Our Litigious Aspiring Immigrants vs. America

June 23, 2022

By Brian Lonergan

Despite their portrayal in the corporate media as low-educated and easily victimized but, somehow, perpetually honorable, the manual laborers often seeking entry into our country turn out to be more savvy about American ways than the narrative would have you believe. When the few immigration laws that are still enforced prevent them from entering America, the obvious thing to do is to file a lawsuit—against America.

It may seem quaint compared to our current immigration nightmare, but there was a time decades ago when a foreign national who showed up on our border would be denied entry and returned to his homeland, and that was the end of the story.

Today, thanks to the emergence of well-funded, extremist anti-borders law firms, a denial at the border is merely the first act in a potentially years-long litigation process until the desired result is achieved. The effort is made easier when the White House, much of Congress and the judiciary are also of the mind that entry into the United States for noncitizens is a right, not a privilege.

Arguments for this case are becoming increasingly brazen, while drifting further from the idea that a country can choose who it allows to enter. This can be seen currently in D.C. federal district court, where a group called the Haitian Bridge Alliance (HBA) is suing Joe Biden and the federal government.

Haitian nationals claim that their Fifth Amendment rights to equal protection and to due process were violated when they were turned away at the border to protect the nation from the COVID-19 pandemic. To the trendy denizens of places like Williamsburg, New York, or Berkeley, this claim evokes great empathy and makes perfect sense. To everyone else it should be seen as patently absurd and factually wrong.

In their friend-of-the-court brief in the case, attorneys for the Immigration Reform Law Institute detail the fallacies of the Haitians’ argument. IRLI showed that it is well-established law that aliens who have never been admitted to our country, such as the plaintiffs here, do not have rights under our Constitution.

Even if they had such rights, the plaintiffs’ claim that the Biden Administration expelled them pursuant to a “Haitian deterrence policy,” in violation of their right to equal protection of the law, would fail because they cannot provide any evidence that such a policy actually exists. In fact, aliens entering the country unlawfully have been expelled without regard to nationality.

The HBA claim that the health-code expulsions violate their due-process right to apply for asylum and to receive statutory protections against being expelled to a country where they face either persecution on account of group membership or torture. Yet, as IRLI showed, none of the plaintiffs even claims that he was expelled to a country where he faced such threats, or that he tried to apply for asylum and was prevented from doing so.

The excesses of the illegal alien legal groups were also on display last year, when they were negotiating with the Department of Justice for payments to aliens temporarily separated from family members because the government actually started prosecuting people crossing the border unlawfully as required by law. Payment amounts being considered were reportedly $450,000 per person or $1 million per family to resolve lawsuits.

Biden, in his typical duplicitous style, at first insisted that such payments were “not going to happen.” When pressed on the matter later, he completely flipped, proclaiming in self-righteous anger that the aliens in question “deserve some kind of compensation no matter what the circumstances.”

Such thinking reveals the gulf between the ruling class and the citizenry when it comes to immigration, and explains a lot about why we are in our current predicament. The average working-class American is generally fine with a manageable number of hard-working noncitizens coming here to improve themselves, playing by our rules and adding value to the country.

The ruling class view of immigration is that America somehow owes a debt to the rest of the world, and pays it in part by allowing an endless flow of noncitizens to enter. Immigration should not exist to better America, but to turn America into what Ann Coulter has described as “the battered woman’s shelter of the world.” The cost of unchecked immigration’s crushing financial burden and increased crime should be paid by American citizens without complaint, while politicians’ get the benefit of a newly-arrived dependent class that will look to an expanding government for sustenance.

Aside from our overly litigious would-be immigrants, the larger problem will be to change the definition of what immigration should be about. It should most definitely not be a winning lottery ticket or a voucher for lifetime government support checks. Our current failed experiment of radical anti-borders policy should make it clear that we need an immigration system that benefits America at least as much as those seeking entry.

Brian Lonergan is director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.

Also published at American Greatness, June 22, 2022