What with the children being detained at the border, I figure now is as good a time as any to talk about The Law. A lot of people seem to be pretty confused about the whole thing. They say things like "if you don't want to be separated from your kids, don't cross the border illegally," and "it's sad, seeing these kids in detention facilities. But it's the law." Also, something about the Second Amendment.
So here is a little something to think about.
Law works for one reason. We all agree that it does. It is like some massive consensual hallucination. We all just sort of agree that we have these rules and we're all going to play by them. When one person decides to not play by the rules, we punish them (to a greater or lesser extent, usually depending on how much money they have). But if a large enough group of people decide to quit paying attention to the rules we've made... well, they stop working.
Laws don't exist in a vacuum. They are inventions of a time and a place, and they change as our society changes. The excuse "well, it's a law" just doesn't fly when you talk about certain things, because we can change them whenever we want to. Especially in a democracy that acknowledges that power ultimately rests in the hands of the people.
Also, laws don't just exist as some arbitrary boundary. They must be grounded in ethics and logic. The US criminal justice system, for example, generally operates on the theory that incarceration serves the purpose of rehabilitating the criminal.
Purpose. That really is the core of what separates good laws from bad ones. Rules are rules, and I think we can all agree there are a few (or more than a few) laws that we disagree with for one reason or another. But can we say that they are unjust? That they are bad laws?
Let's take up the separation question again. It is long-standing US policy to separate undocumented children and parents at the border. However, this has been done sparingly and under very specific circumstances. If the parents needed to be detained prior to examination, for example, it was determined to be better for the child to be placed in a facility geared towards child care or a foster home, depending on the length of parental detention. Reasons for parental detention could vary, of course, but the reason for having this policy in place was to protect the incoming children from a hostile adult detention center.
The Trump administration, however, has decided to use separation as a method to discourage undocumented border crossings. The purpose of the law is no longer to protect the children. It is to protect the border. And this is horrifying to me.
Let's not pretend that borders aren't important. They are, in fact, one of the criteria laid out in the definition of a country. And every nation has the absolute right to control its immigration. But the way that we do so says a lot about who we are, and about how we want to be seen by the rest of the world. I remember a time, not so long ago, when America was a beacon of hope. We were far from perfect, but we were generally seen as being a progressive force for good in the world.
I don't like what these new policies say about us.