From Mehdi Hasan’s article:
In the eyes of this administration, immigrants who are undocumented are all “illegal immigrants” and these “illegal immigrants”, ergo, are all “criminals”.
But, on so many levels, it’s just not true. It’s a popular myth pushed by the right that needs urgent debunking.
First, people are not, are
never, illegal. It was the Nobel laureate and former Auschwitz prisoner Elie Wiesel who
pointed out how “no human being is ‘illegal’” because it is “a contradiction in terms. People can be beautiful or less beautiful, they can be just or unjust, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?”
An act can be illegal; people cannot inherently be illegal.
Second, the anti-immigrant right has not only gotten the language wrong but the law wrong, too. Under the US criminal code, as the ACLU has
noted: “The act of being present in the United States in violation of the immigration laws is not, standing alone, a crime.” Why? Because illegal entry is considered a misdemeanor not a felony, under
8 US Code § 1325, and is subject to civil, and not criminal, penalties. It is the “reentry of removed aliens”, under
8 US Code § 1326, that is considered a felony and subject to criminal punishment.
Meanwhile,
almost half of undocumented immigrants in the United States did not even enter the country illegally to begin with; many of them are “
overstays” who arrived with a legal work, student, or travel visa but failed to leave the US, for a multiplicity of reasons, before their visas expired.
The inconvenient truth for the anti-immigrant right is that it is not a crime for immigrants simply to be present in the United States without proper documentation. They are not “illegals”. Don’t take my word for it. Or the ACLU’s. Take the word – the 5-3 majority ruling! – of the supreme court of the United States. In 2012, in
Arizona v United States, the highest court in the land ruled that “as a general rule, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain in the United States”.
Got that? Not. A. Crime.
