Is Trump’s deportation policy ‘an assault on American values?’

On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced new policies regarding immigration and deportation.

One day later, the editorial page of the New York Times thundered that those just-formulated policies will amount to nothing less than “an assault on American values.”

That sounds like a pretty big deal, so perhaps we ought to pay attention.

One thing that is interesting about the editorial is that, despite all its alarmist, high-pitched rhetoric, it never even suggests that anything in the new policies is in violation of current immigration law.

And, in fact, it is clear that there is no such violation.

{mosads}Instead, the new policies simply reflect the new priorities of a new administration. The new policies, set out in two memos from the Department of Homeland Security, deal with two distinct subjects: controlling immigration at the border with Mexico, and deportation of people who are already in this country illegally (or, as the Times prefers to call them, “unauthorized immigrants”).

The new policies depart in substantial ways from the policies that had been in place during the Obama administration. At the border, the Trump administration is proposing to more rigorously enforce current law.

But what are really raising hackles in editorial boardrooms are policy changes that would result in the deportation of people who are here illegally and who would not have been subject to deportation under the Obama administration.

The Trump administration is proposing to keep in place the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which permits people to stay who were illegally brought to the United States as young children and who are presently employed or in school. It would also keep in place the so-called “Dreamers” program, which protects from deportation people here illegally who are nevertheless enrolled in a program of higher education.

But other people who are here illegally will all be subject to deportation, in accordance with a schedule that would first deport those who have committed serious crimes, and would then focus on those who have committed less serious crimes, and then on those who are simply in the country illegally.

Of course, no amount of memos and policies can make any difference if the administration lacks the resources — that is, the money—that is necessary to put them into action. The Trump administration has already said that its new immigration policies will require thousands of additional immigration officers to enforce them.

The money for those new hires can come only from Congress.

So, not only is the new administration perpetrating an “assault” on American values; the US Congress is potentially a co-conspirator in that assault. And what, exactly, are the American values that are under assault?

Everyone living in this country, with the exception of indigenous native Americans, is either an immigrant or a descendant of an immigrant. If there is any country in the world that recognizes and celebrates the contributions of immigrants, it is this one. Celebrating immigrants is celebrating ourselves.

Still, although virtually all of us are here as a result of immigration, the vast majority of us are here as a result of legal immigration—that is, we or our forebears entered and stayed here legally, in conformity with then-existing immigration laws.

Is there anything particularly un-American about expecting that those who come to this country do so in conformity with our laws governing immigration?

Is it an “assault” on American values to expect that immigration laws be observed and enforced? 

I never learned that indifference to the rule of law was an American value.

Of course, the people who make their living writing editorials for the New York Times are in no danger of losing their jobs to illegal — oh, excuse me — undocumented immigrants. Their jobs are safe. But there nevertheless are millions of Americans who are worried that their own jobs may not be so safe, or who may believe that they have already lost a job to someone who has no legal right to be here.

There are also Americans who believe that the presence of illegal immigrants contributes to crime in the United States. Perhaps those concerns, too, should be met with something other than scorn. Surely, not everyone who disagrees with the editorial pages of the New York Times is one of “the deplorables.”

When a new administration changes policies that had been followed by a previous administration, one can always reasonably ask whether the new policy is an improvement over the old one.

People will often differ over those issues—that is, after all, why old administrations are replaced with new ones. That kind of debate is healthy in a democracy.

What is not particularly healthy, I think, is be over-eager and ever-ready to accuse the other side of being un-American or assaulting 

American values. That is a recurrent theme in the editorial pages of the Times, and it is a discordant one.

We would all hope that civility is an American value that fosters a vibrant democracy.

Accusing people of assaulting American values contributes nothing to an atmosphere of civility.

David E. Weisberg is an attorney who has published writing in the Social Science Research Network and The Times of Israel.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.