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Dear {name}:
G.K. Chesterton once observed: "When you break the great laws, you do not get liberty, you do not even get anarchy. You get small laws." His insight illuminates our current immigration debate with uncomfortable clarity. When federal immigration law that is democratically enacted and refined over decades faces systematic non-enforcement and organized resistance, we don't achieve compassion or justice. We get exactly what Chesterton predicted which is chaos, conflict, and an erosion of the democratic process itself.
The history of American immigration law reflects genuine democratic deliberation. In 1924, Congress responded to popular pressure and passed restrictive policies despite opposition from business interests and ethnic lobbies. Whatever one thinks of those specific provisions, they represented the people's will. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act liberalized that framework, while maintaining enforcement mechanisms, asylum procedures with limitations, and provisions for removing those who entered illegally or committed crimes. This wasn't draconian—it was the democratic compromise and possibly an obfuscation of the negative consequences.
Yet today, even these more liberal laws face resistance when enforcement is attempted. The current administration's efforts to execute existing law including apprehending criminal aliens and preventing asylum fraud meet fierce opposition in cities like Minneapolis. We're told enforcement is cruel, that immigration law itself is unjust. But if the law is unjust, the democratic remedy is to change it through Congress, not to selectively ignore it based on sentiment or media narratives.
The resistance reveals something troubling. It's not merely opposition to specific tactics or concern for due process what we are we seeing is blanket opposition to enforcement itself, funded by billionaire activists, transnational organizations, and interests that seem more responsive to global ideological fashions than to American democratic processes. When local officials actively obstruct federal law enforcement, when protesters mobilize to prevent any removals regardless of circumstances, they're not defending immigrants—they're rejecting the very concept of ordered immigration and national sovereignty.
This is where Chesterton's warning materializes. Abandoning the "great law" that nations may control their borders and determine who enters doesn't produce freedom. It produces the proliferation of "small laws": sanctuary city ordinances, conflicting local policies, endless litigation over enforcement details, and the kind of confrontational atmosphere we see today. The chaos created by non-enforcement inevitably demands more intensive responses, more checkpoints, more intrusive measures to accomplish what straightforward enforcement of existing law would have achieved.
Perhaps most concerning is how much of the opposition appears driven by people responding to media narratives rather than engaging seriously with law and democratic legitimacy. Immigration policy that took generations to develop, that represents countless democratic debates and compromises, gets dismissed as simply "cruel" or "outdated" by those who seem unable to articulate what laws, if any, they would actually enforce.
The traditionalist in me believes Chesterton understood that lasting freedom requires respect for enduring principles or what he called the "democracy of the dead." Our immigration laws embody accumulated wisdom about how a nation maintains itself while remaining open to newcomers. When we treat all enforcement as oppression, we don't liberate anyone. We create the very disorder that ultimately demands heavier government intervention—exactly the outcome Chesterton's paradox predicts.
Onward,
Kevin Lynn
Executive Director, Institute for Sound Public Policy
Founder, U.S. Tech Workers |
