Comments Elsewhere

Boogieman: The next set of rights, and the ones supposedly in dispute today are the rights granted by the Constitution. These rights are natural rights possessed by all free men [sic]. … Non-citizens, however are given no such guarantee by the Constitution.

Nonsense. I defy you to show me any passage in the Constitution which distinguishes between citizens and non-citizens in delineating the natural rights which the government is bound to respect, or indeed anything identified as a “right” at all, other than voting rights (which are, in any case, arguably better described as one of the “privileges and immunities” of citizens rather than as a right, which are, except for the franchise, invariably ascribed to “the people” or to “persons” rather than to “citizens”). There is absolutely no textual basis for the claim that the restraints on U.S. government power, as expressed in Article I, the first ten Amendments, the Thirteenth Amendment, etc., don’t apply to the government’s powers over non-citizens as well as the government’s powers over citizens.

Boogieman: If they wish to exercise their natural rights, fine. They have no legal basis to appeal to the Constitution for protection of those rights, however.

Even if this were true, it would only serve as an argument against the legitimacy of the Constitution. If the Constitution allowed the U.S. government to violate the natural rights of non-citizens with impunity, then it would be a criminal document, worthy only of the contempt of civilized people.

Boogieman: In addition, natural rights do not include the right to break the law, for either citizens or non-citizens.

“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. … The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that ‘An unjust law is no law at all.’”

Part of what having natural rights means is that there are things that no government has the legitimate authority to do to you. If those sorts of injustices are commanded by a law, then defiance of the unjust law is justified, since laws that are passed without legitimate authority are not binding on anybody.

Of course, you could claim that U.S. immigration law isn’t unjust, and doesn’t violate the natural rights of immigrants. But then you’d just be assuming what it’s incumbent on you to prove. So let’s hear the argument for that, rather than a bunch of pseudo-legal mumbo-jumbo about clauses that the Constitution doesn’t actually contain.