Ace EA commenter Ryan Harkins, as he often does, flags the ethics conflict in the current escalating controversy over President Trump’s mass deportations, a.k.a, “Enforcing the immigration laws after a rogue Presidency refused to do so for four years.” The point he raises is not only a valid one but an important one, not just regarding this issue but others. I’m going to append a fairly long addition to Ryan’s excellent work, but first of all, here is his Comment of the Day from “Friday Open Forum, Dedicated To Major Tipton…”:

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Here’s my concern about the situation we’re in. I would liken it to inconsistently disciplining your children. If you only irregularly discipline your child for a particular infraction, the child learns that most of the time, he can get away with that infraction. When that infraction is then punished, the child reactions disproportionately because he’s used to getting away with the infraction, and he believes that if he makes noncompliance painful enough, it will discourage further disciplinary action.

That seems to be the case we’re in with illegal immigrants. We’ve been very poor at enforcing our immigration laws, and so many said illegals and the communities around them grew complacent about the laws not being enforced. When the laws are enforced, it comes as a great shock, and the immediate reaction is to scream about how unfair it is. And to a certain extent, I do agree that it is unfair. It is unfair to cultivate the expectation that a law won’t be enforced, only to turn around and enforce it. But it is unfair because of cultivating that expectation, not because of the subsequent enforcement.

The significant problem is the whiplash effect of enforcement/non-enforcement depending upon who is in charge. We’ve run the gamut of no enforcement (even inviting in illegals), to soft enforcement, to promises of citizenship, to harsh enforcement. To anyone watching from outside the country, it is like dealing with a schizophrenic or someone suffering from multiple personality disorder. Worse, because we keep seesawing back and forth, the expectation right now is that by keeping up a defiant stance against the current administration, illegals and their allies can simply wait for the winds to change and go back to their lives as they’ve been.

I know this aspect of the situation glosses over the deliberate effort of radicals to the destabilize the nation, the outrage over the money spigots that are being closed, the efforts to import in reliable Democratic voters, and the genuine concerns over destabilizing families that had, admittedly against the law, put down roots and became productive members of their communities. But it is a serious problem that we seem to be lurching one direction, and then back the opposite way, with every swing of political power. This has been exacerbated by most policy changes coming from executive orders, which are easily undone, rather than congressional legislation, which is much harder to walk back.

How do we fix a problem where the head of the Executive Branch one year says, “I will enforce this law,” and the next year says, “I will not enforce this law”? Impeachment seems to be dead, because the only way impeachment could ever succeed is when there is a majority of the opposition in the House, and a supermajority of the opposition in the Senate, and that is a very rare occasion and could not be relied upon to fix this issue.

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This is your host.

The problem Ryan is calling our attention to is why the Supreme Court, at least up until recently, traditionally maintained the practice of stare decisus, the principle of holding to SCOTUS precedent in order that the public can rely on the law not wildly swinging from one extreme to another depending on the composition of its members, which issubject to change. However courts are not like elected governments (or shouldn’t be). In a democratic republic, voters alone should be able initiate the rejection and replacement of bad laws and bad policies as well as bad practices by elected officials.

Obviously, a system where the laws spin back, forth and around like weather vanes is unworkable, but the Founders made it sufficiently difficult to pass legislation that this has not been a substantial problem. It shouldn’t have been in this instance either. It was unethical, outrageous, and, yes, impeachable for the Biden Administration to not only refuse to enforce immigration laws, but also to literally invite, as President Biden did, foreigners to violate those laws. The deal that was communicated: Come on in, and as long as you keep your head down and don’t break any more serious laws once you get here—and vote for Democrats, of course—we’ll let you stay, raise a family, work, the whole enchilada. And come they did, millions of them.

Now American citizens are reasonably expected to understand that such a promise cannot be depended upon. “Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” the maxim goes. But to typical aspiring immigrants from other nations and different cultures who do not understand our system, it might be reasonable to assume that what a President says or does makes the law, and thus such declared policies can be relied upon.

They can’t and shouldn’t, however. The excuse for Biden’s betrayal was the Left’s mantra that “The immigration laws are broken,” but the response to that by the ghosts of our Founders is “Tough. Fix it. You have the tools.” Indeed, if the public is not unified on the topic sufficiently to elect representatives who will fix it, then the laws must stay as they are. The President can’t just overturn a law on his own by ignoring it: that can’t be permitted, or the whole system of checks and balances is threatened.

Realistically, though, the device used by the Democrats and the Radical Left in cases like this often works. Conservatives by nature and philosophy try to avoid rapid and extreme change. When the Left institutes a massive policy reversal as it has with illegal immigration, it is counting on the so-called “ratchet effect” that has worked so effectively for the Left, here and elsewhere, in the past.

Once even objectively bad and harmful practices have been institutionalized to the extent that the public relies on them, returning to the previous status quo may be logical, responsible and desirable, but it is usually seen as disruptive, unwise and impractical. In this way our culture got stuck forever with recreational drug use, promiscuous sex, procreation without marriage, and people dressing like slobs in public, among other social maladies. This is the Left’s big advantage, and it is used to great advantage for its followers, and also to the detriment of civilization.

In some cases, however, including some examples from the past where more courage and resolve from the Right would have been appreciated, the ratchet just has to be rejected, no matter how painful the process is. In this one aspect I do feel sorry for illegal immigrants, because they were misled, they relied on messages we sent them, and they have had the metaphorical rug pulled out from under them. However, the duty of our government is to preserve the welfare of this nation and its citizens, and in a utilitarian system like ours, there are necessary trade-offs. To his credit, and in part because of his single-minded resolve (and ruthlessness) as a leader, Donald Trump is doing the right thing and willing to accept the inevitable backlash. Illegal immigrants, to no fault of their own, trusted the wrong U.S. President, who did not have the right to make the promises, implied and express, that he did.

Yes, it is unfair.