. An open borders policy could allow any and every one of them to enter the U.S.
That ratio should give pause and sobering perspective. We cannot have even one-tenth of those people sneaking into our country, nor can we afford to give the world medical care when our government with its deep deficit struggles to provide care for our own citizenry.
Certainly, no one should be coming in unvetted. Vetting should be the real “due process.” And for “asylum” to be granted there should be confirmation and consensus, not just “claims.”
And finally, some analogy to bear this out: If the mantra of “open borders” is taken to its logical conclusion then it should also follow that anyone who wishes to attend an Ivy League school can just go plop themselves down in a seat in any classroom. You can skip the admissions department. And forget tuition, Education is a good thing and should be a right.
Other students should cheer you on as a fellow classmate, one who should not be kidnapped out of the classroom by the Gestapo campus security.
And ditto for hospitals. If you are not feeling well then just go crawl up in a hospital bed. You don’t need no stinkin’ admissions department. After all, healthcare is a right, right?
Or should there be laws and procedural admission rules? What happens if those laws are not enforced?
If a private theatre or theme park allowed folks to sneak in, it would soon go out of business. A hospital might hang on via government subsidies as could a university via even more begging for private donations, but their institutional quality i.e. functionality would dramatically decline.
Likewise, countries that fail to enforce immigration laws might survive at best but with a marked deterioration in quality of life, and no outside entities will be there to bail them out. Take them over, yes, bail them out, no.
