The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Yet this double standard has become internationally par for the course. Most countries regard it as their right to control their own immigration. Citizens of these same countries also regard it as their right to emigrate to the US — the only nation in the world broadly considered open season for the rest of the planet. Yes, any day now I expect Amnesty International to declare emigration to the US a "human right". A large, left-wing contingent of the American electorate also considers any enforcement of US immigration law an outrage, and occasional federal immigration raids on workplaces are reported in the New York Times with the same indignation the editors lavish on paedophile priests.
The US has been hoist on the petard of its own propaganda, its own vanity about itself as a "nation of immigrants", a "melting pot" that smelts the tired and poor into newly-minted American citizens. It's a convenient mythology that the rest of the world has embraced with a vengeance, the downside of "American exceptionalism" — only in this case the US isn't excepted from vexatious institutions like the International Criminal Court, but from being morally justified in having any immigration restrictions at all.
It's all America's fault. Federal enforcement of laws technically on the books has been so lax that custom has rewritten them. Contemporary Mexicans and Central Americans grow up with the understanding that to head to El Norte is simply what people do — since that's what their cousins did, and their uncles, and their next-door neighbours. Whatever folks have got away with for ever ceases to seem like getting away with anything, and becomes the least one can expect, one's birthright, one's due.
The seemingly capricious application of a long neglected statute in my case resulted only in a lone cyclist fuming over her handlebars. But when up to 20 million residents have been, if you will, cycling the park footpath for decades and suddenly we want to issue them a summons, the cumulative wrath and sense of umbrage could approach civil war. A word to the wise at the UK Border Agency: fail to enforce immigration laws at your peril. Custom has power.
