Religion & Law

I hope to find the time later to address the Arizona Immigration Law directly.  For now I want use a Chesterton quote to reflect briefly on a potential motivating factors behind the law.  To be clear, I think the new Arizona law is terrible and terribly mistaken at many levels.  But, I also don't want to fall into demonizing the common person who supported it.  In his essay, The Common Man, Chesterton opines:

To put it briefly; it is now the custom to say that most modern blunders have been due to the Common Man.  And, I should like to point out what appalling blunders have in fact been due to the Uncommon Man.  It is easy eonugh to argue that the mob makes mistakes; but as a fact it hever has a chance even to make mistakes until its superiors have used their superiority to make much worse mistakes.  It is easy to weary of democracy and cry out for an intellectual aristocracy.  But the trouble is that every intellectual aristocracy seems to have been utterly unintellectual.  Anybody might guess beforehand that there would be blunders of the ignorant.  What nobody could have guessed, what nobody could have dreamed of in a nightmare, what no morbid mortal imagination could ever have dared to imagine, was the mistakes of the well-formed....

After Jimmy Carter appointed him to head a blue ribbon commision on immigration reform in 1979, Notre Dame President Fr. Hesburgh concluded that the United States needed to close the back door (illegal immigration) in order to maintain a healthy front door (legal immigration).  Amnesty for four million or so undocumented aliens followed the passage of immigration reform in 1986 with the promise by our government that the back door was effectively shut.  But, of course it wasn't and now we face a situation where the number of undocumented persons in this country is as much as four times what it was in 1986.  While I vigorously oppose the Arizona law, could that law be a "common" reaction not so much to those illegally in the country but toward our federal government's inability or unwillingness to fulfill its promise made 24 years ago?  In short, could the "common" person's terrible mistake in Arizona be a reaction to worse mistakes made by their governing "superiors" in Washington?

Cross posted on the LRE blog.