Drive onto an expressway, set your cruise control at the speed limit, and count the cars that pass you. The drivers of those cars are breaking the law, driving illegally. If they ever parked overtime at a meter, they were parking illegally. During the Prohibition era many Americans made, sold, bought, and drank alcoholic beverages. They were drinking illegally. When Citibank acquired Travelers Insurance, it was illegal for a bank to own an insurance company. Citibank was banking illegally. Later they got their friends in Congress to pass a law retroactively legalizing such mergers. That is called an ex post facto law, which is forbidden by the Constitution. Congress was legislating illegally.

None of these folks who acted illegally are called “illegals”. The term is reserved for one specific group of people who illegally do one thing — enter or remain in the United States without government permission. (Like the Pilgrims?) Never mind that such permission is impossible, or almost impossible, to obtain in many cases.

There are millions of people in the U.S. without government permission. Most of them work at low wage jobs that people with recognized rights and better options wouldn’t be willing to do. They are vulnerable to all sorts of abuses by their employers, who know that they are unable to seek redress from the justice system, though such abuses are illegal. But no one calls the abusive employers “illegals”.

Currently, media, political, and public attention is focused on a few thousand children who have come to try to rejoin relatives who now live here. People who espouse “family values” might be expected to sympathize with them, but such sympathy isn’t very visible in the media. What we see are demands that they be shipped back to where they came from — El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. In these countries, sustenance is scarce and violence is prevalent, which is why these children undertook the long hazardous trip to the U.S. The government is indeed sending some of themback.

The U.S. bears a substantial part of the responsibility for creating the conditions that led to their fleeing their country of origin. Trade agreements allow subsidized U.S. agribusiness to outcompete local farmers, putting them out of work. U.S. drug laws lead to the rise of criminal gangs engaged in the drug trade to the U.S., similar to the way alcohol prohibition led to the rise of violent gangs in the U.S. Some of the weapons of these gangs probably come from here.

Except for Native Americans, everyone here is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants. Attitudes and laws favorable and unfavorable to immigration and immigrants go back a long way. One of the “abuses and usurpations” attributed to King George in the Declaration of Independence is “He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states…refusing to pass (laws)…to encourage migration hither”. Some of the targets of anti- immigrant sentiment have been the Irish, Italians, Jews, Hungarians, and Chinese.

Humanistic ethics, as well as those of traditional religions, call on us to treat immigrants with respect and kindness, as we would wish to be treated ourselves, and to reverse policies that make life so harsh in their native countries as to impel them to leave.