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As the battle over illegal immigration continues, the supporters of illegal aliens are increasingly taking pages from the old civil rights protests of the 1960s. In city after city, large marches have been staged of more-or-less normal-looking people, out demanding their "equal rights." Off the streets in courtrooms, open-borders lawyers are using similar tactics in the legal arena: filing accusations of denying legal aid to illegal aliens, complaining about racial profiling used to discover and arrest illegals, and on down the line. Indeed, advocacy groups are spreading the word to the illegal aliens themselves:
A skit at the rally reminded people what to do to protect their civil rights in the case of an immigration raid. Local advocates, members of the immigration rapid response team, have been organizing trainings to prepare immigrants on what to do when ICE arrives at the door.
It's hard to know exactly how to respond to this. One doesn't wish to compare those who advocate illegal immigrants with Hitler, but it's impossible not to be reminded of his infamous Big Lie technique - that is to say, a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously".
Yet, that is exactly the situation with which we find ourselves presented. These marches, these demands, these lawsuits over the civil rights are entirely irrelevant, for one simple and fundamental reason:
Illegal immigrants HAVE NO CIVIL RIGHTS.
In fact, legal immigrants have no civil rights.
To argue that their civil rights are being denied is "sound and fury, signifying nothing." It's like looking for a male patient in a maternity ward: by definition, there is no such thing, and can never be, no matter how loudly it's argued.
As with so many issues these days, what appears to be impenetrable legal murk can be instantly cleared by a quick grab for the dictionary. And sure enough, the dictionary doesn't disappoint. According to Merriam-Webster, "civil rights" are:
The nonpolitical rights of a citizen; especially the rights of personal liberty guaranteed to United States citizens by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution and by acts of Congress.
Notice those ever-so-essential three words: of a citizen. It's as plain as the nose on your face: by definition, civil rights are rights that you get when you are a citizen. Illegal immigrants, by definition, are not citizens; therefore, by the inherent meaning of the words themselves, they cannot have civil rights! They are flatly ineligible!
Black people who agitated for civil rights in the 1960s were citizens. They were born in the United States, and raised in the United States. They were not citizens of any other country. They served in the military, worked legal jobs and paid taxes, and were citizens in every logical way.
But, simply on account of their skin color, they were in many places denied their full rights as the citizens they were: to ride on public transportation like anyone else, to eat in public restaurants like anyone else, to use public restrooms, water fountains, hotels, and so on down the line. These are all aspects of personal liberty that should just exist in a free society; but for black people, they weren't.
It goes without saying that this was wrong, and the protesters had plenty to legitimately protest about. It is to the credit of the American people that they took note of Jim Crow, recognized it for the injustice that it was, and made changes. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial,
In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.
Notice his words: "...to which every American was to fall heir." Blacks in the United States were, are, and always have been Americans, and fully deserve the privileges and the civil rights which come with that status.
Contrast this with the case of a foreigner - someone who is not an American citizen. By definition, a foreign national holds allegiance to a different country.
There are many Germans, Chinese, Liberians, Indians, and people of every nation and continent living in the United States. They may hold an affection for America; obviously they like it here well enough or they'd go home. But their allegiance is to their home country.
This is a fairly elementary observation: you're naturally going to be loyal to your own land. This isn't related to where you physically are at any given moment; American tourists abroad are no less loyal Americans for being in Madrid, Budapest, or Shanghai on a particular day, and vice versa. Nor is it necessarily related to where you happened to be born, as we've discussed in the case of John McCain; in a very real sense, it's in your head, or your heart.
But it's also reflected on paper and through legal forms: if you are in some other country, then you normally need to have a passport from your home country to show who you are and where you belong. You also need a visa or other paperwork from the country you're visiting to show that you have permission to be there.
That is the essential distinction: A citizen has a right to be in his home land. Now, he may be incarcerated in a prison in his home land, or suffering some other sort of punishment; there could be many reasons why he'd rather not be home just at the moment. But if a citizen wants to return to his own country, normally speaking, he has an absolute right to come home.
We rightly look askance at other countries that practice banishment, where a citizen is thrown out of the country and told that he cannot come home again, even under penalty of law; the Soviet Union made extensive use of this historically, and Pakistan has made quite a habit of it with their ex-leaders. No free, modern country does this.
But nobody has a right to be in some other country. In a world of fast air travel and the "visa-waiver" program, and especially as Americans who are welcome in most places, it's easy to forget this; but under international law, each nation has an absolute right to control who is allowed in.
We may deride North Korea as being the "Hermit Kingdom", but nobody questions the right of the North Korean government not to allow foreigners to visit. It's a difficult task even for accredited diplomats to be granted entry; this is considered rude, no doubt, but it's not against any foreign treaties or even the customary law of nations.
There are many things that international law prohibits a country from doing to another nation's diplomats - you can't arrest them, for one thing, even if they have provably committed horrible crimes. But you're always allowed to throw them out of the country, for any reason or none - and it happens often enough that some diplomats carry insurance against being declared persona non grata.
This is not to say that most countries make a habit of keeping people out. It's long been recognized that trade and tourism are excellent for the economy, for education, and for a nation's image in the world. Nobody has proposed that the United States should become like North Korea where nobody is allowed in or out; that would be absurd. But once you recognize that foreigners are allowed into our country, not by right, but as a privilege, then it makes much more sense as to why they are not entitled to the same status as citizens.
It sounds trite to say this, but our country is our home. Most people don't live alone in their house, and we aren't alone in our country either. People can be added to the family in many ways - by being born in the home; by being borne elsewhere to someone who lives in the home; or by being adopted.
Then, there are people who might be in the house, but don't belong there - that is, guests. Some of them may stay just for dinner. Others might come for a few weeks. Sometimes there may be someone renting a room, who may stay for months. But there's never any doubt as to who is part of the family and who is the guest.
As a homeowner, you always have the right to ask guests to leave; throwing out a member of the family is much more serious, and rightly frowned upon, just as we don't like countries that exile their own citizens.
Because we're a kindly and generous nation, we extend many privileges to our guests. We provide a good bit of free education; recourse to welfare and a minimum of health care; and the natural benefits of our infrastructure, police, fire, and so on.
If Bill Gates invited you as a guest into his house, you'd be living a very nice life, with access to his masseusse, his on-call chef, 24-hour maid service, no doubt a great Internet connection, and surely an extremely cushy bed and plush bathroom.
But does that mean that you have the right to those things? Of course not - because they do not belong to you. They belong to Mr. Gates, his wife, and his children. They're the only people who belong there. At any time, Mr. Gates would have a perfect right to ask you to go home, please.
And that's an analogy to legal aliens - that is, people who have come to this country, following the rules. How is it that anyone can even dream up such nonsense as rights, not merely for law-abiding foreigners, but for people who broke in?
If a burglar opened a window and sneaked into Bill Gates' mansion, it might take him a while to get caught - it's a really big place. Suppose he dodged the guards for a while before finally getting bagged. Does he now have the right to say, "I have been living here for a week, and I haven't broken anything; leave me alone!" Of course not.
Our Founders, in writing their Declaration of Independence, said,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
But they continued on:
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
A right is something that you are entitled to simply because of who or what you are. Today, we talk of human rights, which every human being should be allowed to have - chief among these being the right to life. And aliens, even illegal aliens, are still humans and have human rights. It would be wrong for us to, say, shoot them on sight, or to torture them when they're caught. Even though they have no right to be here, that doesn't make them less than human.
But there are a whole host of rights that apply specifically and only to citizens. Voting is one of these. Another is the right to an attorney. Consider this news report:
Civil rights activists have accused U.S. immigration officials of denying legal aid to some of the 130 suspected undocumented workers caught during a raid by federal agents.
That makes about as much sense as complaining that the officials didn't give the arrestees keys to the Mercedes. Sure, they didn't. So what? Why should illegals be entitled to that? The right to counsel is not a human right, it is a civil right, available to all citizens, but only to citizens.
In George Orwell's classic novel 1984, the totalitarian Party of the future controls every aspect of the lives of its citizens, including even the words they use. The language of 1984 is called "Newspeak", and a major element of control is the constant revision and redefinition of words and even the removal of words from the very language.
The idea is, if people do not even have the words to think about rebellion, they'll have a hard time starting one. Those who promote open borders are attempting very much the same thing.
The term "Civil Rights" has a very definite meaning - the privileges to which all citizens are entitled. This meaning has held true for many years, and is core to American, and indeed to Western political thought.
But to promote their political cause, the left and their allies in the media are replacing that meaning with something more along the lines of "Something we think illegals should have." They think that illegal aliens should have all the rights of citizens, regardless of their criminality and the offense of their simply being here; so, that becomes a "Civil Right."
They think the government should provide health care? Suddenly, health care is a civil right - or even a human right. Likewise with food, housing, water, a clean environment, and all manner of things that are mostly not rights at all.
But by allowing the words to be devalued, it becomes very difficult to wage a sensible debate. It's time we stopped talking in terms of "rights" for foreigners - and especially for illegal aliens - and started using the correct word: privileges.
If we generously allow you, a foreigner, to be present in our country, that is a privilege; one which can be revoked at any time, and which carries with it a heavy load of obligations, not least of which is to respect our laws and learn our language.