Pakistan, Illegal Immigrants and the Constitution
The title for this piece is probably the most discordant at first glance title I've ever put together. But, there is logic in my seemingly incongruous heading.
I just finished reading an entry over at Hot Air where my friend Ed Morrissey writes. There is an article about the Pakistani Intelligence Service (ISI) and the danger to the US and the region that the ISI loyalties are engendering. There are comments about the ISI and a nuclear Pakistan and A.Q. Khan that can be made later. What caught my eye was in the comments section by a contributor called "coldwarrior". He makes mention of the diminishing Pakistani middle class. He states that they are leaving Pakistan and had at first gone to the UK. Their reception there was less than warming and so they've started to come to the US. And any country can not survive well with only an elite and a lower class. The movement of this population gave me pause however.
I restate the obvious when I talk about illegals coming from primarily Mexico to the US. Again it's no secret why they come to America. But what a horrible indictment of the Mexican government! That your citizens find it necessary to leave their birthplace because of no discernible economic hope of improvement. And they come knowing that that is hostility towards them, that they may very well be exploited. And yet they come. But, here was where I tied the Constitution into this immigration scenario from two widely divergent countries: The Founders put great emphasis on individual and states rights. They envisioned and created a federation of individual and therefore fairly autonomous structures called states. The rights of the states were well protected within the framework of the Constitution (read the IX [aka 9th] Amendment to the Constitution). The Founders created a framework of territories (states) where if a citizen found a state inhospitable or not to his or her liking, they were able to move to a state that they found more agreeable. That as a moral and educated people, as long as neither force nor fraud were employed in any activities, we were free to be about our business as best we saw fit to pursue it. Truth be told, that if the Founders wrote a Constitution that did not guarantee that sovereignty to the states and individuals, there would have been no ratification potential by the states at all! This was the idea behind federalism. That idea is now moribund. With an overarching federal government, there is now no place to go to escape bad and crushing federal laws, bloated and "badge heavy" bureaucrats and bureaucracies with bad rules and even worse outcomes. This is not what the Founders had created. They created a constitutional republic. We now live in a functional democracy administered by a class of bureaucrats. They Founders abhorred the idea of a democracy.
And so, the Pakistanis and the many Mexicans exercise a type of international federalism in coming to the US, legally or otherwise. But they do come.
And where do we Americans go to escape a tyrananny federal government?
posted by Amendment X at 9:33 AM permalink
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