Nullification

I have always seen sanctuary cities and states as manifestations of nullification: states or localities defying federal law. The original nullification had to do with tariffs, of which we are currently awash, but this is a different nullification issue. In Andrew Jackson's administration, his own Vice President was a supporter of the nullification of federal tariff laws; the South was harmed by them, whereas the North perceived itself to benefit from them. Jackson famously said that he would personally lead 40,000 federal troops into South Carolina and hang the first man he caught promoting nullification, even though he was a Southerner and opposed the tariffs. The issue then was fraught, but a compromise was worked out that more or less satisfied all and kept the nation intact.

Venues that enforce sanctuary status are in overt violation of federal law. This has been the case for many years; in fact, many decades. Neither party, and certainly not both parties together, has reached anything approaching a compromise since Reagan was rolled by the Democrats after having accepted a deal in which amnesty for those already here would be exchanged for enforcement of the borders to prevent further illegal immigration. The amnesty was granted; the border enforcement never materialized. That has so poisoned the well that nothing has been possible since. Democrats want both illegal immigration ad libitum and citizenship for all.

It has long been recognized that the Democrats are intent upon fundamentally changing the electorate and the balance of power on a permanent basis. With massive numbers of illegals in the country in sanctuary venues, Democrats get more congressional seats, more federal largesse based on the census, and the possibility of forever enshrining their power in those states, with California as the foremost example.

They are, of course, doing this illegally. For all of my adult life, the US has NOT been a nation of law, but of lawlessness, as regards illegal immigration. The exploitation of illegals has been vast, from sex trafficking and virtual slave labor, to padding Social Security revenues on the backs of people that will never be eligible to receive benefits (at least to the extent that Congress will never pass legislation authorizing such benefits; though vast fraud—that is, the foremost characteristic of such government programs—may provide them such, along with Medicaid and Obamacare benefits, education, welfare, etc.).

Now with a president who is more opposed to illegal immigration than Lincoln was to slavery (and appropriately so), we see the ever-predictable Democrat response: violence. We are now treated to the spectacle of rioting in the streets in Los Angeles (of course Los Angeles) with attacks on often-demonized ICE, while the rioters are egged on in their attacks. So the California National Guard has been called out by the president over the objection of the governor, and the Marines at Camp Pendleton have been placed on alert. Are we witnessing a modern version of Fort Sumter? Is the nation on the brink of another civil war?

Illegal immigration has been as much of a detriment to the nation as was slavery. Of course, it is not just Democrats who support it, but many including libertarians and moderates who do not call themselves Democrats are among the proponents of an immigration free-for-all. They are all on the wrong side of the issue.

One of the admitted problems with our immigration system is that it was, for all intents and purposes, based on the vile ideas of eugenics. The 1924 Immigration Act, which essentially ended the era of open migration to America, as celebrated in the Lazarus verse on the Statue of Liberty, was passed by a Congress that was advised by none other than Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Records Office. Laughlin's office was located at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, under the direction of the foremost American advocate of eugenics, Charles Davenport, chair of Biology at Harvard University (of course, it would be Harvard). He was supported by virtually all of the "scientific" establishment, as well as the political establishment. Eugenics was the climate change issue of the first half of the 20th Century (although it continues almost unabated today in modified forms, chameleon-like). The immigration law was signed by Calvin Coolidge, though his veto would have been overruled had he chosen to veto, so popular was the Eugenics agenda. It was cemented, not by a Constitutional amendment, as was Prohibition, but by a 8-1 Supreme Court decision (Buck v. Bell, May 2, 1927), with the majority decision written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., which comprised one of the most vile opinions, word for word (the opinion was very short), ever to come out of the Supreme Court. That opinion equated human pregnancy with the contagion of smallpox, and cited Jacobsen v. Massachusetts as the basis for the police power of the state to forcibly sterilize the "unfit." Then it was off to the races (no pun intended) with forced sterilization. The record for the most such sterilizations by one institution is held by Caltech.

The later modifications to immigration law hardly improved anything, as, among other issues, they enshrined chain migration.

Rational immigration laws that would promote immigration favorably for the nation are impossible under today's politically poisonous climate. Will illegal immigration be the issue that splits the nation again, and brings us another civil war? If so, here's hoping Tom Homan and his agents are as tenacious as Grant.