Comments Elsewhere

Actions may be legal, or they may be illegal. Whether they are moral or not is a totally separate questions. (When the law is wrong, lawbreaking is the right thing to do.) But while actions may be illegal, people are not. A person’s existence and life and worth aren’t reducible to the papers that they carry or the legal or political status that they have, and referring to people by their legal status alone is dehumanizing and insulting to them, as well as coarsening and brutalizing to the person doing it. It encourages the worst in those who do it and justifies inhuman reactions to those it is done to. No human being is “illegal.”