Dr. Empress of All Dominions Elect

Trump is right. It’s hard to deport someone who has worked hard for 15 years and broken no laws beyond entering the country illegally. I spent over a decade teaching in a community with many illegal immigrants and their children. I knew genuinely good people, wonderful families, and incredible kids. They weren't abstractions to me. They were people I cared about and wanted to see succeed. I understand the emotional difficulty of enforcing immigration law. I've experienced it firsthand. But there's a fundamental difference between judging an individual through the lens of personal experience and governing a nation through the rule of law. It's easy to make exceptions when we're confronted with a sympathetic story. We see a hardworking father, a devoted mother, or an innocent child, and naturally want to spare them hardship. But my personal feelings about those individuals cannot determine whether the law applies to them. Nor can anyone else's. And with immigration, the consequences extend far beyond any individual case. We're deciding who may enter our country, remain here, and become part of our national community. If those decisions are ultimately determined by who manages to get here and whose story moves us most, the consent of the governed becomes increasingly meaningless. The hardest cases are precisely when our principles matter most, because the entire purpose of having laws is to establish rules that transcend our individual sympathies, prejudices, and emotions. If enforcing the law depends on our sympathy for those who break it, we no longer have the rule of law. We have a collection of suggestions subject to the whims of our emotions.